MilSOFT Celebrates 25th Anniversary on the Centennial of the Republic of Türkiye

MilSOFT celebrated its 25th anniversary with a momentous event attended by Founding Partner & Executive Chairman İsmail BAŞYİĞİT, Board Member Muhammet Sami ULUKAVAK, CEO Mustafa ÖZÇELİK, SSTEK CEO Ahmet Çağrı ÖZER and members of the press. The event provided insights into MilSOFT's founding journey, its activities since inception, ongoing programs and future projections.

İsmail BAŞYİĞİT, founding partner and executive chairman of MilSOFT, shared the company's achievements in its 25-year journey. He highlighted that MilSOFT's R&D projects have received more than US$15 million in non-repayable support from TÜBİTAK, enabling the development of tactical data links. BAŞYİĞİT mentioned that MilSOFT has equipped eight frigates of the Turkish Naval Forces and the first three MİLGEM ships with Link-11 and Link-16 tactical systems developed in-house. It has also implemented a command-and-control system capable of processing Link-16 information.

BAŞYİĞİT said: "We have provided Link-16 for Alenia's ATR-72 aircraft and supplied Link-11 and Link-22 as a subcontractor for the new type of Turkish submarine under the German company HDW. These products have proved their worth. The Pakistani Navy inquire us to develop a system to integrate all its naval vessels and command and control aircraft. Within nine months, leveraging our diverse capabilities, we seamlessly integrated these systems across more than 50 platforms. Subsequently, we also implemented the project's second phase. In a second contract, we expanded our command-and-control system in this large area to include a third command center and mid-level command capabilities. In addition, HERON unmanned aerial vehicles were purchased from Israel. Within the HERON platforms, there are two unique systems. One is ASELSAN's FLIR camera and the ground imagery intelligence station provided by MilSOFT. It is an imagery intelligence system in a portable shelter.  In the following years, we developed this imagery intelligence system further, and in the Intelligence Command, which serves the Turkish Air Force and the Turkish Armed Forces, we developed a system that combines aerial reconnaissance imagery, which includes not only the information from HERONs, but also that from ANKA and BAYRAKTAR unmanned aerial vehicles, and which contains very detailed information about the Turkish Air Force. We have provided our air force with the capability to identify targets and then dispatch those identified targets from the center, for example to Diyarbakır or elsewhere, transmit them to the F-16s in the Link-16 network at that center, and enable the F-16s to hit the target by displaying them on what we call a 'multi-function display' from the center in Ankara.

Again, utilizing ASELSAN's radios and modems (for which MilSOFT developed the entire software), we demonstrated the same capability, this time on MiG-25 aircraft in Azerbaijan.” 

In his speech, MilSOFT Board Member Muhammet Sami ULUKAVAK highlighted the changing dynamics of warfare, noting the transition from a battle of men to a battle of equipment, and assessed the industry's developments and changes in this context. ULUKAVAK emphasized the widespread use of autonomous systems on the battlefield and highlighted MilSOFT's recent adaptations over the past year and a half to keep pace with industry developments. In particular, he highlighted the integration of cloud computing, autonomous systems and integrated logistics support into MilSOFT's strategic positioning within the sector. He also reiterated the company's commitment to continued investment in these three areas, with the aim of achieving excellence in each. ULUKAVAK added: "When we talk about cloud computing, it includes the related technologies and investments in IT and combat cloud in the defense industry. MilSOFT has set its own goal". He expressed the company's readiness to cooperate with stakeholders in the defense, communications and IT sectors, and also highlighted its openness to sectoral cooperation in the field of autonomous systems as a niche area, such as the joint operation of unmanned systems and their management through a unified platform.

Mustafa ÖZÇELİK, CEO of MilSOFT, emphasized the company's commitment to driving export-led growth through collaboration within the industry ecosystem in the coming years. ÖZÇELİK also discussed the achievements of 2023, highlighting MilSOFT's initiatives in integrated logistics support. This is one of the company's latest areas of investment, which has been fully funded by MilSOFT's own capital over the past 4-5 years. ÖZÇELİK said, "We have provided ELD support and software to NFG, a manufacturer of ground vehicle platforms, as part of the project carried out by the Defense Industry Agency for the Turkish Land Forces". He also highlighted MilSOFT's activities in the field of autonomous systems throughout 2023, saying, "We have entered the field of autonomous systems, which is an emerging technological area for us. We participated in the command, control and communication layers of the DEARSAN SALVO SIDA project. Our approach in identifying these new investment areas has always been to build on our core capabilities by integrating new technologies and capabilities. As a company that has provided command and control systems, tactical data links and communications products to the Turkish Navy, we've begun to adapt these systems specifically for unmanned platforms. In the third quarter of this year, we signed our first autonomous systems contract. We initiated activities to convert Elektroland's 6X6 BOĞAÇ vehicle into an autonomous system. What's more, in the area of cybersecurity, we have improved the scalability of our product, which has already been delivered to the Defense Industry Agency (SSB), to ensure the safe integration of the Turkish Air Force into NATO.”

Highlighting MilSOFT's technological breakthroughs, ÖZÇELİK described the company's investments, which focus on two main aspects: integrating new technologies into their products and aligning product positioning with future operational landscapes. He mentioned their ongoing efforts to move their product services to the cloud and highlighted their candidacy in the development of the Turkish defense industry's cloud platform. ÖZÇELİK underlined their commitment, noting the dedicated capital allocated to this initiative over the past year. ÖZÇELİK said: "Our first success came in the form of our Software Factory concept, which unveiled its first prototype this year. As mentioned earlier, we achieved our first export to NATO in cooperation with STM. Many organizations around the world, and NATO in particular, have started to move to this software infrastructure. Through the NATO Software Factory, our team members enter the NATO domain and develop software for them within their designated software environments. We're currently working on introducing this approach to the Turkish defense industry. ÖZÇELİK explained that they focus on technology rather than platforms in the area of autonomy. He mentioned their active efforts to promote cooperation between manned and unmanned systems in the evolving hybrid operational environment of the future, and their ongoing efforts to transfer information sharing to strategic-level operations center.

On the artificial intelligence domain, which is another area in which MilSOFT is carried out, MilSOFT stated that they have initiated studies on the further development of strategic level command and control capabilities, the artificial intelligence algorithms of the intelligence system used in the Turkish Air Force and the Gendarmerie General Command, and the artificial intelligence integration of autonomous systems.

ÖZÇELİK said that MilSOFT's name will be heard much more in the next five years, especially in the areas of cloud computing, autonomous and integrated logistics support