Turkish startup develops stealth spray for combat drones

Stealth technology has always been the exclusive domain of billion-dollar defense programs and classified government laboratories, built into aircraft through years of engineering work and applied through precision manufacturing processes that cost more per square meter than most countries spend on entire weapon systems. A Turkish startup is now claiming it solved the core problem with a spray can.

The company behind the claim is a small Turkish defense research outfit led by Yunus İnce, who contacted The Defence Blog with technical details and test footage of a radar-absorbing coating called Kürşat 3.0, developed over seven years. The material is designed to spray directly onto any aircraft surface, including drones, reducing the strength of the radar return signal the vehicle produces and making it significantly harder for detection systems to find. İnce says recent testing showed an attenuation figure of 43.2 decibels, meaning the coating absorbed that much of the incoming radar energy rather than reflecting it back toward the receiver trying to locate the aircraft.

Radar cross-section is the measure of how visible an object appears to a radar system, where a large return signal produces a strong blip on the screen and a reduced one shrinks or disappears entirely. Stealth aircraft achieve low radar cross-section through two mechanisms working together: airframe geometry that deflects incoming radar waves away from the source rather than back toward it, and radar absorbing materials applied to the surface that convert whatever energy the shape does not deflect into heat. Those materials, in their conventional form, are engineered composite panels manufactured to precise specifications, bonded carefully to the aircraft structure, and expensive to produce, inspect, and repair. Applying them meaningfully to a small drone using conventional methods is effectively impractical, which leaves the vast majority of unmanned aircraft with radar signatures that a competent air defense system can detect without difficulty.

Kürşat 3.0’s central proposition is that the application problem can be eliminated entirely by making the material sprayable. Rather than cutting composite panels to fit complex curved surfaces and bonding them with adhesives that degrade under vibration and temperature cycling, the formula goes on like paint, conforming to any geometry without seams or coverage gaps that would compromise the absorption performance. İnce describes the formula as built around the microscopic pore structures of naturally occurring volcanic materials, specifically basalt and pumice, engineered to trap incoming electromagnetic waves and convert them into heat rather than scattering them back toward the radar receiver. Basalt and pumice are inexpensive and abundant materials whose electromagnetic properties have attracted sustained attention in academic research on radar absorbing materials over the past decade, making the underlying scientific approach plausible rather than implausible.

A claimed attenuation figure of 43.2 decibels would, if validated by independent testing across operationally relevant radar frequency bands, place Kürşat 3.0 in genuinely competitive performance territory. Academic literature on broadband radar absorbing coatings typically reports effective attenuation in the range of 20 to 30 decibels under standardized measurement conditions, and pushing substantially beyond that threshold while maintaining the manufacturing simplicity of a spray application would represent a meaningful advance over what is currently available commercially.

The military logic driving interest in this kind of development is not difficult to follow. The war in Ukraine transformed the global understanding of what small, cheap unmanned aircraft can accomplish in combat, as both sides demonstrated that drones costing a few hundred to a few thousand dollars could destroy armored vehicles, collapse supply lines, and sustain operational pressure at a scale that conventional artillery and air power struggle to match on the same budget. The response from defenders has been a rapid expansion of electronic warfare systems, radar-based detection networks, and layered interception capabilities designed to find and destroy drones before they reach their targets. Reducing a drone’s radar signature meaningfully complicates that detection chain at every stage, and doing so through a coating that adds negligible weight and requires no structural modification to the airframe would make the capability accessible to operators using commercially available hardware rather than purpose-built stealth platforms.

Turkey’s defense industry provides a credible ecosystem for this kind of development to emerge from. The country built a global export reputation on the Bayraktar TB2 drone, a medium-altitude armed unmanned aircraft that proved its combat effectiveness across multiple conflicts before most Western analysts had adequately accounted for what affordable armed drones could achieve operationally. Baykar’s follow-on platform, the Kızılelma unmanned combat aircraft, which entered Turkish Armed Forces service in 2025, incorporates radar-absorbing materials into its airframe design as a core survivability feature. Turkey’s defense exports reached $7.1 billion in 2024, and the government’s sustained investment in domestic capability development has created conditions where small companies working on enabling technologies for UAV platforms have both a domestic customer and a credible export market to pursue.

What Kürşat 3.0 represents at this stage is a seven-year development effort by a Turkish researcher producing a spray-applicable radar absorbing material with a headline attenuation figure that, if it survives independent scrutiny across relevant frequency bands and real-world application conditions, addresses a genuine and growing operational need. Drone fleets are expanding across every active conflict, detection systems are racing to keep pace, and the gap between what stealth engineering can deliver on a large military aircraft and what it can offer on a small commercial UAV remains wide open. A spray-on coating that meaningfully closes that gap would matter on battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East, and the incentive for both military customers and commercial drone manufacturers to find one is not shrinking.