MKE Unveils Armed PİRANA USV Variant at Euronaval 2026
Turkish state defence manufacturer MKE (Makina ve Kimya Endüstrisi) has unveiled a new, larger member of its PİRANA unmanned surface vessel family at Euronaval 2026 in Paris, a variant built to control swarms of attack drones rather than ram a target itself.
The new boat, designated the PİRANA AUSV (Armed USV), was shown on MKE’s stand during the exhibition, which runs from 3 to 6 November at Paris Nord Villepinte — the same show where ASELSAN put its GÖKDENİZ and GÖKSUR naval air defence systems into shipping containers this week. According to Naval News, which viewed the display, the hull carries roughly three times the weight and ten times the payload of MKE’s earlier PİRANA boats, with an internal bay rated for up to 1,000 kilograms. At Euronaval, that bay was shown fitted with eight tube-launched UAVs.
A Command Node, Not Just Another Kamikaze Boat
MKE’s existing PİRANA KUSV (Kamikaze USV) is a one-way strike craft: it carries a roughly 100-kilogram warhead and is expended against the target it hits, a role it has already demonstrated against surface targets during Turkish Navy unmanned-systems exercises. The AUSV is a different animal. Naval News reports it is intended to act as a control and relay node for groups of smaller PİRANA-series craft and their drones, carrying a communications suite that spans RF, SATCOM and LTE links for swarm data-sharing, alongside its own strike payload.
Reported performance figures put the AUSV’s range at 400 nautical miles and top speed above 35 knots. MKE lists coastal patrol, electronic warfare and communications relay among its secondary roles, in addition to acting as a magazine for saturation attacks. The company has not disclosed the dimensions of the hull or named the UAV type loaded into the launch tubes at Euronaval, and no customer or delivery timeline has been announced — this is a design debut, not an order.
Building on a Combat-Tested Family
MKE first showed the PİRANA concept publicly at IDEF 2025 in Istanbul, including an early mock-up capable of launching either a loitering munition or a small UAV — effectively the seed of the configuration now flying as the AUSV. The baseline kamikaze variant has since been tested extensively: in June 2025, a PİRANA was commanded from the amphibious assault ship TCG Anadolu via a Baykar Bayraktar TB3 data link, demonstrating that Turkey’s naval drones can be handed off between surface, air and ship-based control. In September 2026, a PİRANA KUSV destroyed a target during Exercise Denizkurdu, one of the Turkish Navy’s largest unmanned-systems drills of the year.
The AUSV extends that lineage into something closer to a mothership: a vessel that survives rather than expends itself, feeding smaller munitions and drones into a swarm while staying in the fight. It is a concept other navies are circling too, but MKE’s version benefits from a domestic customer that has already put the underlying hull through live-fire testing.
Why It Matters Beyond Türkiye
Euronaval is one of two flagship European naval exhibitions, and a Turkish unveiling there — rather than at a domestic show — signals MKE’s push to be taken seriously by NATO and EU navies shopping for low-cost unmanned systems, an area where Turkish industry has moved faster than most Western yards. Türkiye’s naval drone sector is already crowded with competing designs, from ASELSAN’s TUFAN one-way-attack swarm boat to the ULAQ, Marlin and SALVO families built by other manufacturers; MKE’s AUSV is a bet that the real procurement gap is not another strike boat but the command layer that makes a swarm of them usable in combat. Whether that bet pays off will depend on a customer actually signing for it — something that, for now, remains undisclosed. MKE’s naval push also comes weeks after it completed an ammunition and aircraft bomb assembly plant in Jordan, part of a broader expansion beyond its traditional ordnance business.
