Delegations from Rwanda and Nigeria were among the foreign military and industry observers present at ASELSAN’s Korkut 35 live-fire demonstration at the Karapınar Test and Evaluation Group Command near Konya, Turkey, where the system engaged and destroyed two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a simulated drone attack. According to the account provided to Military Africa, one target was a Shahed-type one-way attack drone, the loitering munition family that has become a defining weapon of the Russia-Ukraine war and, increasingly, of conflicts across the Sahel. The second carried a smaller radar cross-section and was configured to mimic the radar and thermal signature of a cruise missile.
ASELSAN successfully demonstrated the operational capabilities of its KORKUT 35 Air Defense System in a live-fire demonstration attended by defense delegations from 12 countries.
Military Africa reported last week that the broader demonstration, confirmed by ASELSAN’s own statement, drew defence delegations from 12 countries in total. The company said the system successfully engaged a mix of fixed-wing, delta-wing and smaller UAVs under representative operational conditions, with particular focus on kamikaze drones, and separately demonstrated firing accuracy against a moving ground target while both the Korkut 35 and its target were in motion, a test of the system’s ability to protect manoeuvring forces rather than only fixed positions.
In demonstrations conducted under different scenarios, the KORKUT 35 system, which is effective against fighter aircraft, cruise missiles, air-to-ground missiles, helicopters and UAVs, was demonstrated with a particular focus on its capability to defend against kamikaze UAVs and mini/micro UAVs, which are among today’s most frequently encountered threats. Under representative operational conditions, the system successfully engaged different UAVs, including fixed-wing, delta-wing and mini/micro UAVs. The demonstration showcased the system’s performance against different aerial targets in a dynamic operational environment.
In a separate scenario, KORKUT 35 demonstrated its firing accuracy and shot dispersion against a moving ground target while both the system and target were in motion. Integrated onto an 8×8 tactical wheeled vehicle, the system engaged the moving target while demonstrating its precision engagement capability on the move.
What stood out was not only the intercepts, but the character of the system itself. Korkut 35 is a mobile, twin 35mm gun solution, mounted on an 8×8 tactical wheeled vehicle, firing roughly 1,100 rounds per minute out to an effective range of about 4 kilometres. It uses ASELSAN’s ATOM programmable airburst ammunition, which detonates near a target and scatters tungsten fragments, improving the odds of hitting something as small and fast-moving as a drone that a direct hit would otherwise struggle to find. The system pairs radar and electro-optical tracking with that firepower, and a typical battery splits the work between a command vehicle that searches for and tracks targets and gun vehicles that each engage an assigned threat. ASELSAN first unveiled the wheeled 8×8 configuration at Eurosatory in 2024, specifically to give the platform the road speed needed to keep pace with moving formations rather than sitting fixed around a base perimeter, and released footage in January 2026 of the same Korkut 140/35 variant destroying a first-person view (FPV) drone in motion.
That combination matters more than any single intercept. Guns of this class are built to deal with drones at a sustainable cost per shot, each round costing a fraction of a surface-to-air missile, while still remaining relevant against helicopters, low-flying aircraft and certain missile profiles the same battery might encounter in a single engagement. Korkut 35 sits as the low-altitude layer within ASELSAN’s broader Çelikkubbe, or Steel Dome, architecture, alongside the smaller single-gun Korkut 25 and a range of short, medium and high-altitude missile systems, meaning a buyer is not purchasing an isolated anti-drone gadget but a building block of a layered air defence network that can expand as threats and budgets evolve.
This Is No Longer a Distant Lesson
We are already in the era of drone warfare in Africa. Cheap UAVs, loitering munitions and one-way attack drones are no longer a lesson imported from Ukraine or the Gulf. They are appearing over bases, convoys and urban approaches across the continent. Islamic State West Africa Province has used reconnaissance-guided drone assaults against Nigerian forward operating bases in Borno State. Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin and the Azawad Liberation Front have fielded first-person view and fibre-optic guided drones against Russian and Malian government forces in Mali, capturing a Bayraktar TB2 control station during the fall of Kidal and sustaining a fuel blockade of Bamako through repeated tanker strikes. Sudan’s civil war has become a genuine two-sided drone conflict, with both the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese Armed Forces fielding Chinese-made jammers and interceptors against each other’s loitering munitions. None of these are hypothetical scenarios circulated in a procurement brochure. They are documented engagements with real casualties, and in several cases, real equipment losses to the side that lacked a workable answer to a drone overhead.
African militaries should treat very short-range air defence as an urgent requirement, not a luxury reserved for better-funded forces. The continent’s existing counter-drone posture remains heavily weighted toward man-portable jammers, effective against a single commercial drone at close range but structurally unable to handle a coordinated multi-drone attack, a fibre-optic guided munition immune to radio jamming, or a target with a Shahed’s size, speed and altitude profile. A system like Korkut 35 addresses a different part of that problem: not detection or electronic disruption, but the ability to put kinetic rounds on a target once it has been found, whatever category of aerial threat that target turns out to be.
The systems that deserve serious consideration from African defence planners are those that can defeat drones and still contribute against aircraft and helicopters, rather than systems that solve one narrow slice of the airspace problem while leaving the lower layer of the sky uncovered. A dedicated counter-drone jammer does nothing against a helicopter gunship. A conventional medium-range surface-to-air missile battery is frequently too expensive to fire at a single commercial quadcopter and too slow to reorient against a fast, low, manoeuvring FPV drone. A mobile gun system built around programmable airburst ammunition and dual radar and electro-optical tracking occupies exactly the gap those two extremes leave open, and Rwanda and Nigeria’s presence at Konya suggests at least some African procurement planners have already identified that gap for themselves.
