Deciphering Turkey's Assertive Military and Defense Strategy: Objectives, Pillars, and Implications.

• Author: Yesiltas, Murat
• Position: ARTCLE

Introduction

The recent strategic moves in Turkey's military and security policy remain an interesting puzzle for those interested in Turkish foreign and security policy. Over the past two decades, Turkey has been fundamentally transforming its military strategy in the fight against terrorism at both the domestic and regional level, particularly since the failed military coup attempt in 2016. However, it has also been adopting a more 'assertive military activism' to protect its national security interests, prevent counter-balancing moves and ultimately gain strategic leverage against its adversaries in the regional and international geopolitical competition. As an integral part of its military and foreign policy activism in approaching different regional issues, Turkey's adaptation of assertive defense industry policies, such as acquiring S-400s from Russia while attempting to develop its own short-range to long-range surface-to-air missile system alongside its other hard power instruments, raises a wide set of questions ranging from tactical-operational level challenges to geopolitical ones. Why has Turkey adopted more assertive practices in which the use of military force and power maximization has become the linchpin in its new military and defense strategy formulation? What drives Turkey's new assertive military and defense strategy as the major foreign policy perspective shaping its bilateral relations and its motivation in regional and international politics?

Three lines of thought have emerged to explain the increasing assertiveness in Turkey's military strategy. The first seeks to explain Turkey's new military assertiveness from an individualistic perspective by locating the role of leadership in the decision-making process. By situating President Erdogan as the main reference point, proponents of this line of reasoning argue that Turkey's gradual deviation in foreign and military policy practices can be understood as the product of Erdogan's rational calculation of what is in his best interest. (1) The second attempt argues that transformation in military strategy is best understood not as a unique product of Erdogan's preference, but as the culmination of tendencies in domestic Turkish politics in the context of the crisis of state-society transformation, particularly since the July 15 military coup attempt. (2) The final explanation concerning Turkey's new military and defense strategy underlines a two-level transformation. While some analyses point to the global and regional geopolitical consequence of the crisis of the U.S.-led international order by arguing that Turkey is not the exception in choosing an assertive strategy, others argue that political turmoil in Turkish foreign policy and military strategy is a product of the Syrian internal war and the regional geopolitical shifts in the post-Arab uprising era. (3) Such an argument frames Turkish foreign policy motivation as a counter-reactionary resistance against the international and regional crisis, which has ultimately shaped the counter-reactions necessary to Turkey's survival, as it has forced Turkey to adopt a new foreign and military strategy.

Rather than focusing solely on a single determinant factor to make sense of Turkey's shift in foreign and military strategy, this paper takes into consideration dynamics in Turkey's domestic, regional, and international security landscapes as the prevailing drivers in shaping its new strategy of assertiveness. The article argues that the change in Turkey's defense and military strategy stems both from Turkey's changing security landscape following the post-Arab spring regional disorder and Turkey's quest to be an assertive regional player, which has in fact long been a central component of Ankara's post-2002 foreign policy objective. The reasons behind the change in Turkish defense and military strategy also include a desire to gain political influence in the international arena and improve Turkey's military capabilities to deter emerging security threats near its borders and abroad. The article seeks to unpack Turkey's growing assertive military and defense strategy by taking into account its main drivers, primary objectives and essential pillars, as well as its tangible repercussions on the military mindset. The article is composed by two main sections. The first section contextualizes Turkey's new military and defense strategy by taking into consideration its main drivers, objectives and pillars. The second empirically scrutinizes Turkey's military strategy by focusing on its military activism in extra-territorial domains. In this section, Turkey's military interventions in Syria following the failed military coup and its strategy of power projection are examined to explain the question of how Turkey operationalizes its new military and defense strategies.

Turkey's New Assertive Strategy

Turkey's new military and defense strategy have been under significant transformation since the Arab uprising started to reshape the regional order in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in 2011. Proliferation of non-state armed groups, decline of conventional state sovereignty, questioning of nation-state borders across the region, proxy war as the new tool of the foreign and security apparatus of the regional countries and power competition among the countries across the MENA region have all shaken Turkey's security landscape and forced it to adopt a new assertive military strategy in order to take a more proactive stance. Assertiveness in the context of Turkish military strategy has manifested itself through Turkey's extra-territorial rapid military operations and forward military posture as well as its growing defense industry. In addition to the regional geopolitical developments in general and the conflict spill-over effects of the Syrian civil war on Turkey's national security in particular, the global geopolitical turmoil with the return of great power rivalry and intense security, political and economic competition among the major global powers are perceived as a challenge to Turkey's national interests and foreign policy strategy in its surrounding regions. The Syrian civil war can be taken as a textbook example of how Turkish military strategy has been shaped and influenced by two superpowers' strategic and tactical competition over regional issues in the MENA region. As a result of the fundamental transformation of Turkey's geopolitical landscape both on the regional and international scale, Turkey has resorted to coercive posturing, the stated strategic objective of which is to contain the threats from the Middle East and recalibrate national and regional interest through the application of cross-border military force.

Drivers

The transformation in Turkey's new military and defense strategy is arising out of domestic, regional, and international developments. On the domestic level, the gradual change in the decision-making process and a change in Turkey's geopolitical vision are the main prevailing factors. In the context of internal political development, there has been a significant shift in the power differential of Turkey's civil-military relations in which the Turkish Armed Forces' (TAF) special role above politics had provided an exceptional position to the military in formulating the country's military and defense strategy. This exceptional role also granted an untouchable status for the military in Turkey's military-industrial complex. (4) More to the point, while the military was one of the central actors in planning Turkey's military and defense strategy during the 1990s, the civil government was an unresponsive actor that only had the right to speak during technical approval procedures. (5) In the post-2002 era of Turkish politics, however, the imbalance in civil-military relations fundamentally transformed so that the civil government became the ultimate authority in formulating defense and military strategy as a consequence of intense political struggle between the government and the military. The new foreign policy vision initiated by the government started to shape the priorities of the defense industry, and the military eventually had to adapt itself as an integral part of the government's vision. In the first phase of the AK Party era (2002-2008), the military was the only actor able to securitize foreign policy issues on behalf of its own strategic view, which was mainly formulated with reference to the role of the TAF as the protector of the Republican regime. (6) The AK Party changed the balance in favor of civilianization and the democratization of civil-military relations.

With this shift already underway, the July 15 military coup attempt organized by FETO was a turning point in the history of Turkish civil-military relations, affecting the very nature of the military-industrial-political complex in Turkey. The first consequence of the failed coup involved a reshuffling of the TAF's organizational structure, in which the Ministry of Defense became the superior authority over the military decision-making process. Following the fundamental change in Turkey's political structure from a parliamentary to a presidential system after the 2018 constitutional referendum, the President became a powerful actor in civil-military relations and in Turkey's defense architecture.

Beside this revolutionary move in civil-military relations, the idea of building a more powerful national defense sector is another important dynamic behind the consolidation of the defense and military strategies that had already been under transformation. While the military as a tool of foreign policy had been reinvented to reflect Turkey's foreign policy objectives in the post2016 strategic environment, the defense industry was designed as an integral part of Turkey's hard power instruments in order to gain more freedom of strategic maneuver against security threats in the region. The...