According to foreign media, the Turkish defense company Roketsan conducted a fire test of the TAYFUN Block-3 anti-ship ballistic missile. The warhead of the missile, flying at hypersonic speed, reportedly hit a free-moving unmanned surface vessel about 7 m long, imitating a small fishing boat.
The company described the hit as achieved with surgical precision. According to Turkish officials, the test marks the first time that a domestically developed homing warhead has been successfully integrated into a ballistic missile to aim it at a moving naval target during the final stage of flight. Thus, the TAYFUN Block-3 effectively qualifies as an anti–ship ballistic missile (ABM), a category of weapon that launches a warhead along a traditional ballistic trajectory, and thanks to the addition of sensors and steering, it guarantees guidance to a moving vessel during its final descent. Only a few countries have successfully implemented such a combination. The Chinese DF-21D missile is the most powerful existing missile defense system in the world, and Turkey's success puts it on a par with a small group of countries capable of turning a land-based ballistic missile into a real strike weapon for the navy.
Roketsan and the Turkish Defense Industry Department developed this missile based on the earlier Bora system. Its existence became known almost by accident: the first test launch on October 20, 2022, was spotted and reported before the Turkish authorities planned to make it public. This accidental disclosure briefly strained relations with Greece. The second test of the TAYFUN took place in May 2023, and in the same month the rocket was launched into mass production. The third test took place in February 2025 near Rize on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. The missile hit a naval target at a range of hundreds of kilometers, showing a circular probable deviation (CVO) of about 5 m. These indicators have already demonstrated the accuracy of the missile even before its newest version with a homing head made it possible to track a moving target. The Block-3 variant tested during the last launch is at an intermediate stage of development of TAYFUN towards the creation of even larger and more powerful modifications.
The base TAYFUN is 6.5 m long, has a launch mass of about 2,300 kg, and uses a guidance method that Roketsan called GOLIS (an abbreviation for "go-on-location-in-space"), combined with additional guidance adjustments during flight to achieve a published KVO of less than 10 m. This means that half of all released RBMs are expected to hit a circle of this radius from the calculated aiming point.
Roketsan continued to expand the missile family by demonstrating a significantly larger variant of the TAYFUN Block-4 at the IDEF defense exhibition in Turkey in July 2025. Its length is 10 m, and the launch weight is about 7,200 kg, which is almost a third more and more than three times the mass of the original rocket. According to representatives of Roketsan, the new rocket will reach hypersonic speeds exceeding Mach 5, and its mass production will begin in 2026 after successful tests.
Turkey's desire to develop an anti-ship ballistic missile comes amid ongoing regional tensions, which gives this project an obvious strategic weight that goes beyond a purely technical achievement. Ankara maintains a military presence in Syria, monitors the weakened threat from Kurdish armed groups, faces ongoing tensions with Israel, and remains involved in a long-standing dispute with Greece and Cyprus over territorial waters and energy exploration rights in the eastern Mediterranean . In this dispute, a missile capable of hitting a moving warship from land represents a direct and unequivocal show of force by Turkey.
Source: Defense Blog
