By January 2026, Azerbaijan’s quiet induction of Turkey’s SOM‑Ş (Şahin) air‑launched cruise missile is emerging as one of the most consequential shifts in the South Caucasus security environment since the 2020 Nagorno‑Karabakh war, fundamentally altering how airpower, deterrence, and long‑range precision strike are conceived in the region.
The transfer marks far more than a routine arms sale. It represents a decisive inflection point in Azerbaijan’s military modernisation, collapsing long‑standing technological barriers between NATO‑standard systems and Soviet‑legacy platforms while reinforcing the strategic mantra long advanced by Ankara and Baku under the “One Nation, Two States” doctrine. What was once political symbolism has now matured into an operational reality reshaping regional deterrence geometry.
By fielding the SOM‑Ş, Azerbaijan becomes the world’s first air force to operationally deploy an air‑launched cruise missile compatible with both Western‑aligned unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) and legacy Russian‑origin strike aircraft. This distinction carries implications that extend well beyond the Armenia–Azerbaijan theatre, feeding into wider debates on force modernisation under sanctions pressure, hybrid fleet optimisation, and the future of exportable precision‑guided munitions.
At its core, the SOM‑Ş signals a doctrinal evolution in how Azerbaijan conceptualises airpower. Rather than pursuing costly and politically sensitive wholesale fleet replacement, Baku is shifting toward a munition‑centric model of dominance. In this paradigm, precision, survivability, standoff range, and cross‑platform adaptability outweigh raw aircraft numbers in determining battlefield outcomes.
The missile allows Azerbaijan to decouple long‑range lethality from scarce high‑end platforms. In operational terms, this enables layered, multi‑axis strike dilemmas for any adversary, forcing air defences to contend with threats launched from multiple vectors and platforms while increasing sortie survivability for Azerbaijani aircraft. The result is a compressed defensive decision‑making cycle that favours the attacker.
This shift also reflects lessons internalised from the 2020 war, where Azerbaijan leveraged Turkish and Israeli systems to achieve information and precision advantages rather than numerical superiority. The SOM‑Ş builds directly on that experience, extending it from the tactical battlefield into the operational and quasi‑strategic domain.
For Turkey, the SOM‑Ş programme stands as a validation of its indigenous defence‑industrial strategy. Ankara has demonstrated that it can design, produce, export, and sustain complex long‑range strike weapons without reliance on politically vulnerable foreign subsystems. This capability increasingly positions Turkish industry as a disruptive force in the global precision‑guided munitions market, particularly for states seeking alternatives to US, Russian, or European suppliers.
The missile’s evolution was shaped by hard lessons. Early SOM variants relied on the French Microturbo TRI‑40 engine, a dependency that became untenable as European export restrictions tightened. Turkey’s successful transition to the indigenous KTJ‑3200 turbojet not only salvaged the programme but elevated Ankara into a small group of states capable of producing complete cruise missile systems end‑to‑end.
For export clients like Azerbaijan, this indigenisation translates directly into supply‑chain security, sustainment autonomy, and insulation from third‑party political pressure—an increasingly decisive factor in arms procurement decisions worldwide.
Azerbaijan’s path to the SOM family is inseparable from its post‑Soviet strategic imperative to modernise under chronic regional insecurity. Unresolved territorial disputes, shifting alliance structures, and uneven arms balances pushed Baku to seek partners capable of delivering not just hardware, but operational relevance.
Turkey emerged as the natural choice, combining NATO membership, deep political and cultural affinity with Azerbaijan, and a defence industry willing to customise systems rather than impose rigid export templates. Momentum accelerated in the mid‑2010s as Turkish precision‑guided munitions demonstrated credibility across multiple theatres.
A critical signalling moment came on 26 June 2018, when Azerbaijan publicly displayed a SOM‑B1 mock‑up during a military parade in Baku. The message was clear: long‑range precision strike was no longer aspirational, but inevitable.
That trajectory culminated in a formal export contract signed on 19 February 2021, reportedly valued at US$300–400 million depending on configuration and sustainment packages. Concluded in the aftermath of Azerbaijan’s 2020 battlefield success, the agreement reflected confidence that Turkish systems were not only technologically mature but operationally decisive.
Importantly, the contract followed years of quiet integration planning and joint testing, ensuring the missile would be absorbed into Azerbaijan’s force structure with minimal friction rather than remaining a standalone prestige asset.
The SOM family was conceived as a stealth‑optimised, autonomous air‑launched cruise missile designed to strike high‑value, well‑defended targets from outside the engagement envelopes of modern integrated air defence systems—precisely the environment Azerbaijan anticipates in any future conflict.
With a range exceeding 250 kilometres, a low radar cross‑section, and a subsonic profile optimised for terrain masking, the missile allows launch platforms to remain well clear of hostile airspace. Its multi‑layered guidance suite—combining inertial navigation, satellite navigation, terrain‑referenced navigation, and imaging infrared terminal guidance—ensures accuracy even in GPS‑degraded or electronically contested environments.
Warhead options, including high‑explosive fragmentation and tandem penetrator designs of roughly 230 kilograms, give planners flexibility to strike everything from logistics hubs and air defence sites to hardened command bunkers.
Crucially, the missile’s data‑link capability allows mid‑course updates and dynamic retargeting, integrating the weapon into broader ISR and command‑and‑control networks rather than treating it as a fire‑and‑forget asset.
What truly distinguishes the SOM‑Ş from earlier variants is its architectural innovation. Through the Aircraft‑Independent Firing System (UBAS), the missile decouples targeting, launch authorisation, and mission execution from platform‑specific avionics.
This allows the same missile to be launched from Bayraktar Akıncı UCAVs and Soviet‑era Su‑25 Frogfoot attack aircraft without extensive structural or software modification. Successful test launches from Azerbaijani‑modified Su‑25s reported in 2025 confirmed that the missile’s digital architecture could bridge Cold War‑era hardware with modern network‑centric warfare concepts.
For Azerbaijan, the implications are profound. Legacy aircraft that many air forces would retire gain renewed operational relevance, while unmanned platforms inherit deep‑strike credibility once reserved for advanced manned fighters. Training, logistics, and sustainment complexity are reduced, and combat power is extracted disproportionately from an otherwise heterogeneous fleet.
From a deterrence‑theory perspective, the SOM‑Ş blurs the line between tactical and strategic strike. It allows Azerbaijan to credibly threaten high‑value military and dual‑use targets without crossing the escalation thresholds associated with ballistic missiles or manned deep‑penetration raids.
Against Armenia, the missile enables Azerbaijan to hold command nodes, air defences, logistics infrastructure, and critical facilities at risk from the opening hours of any conflict, compressing decision‑making timelines and raising the perceived cost of escalation.
More broadly, the missile’s deployment underscores how access to modular, exportable precision‑strike munitions is compressing the historical gap between major air forces and smaller regional actors. Aircraft generation, fleet depth, and pilot numbers matter less when lethality can be modularised and distributed across platforms.
Ultimately, the SOM‑Ş is not merely a weapon of increased range. It is a catalyst accelerating Azerbaijan’s transition toward a modern, network‑enabled airpower model calibrated for sustained competition rather than episodic conflict.
For Turkey, it cements Ankara’s role as a defence‑industrial partner capable of reshaping regional balances. For the South Caucasus, it signals a future security environment defined less by platform counts and more by precision, connectivity, and asymmetry—where the ability to strike first, from afar, and across domains may prove decisive.
As the missile enters operational service through 2026, its true impact will be measured not only in technical specifications, but in how it reshapes calculations in Yerevan, Moscow, and beyond—quietly but fundamentally altering the geometry of deterrence in one of Eurasia’s most volatile regions.
