He says that was demonstrated by the way Azerbaijan’s land-based artillery and multiple-rocket launchers worked “in close coordination with unmanned aerial systems tasked with intelligence, target accusation, and battle damage assessment.” Kasapoglu says Azerbaijan’s military planning and operations “mimicked the Turkish Armed Forces’ way of warfighting during Operation Spring Shield.” “Interestingly, the Azerbaijani drone campaign strongly resembled Turkey’s Operation Spring Shield against the Syrian Arab Army back in early 2020,” Kasapoglu wrote in an analysis published by the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation. Kasapoglu says Azerbaijan’s technological advantage didn’t come only from the combat and surveillance drones it purchased.Ĭrucially, he says, Turkey also transferred “a complete robotic warfare doctrine and concept of operations” to Azerbaijan. “This caused a kind of outcry in Russia because Turkey has produced drone weapons which are able to easily hit all the air-defense systems that have been advertised by Russia as one of the most effective air-defense systems in the world,” Shahbazov says. In Libya, about two dozen Russian-built Pantsir-1S air defense systems also reportedly were destroyed recently by Turkish Bayraktar TB2 and Anka-S combat drones, the latter of which were developed by Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI). “In Syria, these drones very easily destroyed Russian air defense systems like the S-300 and S-400” surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), he claims. “These drones have been used in Libya and Syria where they’ve proved to be very effective against all Russian-made weapons.” “The Bayraktar drones carry four missiles that are also produced by Turkey - MAM laser-guided ‘smart micromunition’ missiles,” Shahbazov says. He says those purchases included radar-jamming systems from Spain, self-propelled DANA howitzer artillery acquired in 2018 from the Czech Republic, and the “very recently imported Turkish-made Bayraktar drones.” Shahbazov notes that Baku also has used its income from oil and natural gas exports during the past decade to buy weapons from NATO-member countries. “But Azerbaijan has managed to diversify its arsenal by importing weapons from Turkey and from Israel.” “About 90 to 95 percent of its arsenal is Russian-made weaponry,” Shahbazov told RFE/RL. Shahbazov says that as a member of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Armenia was “mostly only able to get Russian-made weaponry, receiving batches of weapons from Russia.” While Azerbaijan hasn’t released casualty figures for its troops, it has made no secret about its use of the latest high-tech drones it purchased from Turkey and Israel to carry out air strikes and battlefield reconnaissance.ĭrone footage released by Azerbaijan’s Defense Ministry after fighting broke out on September 27 revealed the havoc wreaked by Baku’s UAVs - the destruction of Armenian tanks, artillery, ground fortifications, and even a Russian-built S-300 antiaircraft missile system.įuad Shahbazov, an analyst at the Baku-based Center For Strategic Communications, agrees that the most significant battlefield advantage for Azerbaijan was its technological superiority. Melikishvili says the presence of Turkish F-16 fighter jets at a military airfield in Ganca, Azerbaijan’s second-largest city, was “tangible confirmation” that the geopolitical balance in the South Caucasus had shifted in Azerbaijan’s favor. It took Azerbaijan just 43 days to win back its territory around the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh - seven districts of mountains and foothills that had been occupied by Armenian separatists since Baku’s humiliating battlefield failures of the early 1990s.Īnalysts say three factors explain why Azerbaijan was so successful in the battlefield this time: technology, tactics, and Turkey.Īlex Melikishvili, a research analyst at IHS Markit Country Risk, says it was Turkish support for Azerbaijan that made the war “qualitatively different from all previous conflagrations.”
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