Military Innovation in Turkiye: An Overview of the Post-Cold War Era.

• Author: Tezcanlar, Arda Mehmet

Edited by Baris Ates

London and New York: Routledge, 2023, 230 pages, [pounds sterling]96.00, ISBN: 9781032354910

With the advent of Turkiye's emergence as a regional power actor, its underlying causes become a matter of inquiry in studies of International Relations and military sciences. Any overlap between these inquiries becomes a diverse study methodologically when scholars of both international relations and military studies analyze this causal phenomenon in their own terms. As a result, it is a complex task to produce a well-written academic book. However, the contributors to Military Innovation in Turkiye have succeeded in putting together such a treatise in an interdisciplinary form.

Before reviewing the contents of the book, it is important to point out that the topic of military innovation does not contain mere explanations about the evolution and development of weapon systems. More than that, it is a matter of making decisions on what and how to manage a change in ways of conducting offense and defense for a national strategy with military and civilian domestic participants. The military demands what should be changed. The civilians appropriate the change. Since it is a matter of national defense, conflict among these actors is out of the question; it is rather expressed by discord. Cooperation or discord between civilian and military participants is dependent not on principles, but on premeditated techniques. Success develops through careful planning, along with informal but well-intentioned goodwill in consultative relations among the participants.

The book's first chapter is reserved for the philosophical foundations of Turkish military innovation by Ozgur Korpe. He argues that the mentality behind Turkish military innovation comes from a kind of pragmatism that emerges in society at times of upheaval and crises. However, Korpe fails to either assert how this pragmatism is reproduced among a group of innovators or describe the quality of crisis conditions that affect these innovators to act pragmatically. In that sense, the philosophy behind the innovation that is suggested as pragmatism may have been an ex post facto notion of adaptive behavior within a social subsystem that may directly be related to social psychology.

Chapter 2, written by Tolga Oz, explores the evolution of the Turkish Defense Industry after the Cold War. Oz argues that the dynamics of the post-Cold War environment provided a pretext for the adoption of a...