Review: Which Armed Drone Will Best Suit Bangladesh Air Force

Bangladesh Air Force (BAF) Needs A Fleet of Efficient Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to Reduce Pressure on Manned Combat Aircraft.

BAF doesn’t operate any capable unmanned aerial system (UAS) or UAVs right now. But, to ensure force’s capabilities it’s now time to acquire some drones to conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions in the regions where manned aircraft operations costs unnecessarily. There are handful options for Bangladesh regarding UAV/UCAVs. First of all China can be the most predictable source as several Chinese surveillance and armed UAVs are emerged as capable system. Chengdu Aircraft Industry Group recently unveiled Wing Loong II Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV) which is the successor of the previous version Wing Loong I. on the other side China Aerospace Science and Industries Corporation (CASIC) also offering it’s new version of the RainBow series armed drones named CH-5, which is the most powerful & capable Chinese combat UAV. Besides these two there are many other Chinese military drones which can make their way to the Bangladesh Air Force, and those are cheap, cost effective solutions. 

Other than China BAF can also go for Turkish military drones, mostly TAI developed Anka and –Kale-Baykar’s Bayraktar & Bayraktar TB2 armed UAV. Turkish ones may cost more than Chinese ones but those are reliable and almost similar to the western UAVs. 

In recent times, Bangladesh Air Force lacking sufficient air power. Most of the combat aircrafts of BAF are Chinese built obsolete F-7s which can’t secure country’s airspace, besides recent acquisition process of MRCA (Su-30SME) has been plagued by the huge asking price from Moscow. MRCA acquisition will take more time to be finalized. In the meantime BAF needs to balance the air power to provide air support to the ground troops and navy. 

Myanmar violated Bangladesh’s airspace almost 20 times in last few months and BAF can’t response befittingly. Army and Navy was in standby position to thwart any burmese misadventure but due to the lacking of air power burma got a clean chit this time. And that’s sad. Fellow countrymen keenly followed the development and wished Bangladesh Armed Forces would response burmese aggression with vigorous reply, but they failed. Hence, as experts believe, BAF needs to buy some truly combat capable drones to fill the gap.