Turkey’s Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation (MKE) recently put on a show as its Tolga short-range air defense (SHORAD) system destroyed every drone in live-fire trials.
The tests, hosted at the Karapınar Firing, Test, and Evaluation Center, drew around 100 observers from the Turkish Armed Forces and security agencies.
Across eight scenarios, Tolga hit a “100 percent success rate” using both soft-kill and hard-kill methods.
In soft-kill mode, operators disabled a hostile unmanned aerial vehicle at 3 kilometers (1.86 miles) using electronic warfare (EW) tools that jammed its control signals.
Hard-kill engagement was used for fixed-wing and first-person view drones, utilizing 12.7mm rotary guns with quick-change barrels.
A 20mm cannon also fired MKE’s anti-drone rounds, designed to burst at precise distances, creating a concentrated fragment cloud for cleaner intercepts.
Aerial Threat Crusher
Tolga pairs advanced radar, electro-optical sensors, and EW tools to detect and classify threats up to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) away.
Its command-and-control unit consolidates core functions, including target detection, tracking, engagement decisions, and fire-control management.
The weapon supports manual, semi-autonomous, and fully autonomous operation, letting crews adapt to mission needs.
This flexibility allows the system to tackle a broad mix of drones, from fixed-wing and rotary-wing to FPV models.
Its layered weapons package gives operators multiple engagement options: 35mm rounds out to 3,000 meters (1.8 miles), 20mm fragmentation rounds to 1,000 meters (0.6 miles), and 12.7mm rounds for targets within 300 meters (0.18 miles).
