Italian Navy Surges Ahead with Carrier TB-3 Strike Drones
Last year, The Maritime Executive reported on the Turkish Navy and drone manufacturer Bayraktar’s apparent success in mounting TB-3 strike drone missions from the deck of TCG Anadolu (L400), the Turkish Navy’s amphibious assault ship. During Exercise Sea Wolf 2025 held in the Eastern Mediterranean in mid-May 2025, Bayraktar’s TB-3 navalized drones, an upgraded version of the widely-exported TB-2 drone but featuring a retractable undercarriage and folding wings to permit below deck hangar storage, were seen conducting take-offs and landings from the flat top. These same drones were seen carrying out strike missions on ground targets using Rokestan MAM-L precision-guided missiles, which have a 22kg warhead and a stand-off range of 10 miles.
The armed TB-3s took off without catapult assistance using the full 720 feet length of TCG Anadolu’s flight deck and ski ramp, and recovered using about 330 feet of deck. Landings and take-offs were conducted using an autonomous flight control system.
The TB-3 has extremely attractive flight characteristics: long endurance of up to 32 hours, and a range of more than 500 miles at medium altitude. Carrying a multi-mode AESA (Active Electronically Scanned Array) radar, developed for the TB-3 by Turkish company Arselan, a carrier strike group with a constellation of TB-3s could have persistent, wide area surveillance, with redundancy and overlap, plus the capacity to take on, for example, asymmetric warfare targets or coastal anti-ship missile batteries at range. A capability to maintain continuous wide-area surveillance using the TB-3’s radar would be a huge operational enhancement even for navies flying the Hawkeye E2-C surveillance aircraft, let alone for those such as the Royal Navy relying on makeshift helicopter-borne surveillance systems.
The TB-3 was developed in Turkey when it was thought that TB-3s could be deployed on the TCG Anadolu in tandem with F-35Bs. The operational concept was to preserve the F-35Bs for difficult and priority missions, leaving the TB-3s to mount a continuous low-cost overhead surveillance presence, with the capability to engage unsophisticated targets well beyond the range before they could present a close-in engagement threat. But while the Turkish Navy could not realize this dual capability concept, the Italian Navy, with F-35Bs replacing Sea Harriers aboard its light carrier ITS Cavour (C550), was ready to do so.
ITS Cavour, alongside USS Harry S. Truman and FS Charles de Gaulle (USN)
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The Italian TB-3s are being built in Italy in a joint venture with Leonardo, and are due for operational certification this year.
The deployment of Italian TB-3s is a stark illustration of how some navies have adopted the Ukrainian survivalist model of rapid, low-cost procurement, leveraging technical innovation, whilst others string out the development and experimental phase for years without quite managing to find funding for operational deployments. It took a long time for the tank to replace the horse. But in a period of rapid technological change in the nature of warfare, victory usually goes to the side forced to innovate the fastest.