ASELSAN’s EJDERHA Brings Down 51 Drones at Once
On its 51st anniversary, ASELSAN chose to make its point with numbers. The Turkish defence company says its EJDERHA high-power electromagnetic system neutralised 51 drones launched at the same time, and did it within seconds. ASELSAN is calling it a world record.
What makes EJDERHA different is how it works. It doesn’t fire a missile or use any ammunition. Instead, it uses vacuum electronics to generate high-power electromagnetic waves, and those waves target the electronics inside small drones. The real targets are the navigation, communication and command systems that keep a drone flying and under control.
Two scenarios were shown. In the first, EJDERHA took out two wired drones from roughly 1,000 metres away. That’s more significant than it might sound. A wired drone gets its power and control through a cable from the ground, which makes it harder for conventional counter-drone systems to deal with. ASELSAN says EJDERHA can counter these regardless of that connection.
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The second scenario drew most of the attention. Fifty-one drones were launched together, a number chosen to echo the company’s 51 years of engineering work, and EJDERHA neutralised all of them in seconds. Swarms are a problem that keeps air defence planners up at night, so a system that can handle that many targets at once is a serious claim. ASELSAN says no directed-energy system has previously been recorded doing this.
The system finds threats with radar and tracks them with electro-optical sensors. Its precise pointing lets it suppress, reset, disable or damage any target containing electronic circuits. ASELSAN presents EJDERHA as one layer in a wider counter-UAV setup rather than a standalone fix and says it has already been tested in field conditions against mini and micro UAVs, low-altitude fixed-wing drones, wired and wireless FPV drones and combustion-engine UAVs.
ASELSAN President and CEO Ahmet Akyol went further, describing EJDERHA as the world’s first system to neutralise 51 drones with a single push of a button. He credited the achievement to half a century of experience, the work of young engineers, and the direction and support of the state and the nation. He also said the system has reached operational deployment and entered serial production, calling drones “one of the greatest threats of our time.”
Cheap drones have made the economics of air defence painful, since firing an expensive interceptor at a drone that costs a few hundred dollars is a losing trade over time. A system that works with electromagnetic waves rather than missiles changes that calculation, which is why other militaries will be watching what Turkiye does with EJDERHA next.
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