Siper

The missile Turkey built because nobody would sell it one — the Siper ("rampart") is Ankara's indigenous long-range surface-to-air system, conceived after Washington wouldn't transfer Patriot on Turkish terms and the Russian S-400 purchase got Turkey expelled from the F-35 program and sanctioned. Now the 100-plus-kilometer top tier of the "Steel Dome" national air-defense network, Block 1 entered service with formal induction in January 2026; a 150 km Block 2 is in live-fire testing, ballistic-missile-defense blocks are announced — and every performance figure remains a Turkish official claim awaiting independent test.

Overview

The Siper (originally HİSAR-U, for uzun menzil — long-range) crowns the air-defense family that Aselsan, Roketsan and TÜBİTAK SAGE built to give Turkey what neither ally nor adversary would provide: a sovereign long-range SAM. The Block 1 missile — a scaled-up HİSAR-RF with an ATMACA-derived booster, active radar seeker and dual-pulse motor — engages at 100+ km and 20+ km altitude (official figures), fired from six-round trailer launchers in 14-vehicle batteries built around two Aselsan AESA radars: the ALP 310-G early-warning set (500–600 km detection claimed) and the AKREP 1000-G fire-control radar. It is the outermost layer of the Steel Dome (Çelik Kubbe) — the integrated network announced in August 2024 that stacks SUNGUR MANPADS, KORKUT guns, GÜRZ point defense and the HİSAR-A/O tiers under AI-supported command-and-control, with $460 million of hardware delivered in a single August 2025 ceremony and $6.5 billion in expansion contracts signed that November. The roadmap runs through a Block 2 (150+ km, larger monoblock missile — live-fire tested against an evasively maneuvering target drone in June 2026), a planned Block 3 (180+ km with anti-ballistic capability) and a Block 4 announced in May 2026 as Steel Dome's upper-tier missile defense. The caveats are structural: no combat record, no independent verification of any figure, and coverage dominated by Turkish state-adjacent outlets — the Siper is a serious program whose numbers must all be read as claims.

Development

The Siper exists because of a procurement dead end. The US refused Patriot sales on Turkey's technology-transfer terms; Ankara bought the Russian S-400 instead (delivered July 2019), was expelled from the F-35 program, and in December 2020 became the first NATO ally sanctioned under CAATSA — while the S-400 itself, never integrated into NATO-linked networks, sat effectively dormant. The SSB-managed Siper program was the structural answer: a first firing test at Sinop in December 2022, a mass-production contract worth more than $1.5 billion in December 2023 (Siper Block 1 plus HİSAR missiles, deliveries 2025–2029), and entry of Block 1 into the Turkish Armed Forces inventory in October 2024 after more than 100 launch tests, per TURDEF. The public milestone came on 27 August 2025, when President Erdoğan presided over the Steel Dome delivery ceremony at Aselsan's Gölbaşı campus — 47 vehicles worth $460 million across the Siper/HİSAR/GÜRZ/KORKUT/SUNGUR families, per AP — at a site Breaking Defense reports is being built into Europe's largest air-defense facility with $1.5 billion of investment. $6.5 billion in Steel Dome expansion contracts followed in November 2025, per The Times of Israel; a full-battery acceptance firing at Sinop closed the year, and SİPER-1 was formally inducted into operational service and integrated into Steel Dome in January 2026, per Overt Defense. In June 2026 the SİPER-2 destroyed an evasively maneuvering Banshee target drone at Sinop; a first export delivery to an undisclosed buyer was reported in May 2026 by a single mid-tier outlet — unconfirmed.

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