The project of Turkey on turning into an arms power that has lasted two decades begins to bear fruit to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the war in Ukraine finally fixed the status of an important supplier of military equipment for Turkey, writes The Wall Street Journal.
The name of Turkish military technologies helped to create Bayraktar TB-2 drones that change conflicts around the world. But they are not limited to them: new Turkish companies export helicopters to the Philippines, military corvette – to Pakistan and armored vehicles in Kenya. Turkey built its navy to compete with its rival Greece, and sells patrol boats in ten countries.
The Erdogan government allocates $ 60 billion a year – compared to 5 billion dollars in 2002 – for efforts to reduce dependence on American and other foreign military suppliers. In 20 years, private defense industry has grown from $ 1 billion to $ 11 billion. Weapons transactions have become one of Erdogan’s foreign policy instruments, which uses the sale of drones and other weapons to establish relations and promote their ambitions to global Turkish influence.
According to the government, Turkey now produces about 70% of what is necessary for Turkish armed forces, compared with 30% in the early 2000s. Based on the success of Bayraktar TB-2, Turkey seeks to become a key supplier of other drones, including unmanned ground, sea and underwater devices.
According to the Stockholm International Institute for Research Problems, Turkey takes 12th place in the export of weapons from 2017 to 2021, inferior to Israel and Switzerland and ahead of Ukraine and Sweden. Turkish industry is still small compared to such giants of weapons exports as the USA, Russia and France, but since 2001, when it took 36th place, it went up to a new level. The main buyers were Turkmenistan, Oman and Qatar.