Korkut

Türkiye's flak gun for the drone age — Korkut is the twin-35mm, radar-directed self-propelled anti-aircraft gun that forms the bottom rung of Türkiye's "Steel Dome" air-defense ladder, beneath the Hisar and Siper missiles. It fires programmable airburst rounds that detonate ahead of a target and throw a cone of tungsten pellets into its path — the classic gun answer to aircraft, now repurposed against the cheap drones flooding modern battlefields. Built entirely in Türkiye by ASELSAN, it is the national counterpart to Germany's Gepard and Skynex, and its family has spread from a tracked gun into towed, mobile and naval forms as Ankara builds a home-grown shield.

Overview

Korkut is ASELSAN's 35mm self-propelled anti-aircraft gun (SPAAG) — twin Oerlikon-derived cannons on a tracked FNSS ACV-30 chassis, radar-directed, firing ATOM programmable airburst ammunition that bursts ahead of the target and scatters tungsten pellets in a cone (the same principle as Rheinmetall's AHEAD rounds). It is the very-low-altitude gun layer of Türkiye's "Steel Dome" (Çelik Kubbe), sitting below the Hisar short/medium-range SAMs and the long-range Siper — the cheap-per-shot bottom of the ladder, pitched squarely at the mass-drone threat (Shahed and FPV) that has made gun air defense relevant again, exactly as the Gepard and Skynex have. A battery pairs a command vehicle carrying a 70 km search radar with three gun vehicles, each with its own fire-control radar and electro-optics, firing on the move. Developed from around 2008, in serial production since 2017 and delivered to the Turkish Army from 2019 (replacing the old M42 Duster), Korkut has grown into a family — the tracked gun, a wheeled version, the towed Korkut 130/35 modernization of legacy 35mm guns, palletized and mobile variants, and the GÖKDENİZ naval close-in weapon system. Two honest caveats govern the entry: its counter-drone capability is largely a manufacturer claim (its confirmed combat use is ground fire support, not verified air-defense kills), and its export success is on the naval GÖKDENİZ, not the land gun. Korkut is best understood as a sovereignty instrument — Türkiye's own gun tier for a shield it builds rather than buys.

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