Turkey's Burgeoning Defense Technological and Industrial Base and Expeditionary Military Policy.

• Author: Kasapoglu, Can
• Position: ARTICLE

Introduction: Turkey's Military Capacity in a Geopolitical Context

The intersection of Turkey's geography and political-military affairs has never been easy for the Turks to navigate. Turkey remains a NATO nation bordering, Iran, Iraq, Syria, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus. A few decades ago, Turkish governments had to deal with Hafez al-Assad of Syria and Saddam al-Hussein of Iraq as neighbors. Many flashpoints, ranging from the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict to the hydrocarbon bonanza in the Eastern Mediterranean to the Syrian civil war revolve around Ankara's immediate doorstep. Geopolitically, this unfavorable positioning situates the nation at a crossroads of various armed conflicts, either happening or in the making. The country also faces various hybrid risks ranging from the Salafi extremist terrorist networks of ISIS and al-Qaeda to the ethno-separatist terrorism championed by the PKK and its PYD/YPG offshoots. Thus, the Turkish military has to ensure a high level of readiness to tackle national security threats across a broad spectrum.

In this endeavor, the Turkish administration faces some limitations. In terms of its economic capacity, Turkey is a textbook mid-size state. Furthermore, when it comes to generating defense technologies, the Turkish defense technological and industrial base (DTIB) has long been in the losing camp of the industrial age. Even at the beginning of the 2000s, the contribution of Turkey's indigenous defense industries to the Turkish Armed Forces' (TAF) warfighting arsenal remained below 20 percent. At the time of writing, this contribution marked an optimistic level of 65 percent. Yet when it comes to high-end and technology-driven arms, be it defensive strategic weapon systems, 5th generation aircraft, advanced submarines, airborne early warning and intelligence aircraft or state-of-the-art command, and control infrastructure for a generating a world-class network-centric warfare capacity, Turkey still needs foreign collaboration.

Ankara's arms interactions have never been immune to political fluctuations, especially concerning its traditional NATO allies. Turkey has had to weather a long list of disagreements with many of its Western weaponry suppliers, despite the fact that Turkey's C4ISR (command, control, computers, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) infrastructure is largely integrated with NATO architecture and connected with a web of data-links to the transatlantic network. This architecture cannot be altered easily given the hardship of dealing with high-tech systems and advanced algorithms.

Nonetheless, the Turkish military is fast becoming an expeditionary entity. The TAF's contemporary missions showcase Turkey's new defense policy which extends well beyond its national borders. At present, Turkish Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) loiter in the Syrian airspace, the navy's combatants operate along the coasts of Libya, Turkey's military advisors in Tripoli train and equip the Government of National Accord (GNA) formations, Turkish commando units run counter-terrorism campaigns in northern Iraq and Turkish officers train Qatari and Somali troops. Overall, these emerging dimensions are not only re-defining the armed forces' traditional role in Turkey's political-military agenda but also giving the country a new geopolitical outlook.

This article will analyze two main pillars of Turkey's national military capacity. First, the study focuses on presenting a comprehensive assessment of Turkey's military transformation in terms of its major concepts of operations and doctrinal order of battle. A thorough analysis of the Turkish defense technological and industrial base will follow. Finally, the study will present its findings and conclusion.

Doctrinal Order of Battle and More: Decoding Turkey's Military Transformation

Four pivots have shaped the Turkish military's immense change: the naval transformation toward a blue-water navy and the Blue Homeland (Mavi Vatan) concept, the army's expeditionary warfare concepts and doctrinal order of battle, the growing experience of the Turkish special forces and intelligence in proxy warfare and a rising forward-basing posture in Turkey's sphere of strategic interests.

Blue Homeland is one area in which the global strategic community can observe Turkey's new military-strategic thinking. The concept is centered on a trilateral basis. First, there is a pronounced power projection dimension. Ankara wants its warships to be not only defenders of its coastal waters, but assets of exercising geopolitical influence on the high seas. This paradigm is in line with the TAF's forward-basing posture across the Horn of Africa and the Gulf. The second Blue Homeland pillar involves Turkey's robust capability development efforts to equip the navy with state-of-the-art systems. At the time of writing, for example, President Erdogan declared a '5 x 5' plan for naval modernization, namely five giant projects (the TCG Anadolu amphibious assault vessel followed by other mini-aircraft carriers, the TCG Ufuk signal and electronic intelligence vessel, Reis-class [Type 214] air-independent propulsion submarines, the second batch of MILGEM corvettes [I-class frigates] and a complete joint warfare C4ISR network) to be finalized or start entering into service within five years. (1) Third and finally, the navy, with its reloaded outlook, now plays a decisive role in energy geopolitics competition and gunboat diplomacy.

The army has been transforming too. Turkey's land warfare capacity is striving to boost its foothold in expeditionary campaigns. The Turkish Army, in recent decades, has witnessed two major transformation epochs. Back in the 1990s, to tackle one of the most challenging low-intensity conflict threats posed to Turkey's national security, namely PKK terrorism, the Cold War era's bulky, division-based doctrinal order of battle, essentially built to halt massive Soviet Red Army units, was replaced with a flexible, brigade-dominant air-mobile one. To accomplish this transformation, Ankara procured attack helicopters, equipped army aviation with night-flight capabilities, established mountain-commando brigades and fostered the Special Operations Command.

Then, in the 2000s, the second epoch revolved around hybrid warfare challenges emanating from Syria. Terrorist groups at Turkey's doorstep, ISIS and the PKK, had gained tactical game-changer capabilities such as anti-tank guided missiles (ATGM) and advanced man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), which can seriously threaten any conventional army. In response, in order to launch cross-border campaigns to address the hybrid warfare challenge, starting with Operation Euphrates Shield in 2016, Turkish military planners developed new concepts of operations (such as integrating drones with land-based fire support elements), Turkey's defense sector produced large numbers of mine-resistant and ambush protected (MRAP) combat vehicles (i.e. Ki'rpiVHedgehog), Ankara equipped its armored platforms with remote weapon platforms and gunshot detection systems and, brightly, Turkey even procured Ukraine's Zaslon-L derivative active protection systems for better armor survivability during its ongoing campaign, Operation Olive Branch, which began in 2018.

As indicated earlier, apart from the doctrinal order of battle changes, in order to fully grasp Turkey's emerging land warfare capacity, one has to pay attention to the army's rising proxy warfare capabilities too. Turkey's experience in Syria with the...