Türkiye Presents MKE Pirana Kamikaze Sea Drone to Target Ships and Ports.

Türkiye’s state defense firm Makine ve Kimya Endustrisi has unveiled the PIRANA kamikaze unmanned surface vehicle, a high-speed maritime strike drone designed to attack ships and coastal targets at long range. The system highlights Ankara’s growing emphasis on attritable naval weapons that can challenge traditional fleets at a fraction of the cost.

Türkiye’s Makine ve Kimya Endustrisi (MKE) is leveraging DIMDEX 2026 in Doha to highlight its PIRANA Kamikaze Unmanned Surface Vehicle (KUSV), a compact, expendable maritime strike platform designed to deliver a heavy warhead with precision against surface and coastal targets. Developed for high-speed, low-signature operations in contested littoral environments, PIRANA integrates networked guidance and coordinated attack concepts intended to saturate and overwhelm modern naval defenses.
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PIRANA KUSV, armed with a 100 kg high-explosive warhead, combines 42-knot speed, low radar signature, FLIR-based terminal guidance, and SATCOM or line-of-sight control to deliver precision kamikaze strikes against surface vessels and coastal targets at ranges exceeding 200 nautical miles (Picture source: Army Recognition Group).

MKE positions PIRANA as a low-cost, high-impact attacker for asymmetric maritime warfare, but its technical profile is closer to a purpose-built, high-speed precision munition than a hobby-grade drone boat. The platform’s exhibited data indicate a displacement of around 1,200 kg and a hull measuring 4.5 m in length with a 1.6 m beam, about 1.5 m overall height, and a shallow 0.35 m draft, a combination that supports coastal operations, port approaches, and confined waters where larger unmanned craft become easier to detect and track. Propulsion is a diesel engine paired with a waterjet, a configuration that typically improves acceleration, reduces exposed running gear, and helps maneuver at high speed in littoral environments. MKE’s published performance figures point to a 20-knot cruising speed and a top speed around 42 knots, with endurance rated to Sea State 4 and range beyond 200 nautical miles, allowing PIRANA to be staged from dispersed coastlines or mother ships rather than pushing launch teams dangerously close to defended targets.

The heart of the system is its armament package, and MKE’s own materials describe a 100 kg warhead integrated with precision fuze technology, optimized for terminal impact detonation against surface targets. In practical terms, a 100 kg-class explosive payload gives planners options across a spectrum of naval targets, from mission-killing hits on fast attack craft and patrol vessels to serious damage on corvettes, frigates, auxiliaries, and port-side infrastructure, depending on where the impact occurs. While MKE has not publicly detailed the explosive type, casing design, or fuze modes, the emphasis on indigenous warhead and fuze development suggests the company is treating PIRANA as a controlled-effects naval munition, not merely a contact bomb. For a kamikaze USV, fuze design is decisive: consistent initiation at the moment of hull contact, robust safety and arming logic under high vibration and spray, and resistance to premature function in complex sea states. In a swarm setting, precision fuzing also matters for deconfliction and timing, ensuring individual craft do not waste themselves on wake turbulence, minor collisions, or glancing strikes.

To deliver that warhead reliably, PIRANA blends remote control with semi-autonomous mission execution. MKE describes operator-controlled and semi-autonomous modes supported by route planning, a mission computer, advanced electro-optical sensors including FLIR for day-night targeting, and jam-resistant GNSS using a CRPA-supported architecture aimed at preserving navigation performance in contested electromagnetic conditions. Communications are presented as layered, with line-of-sight control and SATCOM for beyond-line-of-sight employment, and MKE marketing also highlights RF and LTE pathways depending on operational environment and permissions. The composite hull is designed to reduce radar cross-section, and MKE references silent cruising capability, a combination intended to compress an enemy’s detection-to-engagement timeline during the most vulnerable final minutes of an attack run.

PIRANA is built for the modern naval problem: too many threats, arriving too fast, from too many angles. MKE states the KUSV has already completed surface navigation and target impact trials, including the destruction of a small target about 3.5 m in size, a useful proxy for the kind of compact contact point a defender might try to mask with decoys, wakes, or clutter. The most telling demonstration is PIRANA’s integration into a wider unmanned kill chain. In June 2025, MKE reports a joint exercise in which PIRANA was controlled first from the TCG Anadolu command-and-control station and then handed over to a Bayraktar TB3 UAV, which guided it to the target, validating a concept where an airborne platform extends the communications horizon and helps refine terminal guidance beyond line-of-sight. This is tactically significant because it reduces the need for forward coastal control teams and enables a naval commander to cue attacks using organic ISR from the air, compressing the sensor-to-shooter loop in a way that is difficult to disrupt with a single jamming or kinetic strike.

Assuming these trials translate into a production run, the most plausible pathway is serial manufacture through 2026 with deliveries to Türkiye beginning that year, aligning with Ankara’s broader push for massed, attritable unmanned systems across air, land, and sea. For Türkiye, PIRANA matters less as a single platform and more as a regional strategy enabler. In the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, where geography favors ambush, rapid concentration, and layered coastal defenses, a 200+ nautical mile kamikaze USV complicates an adversary’s freedom of maneuver and forces expensive defensive expenditures on sensors, close-in weapons, and small-target interceptors. In the Black Sea, the system reinforces a deterrent posture built on denying surface access rather than matching tonnage ship-for-ship. And in expeditionary scenarios tied to forward presence, amphibious operations, or protection of sea lines of communication, the TB3-Anadolu-PIRANA teaming concept offers a distinctly Turkish model of distributed maritime strike: launch from a sea base, extend control via airborne relay, and saturate the defender with multiple low-signature attackers that each carry a warhead weight normally associated with much larger missiles.

Written by Evan Lerouvillois, Defense Analyst.

Evan studied International Relations, and quickly specialized in defense and security. He is particularly interested in the influence of the defense sector on global geopolitics, and analyzes how technological innovations in defense, arms export contracts, and military strategies influence the international geopolitical scene.