HAVELSAN Writes the Software Behind Türkiye’s Armed Forces

Most Turkish defense companies are known for hardware you can point a camera at. HAVELSAN is different. Its flagship products are millions of lines of code running inside frigate operations rooms, full-flight simulators and military networks, which makes the Ankara-based firm easy to overlook and hard to replace. Ask the Turkish Navy what happens if its combat management software disappears tomorrow, and the answer explains why HAVELSAN sits so close to the center of Türkiye’s defense industry.

The company today spans five main business lines. It writes command and control software for warships and air forces, builds flight and tank simulators for both military customers and commercial airlines, runs homeland security and e-government projects, develops cyber security tools, and fields its own family of unmanned vehicles. Nearly all of it grew out of a single, narrow job the company was given in 1982.

From Radar Maintenance to Naval Combat Software

HAVELSAN began life as HAVELSAN-AYDIN, a joint venture set up in 1982 by the Turkish Air Force Foundation together with the American firm Aydin Corporation. Its original mission was modest by today’s standards, maintaining the high-technology radars operated by the Turkish Air Force. In 1985 the foreign shareholders were bought out and the company was reorganized as a national firm, with the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation (TSKGV) holding 98 percent of its capital. That ownership structure remains in place, putting HAVELSAN in the same family as ASELSAN, ROKETSAN and TUSAŞ.

The decisive turn came in 1997, when the company formally added command and control systems, simulation and training, and management information systems to its charter. The following two decades filled out the portfolio. HAVELSAN delivered the ground support segment for Türkiye’s Peace Eagle airborne early warning aircraft, worked on the ground systems of the Meltem maritime patrol program, and became the default software house for large state information projects, from e-government infrastructure to the biometric data ventures it pursues through its BİYOTEKSAN subsidiary. In 1999 the Turkish Navy launched the GENESIS project, an effort to develop a national combat management system rather than keep buying foreign software for its surface fleet. HAVELSAN built GENESIS jointly with the Navy, and the system went on to modernize the ex-US Oliver Hazard Perry frigates Türkiye operates as the G class. GENESIS gave those secondhand ships a combat suite capable of tracking more than a thousand tactical targets, and in 2009 Raytheon and HAVELSAN agreed to market the upgrade to other Perry-class operators, an early sign that Turkish defense software could be an export product.

HAVELSAN at a Glance

Which Warships Run on HAVELSAN Software?

GENESIS was the apprenticeship. ADVENT, developed with the Turkish Navy’s research center ARMERKOM, is the mature product. The ADVENT combat management system moves beyond the single-ship logic of older CMS designs toward a network-enabled approach, letting vessels share a common tactical picture and integrating NATO data links such as Link 11, Link 16 and Link 22 at every operator console. HAVELSAN describes the system as comprising roughly 500 applications and some ten million lines of code.

Inside the Turkish fleet, ADVENT serves aboard the Ada-class corvettes, the Istanbul-class frigates, the modernized Barbaros class, the intelligence ship TCG Ufuk and other platforms, and the Navy intends to standardize on it across surface, subsurface and shore-based assets. The highest-profile installation came in early 2026, when HAVELSAN completed ADVENT and FleetStar data distribution integration aboard TCG Anadolu, the amphibious assault ship that doubles as a drone carrier. That work included verified two-way data exchange between the ship’s CMS and the Bayraktar TB3 unmanned combat aircraft, so imagery and mission data from the drone flow straight into the operations room.

The export record has grown alongside the domestic one. Pakistan’s MILGEM-derived corvettes use ADVENT, Indonesia ordered the system in 2022 for its navy, and Ukraine’s Turkish-built Ada-class corvettes carry it as well. Trade press has also reported agreements involving Malaysia and Chile. Because every Turkish shipbuilder ultimately needs a combat management system, HAVELSAN’s software sits on hulls delivered by private yards and by state-owned ASFAT alike, a position no other company in Turkish naval shipbuilding occupies.

Why Airlines Buy Simulators From a Defense Company

Simulation is HAVELSAN’s oldest commercial muscle and its clearest bridge into civil markets. On the military side the company has delivered flight simulators for platforms ranging from the CN235 transport and the naval Seahawk helicopter to the newest national designs, including devices for the Gökbey helicopter, the Hürjet jet trainer and the Altay main battle tank. Training centers built around those devices allow Turkish crews to log demanding emergency scenarios without burning flight hours or risking airframes, and they give export customers of Turkish platforms a ready-made training pipeline to buy alongside the aircraft.

The civil business has become a story in its own right. HAVELSAN builds full-flight simulators for the Airbus A320 family, and the five devices already in service have all secured qualification from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency. In September 2026 the company announced that its A320 simulator orderbook had grown to six devices under construction, with production capacity being pushed toward eight full-flight simulators a year. Earlier in 2026 it broke ground on a 17,000-square-meter Simulator Production and Integration Facility in Ankara, planned to be operational in 2027 and sized, by company figures, for more than 30 simulators annually. Few defense software houses anywhere compete directly with CAE and L3Harris in the airline training market; HAVELSAN has decided to try.

BAHA, BARKAN and the Digital Troops Concept

Since 2021 HAVELSAN has organized its unmanned systems work under a concept it calls Digital Troops, the idea that soldiers, ground robots, drones and command software should operate as one networked unit rather than as separate gadgets. In August 2023 the company ran trials pairing its ground robots with a drone swarm to demonstrate the concept in the field, and it has kept iterating since, showing autonomous swarm behavior at exhibitions through 2026. The portfolio now includes the BARKAN unmanned ground vehicle, which was the first Digital Troops platform to enter Turkish service, the armed SANCAR unmanned surface vessel developed for naval missions, and several aerial designs.

What distinguishes the approach from rival drone programs is that HAVELSAN treats the vehicles as endpoints of a software architecture rather than as standalone products. The same networking logic that lets ADVENT consoles share a tactical picture at sea is meant to let a BARKAN, a BAHA and a dismounted infantry squad share one on land. Whether that vision scales to contested battlefields remains to be proven, but it plays directly to the company’s strengths, writing the connective tissue between machines built by others.

The best-known of these is BAHA, a sub-cloud vertical takeoff and landing UAV that two technicians can carry and operate. According to company figures, BAHA has a maximum takeoff weight of 30 kilograms, a payload of around five kilograms and an endurance of two to two and a half hours depending on the powerplant, with a reported range of some 80 kilometers. It flies day and night reconnaissance missions, keeps working in jamming environments and returns home autonomously if it loses its data link. Deliveries to the Turkish Armed Forces began at the end of 2023, and the Land Forces formally took the system into inventory afterward, making BAHA the first Digital Troops air vehicle to reach regular service.

A Drone Production Line on the Nile

HAVELSAN’s unmanned ambitions no longer stop at the border. On 26 August 2025 the company signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Egypt’s Arab Organization for Industrialization covering joint production of VTOL autonomous drones in Egypt. The first result, the HAMZA-1, was unveiled at the EDEX exhibition in Cairo in December 2025. The partnership then moved from prototype to commerce, and at the El Alamein International Airshow in September 2026 the two sides signed a sales agreement for the aircraft, with deliveries expected in the coming period.

The HAMZA-1 program with Egypt’s AOI matters beyond the airframe itself. It pairs HAVELSAN’s autonomy software with Egyptian manufacturing capacity, giving Cairo local production and giving Ankara a foothold in a market Turkish drone makers were locked out of during the years when relations between the two countries were frozen. For a company whose product is fundamentally software, licensing intelligence into someone else’s factory is a natural export model.

Egypt is one piece of a wider push. HAVELSAN reports business presence in nearly 30 countries across Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, and its leadership has spoken openly about expanding in Africa and about technology transfer opportunities with NATO members. Combat management systems, simulators and training centers travel well, since each sale embeds the company in a customer’s fleet or air arm for decades of updates and support.

Cyber Security, KOVAN and the Home Front

The less photogenic half of HAVELSAN’s business runs on servers rather than ships. The company builds cyber defense tools and operates in homeland security and e-government, fields where its long relationship with Turkish state institutions gives it an incumbent’s advantage. It has also developed KOVAN, a national enterprise resource planning and business management system positioned as a domestic alternative to foreign ERP suites inside the defense sector.

KOVAN comes with an unusual workforce experiment attached. Together with the Turkish employment agency İŞKUR and the Defense Industry Academy, HAVELSAN launched a train-first, hire-later programme intended to qualify 500 young specialists in the KOVAN ecosystem, with graduates employed at HAVELSAN and at other defense companies that run the software. It is a practical answer to a problem every Turkish defense firm complains about, the shortage of experienced enterprise software engineers.

More Capacity in Ankara and an AI Label on the Flagship

Under general manager Dr. Mehmet Akif Nacar, who has led the company since July 2020, HAVELSAN has been marketing itself around artificial intelligence, most visibly with the futureAIready branding it now attaches to its exhibition appearances. The substance behind the slogan includes an AI-enhanced evolution of its naval flagship, promoted as ADVENT-AI, and growing autonomy work across the Digital Troops line.

The near-term markers are concrete enough to check. The Ankara simulator facility is due to come online in 2027 and will multiply civil production capacity several times over. HAMZA-1 deliveries to Egypt are expected to begin in the coming period. And the Turkish Navy’s next hulls, from new frigates to the future aircraft carrier, will each need a combat management system, which means each one arrives at HAVELSAN’s door. For a company founded to fix radars, that is a comfortable place to wait.