Kemankeş: Baykar’s AI-Guided Mini Cruise Missile That Flies Without GPS, Explained

Image: Baykar Kemankeş mini cruise missile at the 2025 Paris Air Show (Bourget). Photo by Tpe.g5.stan, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

Modern electronic warfare has one fairly recent obsession: turning off the satellites. If you can jam the GPS signal a missile relies on, it loses track of where it is, drifts off course, and either misses or has to be recalled. That problem has quietly limited the value of every cruise-missile family in service, including some of the very best Western ones. Baykar’s answer to it is named after a 17th-century Ottoman archer: Kemankeş.

Kemankeş is a mini cruise missile in the 30-kilogram class — small enough to hang four under the wing of a Bayraktar TB2, and equally compatible with the larger TB3, AKINCI and the unmanned jet KIZILELMA. What sets it apart is not the weight but the brain. Inside Kemankeş, a Turkish turbojet pushes it through the air; an AI-driven visual navigation system looks down at the ground through an onboard camera and matches what it sees against a pre-loaded map. GPS is an optional check. If GPS is jammed or spoofed, the missile keeps flying — because it is, in effect, looking out of the window.

Publicly unveiled at TEKNOFEST 2024 and shown abroad at the 2025 Paris Air Show, Kemankeş is also designed to operate in swarms — multiple missiles sharing target data and dividing the attack between them in flight. It is the kind of weapon that takes the lessons of the Ukraine war (heavy GPS jamming, swarm-style drone strikes) and bakes them in from the design stage.

At a Glance

How Kemankeş Finds Its Target Without GPS

The trick is straightforward in concept and difficult in execution. Before launch, the operator loads Kemankeş with a high-resolution satellite or aerial map of the route and the target area. In flight, the missile’s downward-looking camera takes images and feeds them to an onboard AI model that compares each new frame against the pre-loaded imagery. It is essentially playing “spot the difference” with the world below at thirty frames per second, and using the matches to keep itself on course.

This approach has several practical consequences. GPS jammers stop mattering. GPS spoofers — devices that broadcast fake satellite signals to lead a missile astray — also stop mattering, because the missile is checking the ground, not the sky. The downside is that visual matching needs daylight and reasonably clear weather, which is why most operational missions of this kind are flown in conditions the seeker can handle.

What Kemankeş Actually Does

Specifications

How Kemankeş Compares Internationally

Why It Matters for Turkey

Kemankeş is the first cruise missile in the Turkish inventory to be explicitly designed around the assumption that GPS will not be available. That assumption matches the operational reality of the post-2022 battlefield: every major military is now investing heavily in GPS jamming, and every cruise-missile programme has to answer the question of what to do when the satellites go quiet. Baykar’s answer — onboard AI plus a downward-looking camera — is one of the cleanest expressions of that idea anywhere in the world.

The export logic follows naturally. Bayraktar TB2 is operated in more than thirty countries; TB3, AKINCI and KIZILELMA are increasingly on the same export brochures. A munition designed from day one to fit the entire Baykar drone family — and to keep working under jamming — is exactly the kind of weapon those customers will want to buy along with the airframe. Kemankeş does not just give Baykar a new mini cruise missile. It gives Baykar’s drone exports a more capable answer to the next decade of electronic-warfare conditions.

Summary

Sources:

• Baykar — Kemankeş Mini Smart Cruise Missile
• Wikipedia — Baykar Kemankeş

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