Bangladesh Procures CİRİT Laser Guided Missiles From Roketsan For Its Falco Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
In recent weeks, Bangladesh organized a large event named “Air Force Day” in the capital Dhaka to commemorate the 52nd anniversary of the formation of the air force. The event, which was attended by Bangladesh Air Force (BAF) Chief of Air Staff Marshal Shaikh Abdul Hannan, featured a documentary on “Kilo Flight” (the code name of the Mukti Bahini combat aviation formation during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971), the Air Force’s current development, and BAFWWA’s development activities. The video showed a Falco UAV of the Bangladesh Air Force outfitted with the Roketsan’s CİRİT Laser Guided Missile. With this development, it became official that Roketsan had exported the CİRİT Laser Guided Missile to Bangladesh.
Cirit is a laser-guided missile with high hit accuracy developed by ROKETSAN, the Turkish defense industry’s munition, missile, and rocket production center, for use against lightly armored/unarmored, fixed and moving targets from ground, naval, and aerial vehicles. CİRİT, which started to be developed in 2007, was designed to fill the tactical gap between unguided 2.75” rockets and guided anti-tank missiles. As the first domestically produced guided missile in Turkey, CİRİT entered the service of the Turkish Armed Forces in 2012, and its versatile design enables easy integration and use on a variety of platforms (helicopters, unmanned aerial vehicles, ground vehicles, fixed platforms, light attack aircraft, naval platforms).
The Cirit missile, which has been supplied to Bahrain, Chad, the Philippines, and the United Arab Emirates in addition to Bangladesh according to open-source data, weighs 15kg sans the canister. Cirit, which is 1.9 meters long and 70 mm in diameter, has a maximum range of 8km thanks to its low-smoke solid fuel engine. After being launched from the platform, CİRİT performs its flight utilizing the Inertial Measurement Unit (INS) in the intermediate stage and destroys its target using the semi-active laser seeker in the final stage. In addition, the CRT missile has a multi-purpose (Armor Piercing, Anti-Personnel, and Incendiary) warhead as well as high-explosive warhead options.
The relationship between Bangladesh and ROKETSAN is not limited to the Cirit missile. Bangladesh had previously purchased Roketsan’s TRG-300 Kaplan missile system and TRG-230 missile systems. Furthermore, Bangladesh ordered Roketsan’s TEBER Guidance Kit for its Chengdu F-7BG aircraft last year, becoming the product’s first export customer.