TARGET PRACTICE OR PROVOCATION: Turkish drone manufacturer Skydagger shows an Israeli Merkava tank as the target of its explosive drones.
A promotional video from Turkish drone maker Skydagger is drawing sharp attention online after it showed one of the company's explosive first-person-view drones striking and destroying a tank closely resembling Israel's Merkava, complete with a blue flag marking. The short clip frames the tank as the problem before cutting to the drone strike as the solution, though the vehicle itself is never explicitly labeled. Skydagger, a Turkish kamikaze drone developer founded in 2024, has built a growing product line that includes fixed-wing and rotary attack drones, with reported output in the thousands of units per month and tens of thousands of drones already exported to more than 20 countries. The company markets itself as a low-cost alternative in modern drone warfare, arguing that cheap systems costing only a few thousand dollars can now threaten even heavily armored, expensive military vehicles.
The timing has raised eyebrows given Skydagger's growing footprint in Western defense circles. In June 2026, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with American defense giant L3Harris Technologies to co-produce FPV interceptor drones in the United States for integration into L3Harris's VAMPIRE counter-drone system, a partnership L3Harris says could help meet billions of dollars in projected demand for drone-defeating technology in the years ahead. That a company now partnering with a major US defense contractor would release marketing material appearing to target Israeli military hardware has fueled online debate about the state of Turkey-Israel relations, which have remained tense over disagreements tied to the wars in Gaza and Syria. Neither Skydagger nor L3Harris has publicly addressed the video's choice of target.