Political Analysis : Turkey’s Military Modernization

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The Turk­ish gov­ern­ment has set a num­ber of ambi­tions goals for the 100 year anniver­sary of the Turk­ish Repub­lic in 2023. Amongst them is the mod­ern­iza­tion of the Turk­ish mil­i­tary into a robust and effi­cient mil­i­tary force that can pro­tect Turk­ish inter­ests abroad.[1] Var­i­ous multi-faceted chal­lenges need to be over­come for Turkey to acquire the so called ‘ultra mod­ern,’ mil­i­tary it is seek­ing. The recent break­down with China over the country’s first long-range air and anti-missile sys­tem, due to intense pres­sure from the West and NATO shows the path to mil­i­tary mod­erni­sa­tion is fraught with issues.[2] Whilst Turkey will need to over­come numer­ous bar­ri­ers in order to mod­ern­ize, there are four fun­da­men­tal issues Turkey will need to over­come if it is to mod­ern­ize its forces.
Firstly, Turkey’s armed forces are dom­i­nated by a land cen­tric struc­ture which his­tor­i­cally has been over­whelm­ingly defen­sive. The armed forces have been heav­ily involved in domes­tic pol­i­tics and have spent sig­nif­i­cant years in power as a result of mil­i­tary coups against civil­ian rulers. Main­tain­ing inter­nal sta­bil­ity, main­tain­ing the power and influ­ence of the army, pro­tect­ing Mustafa Kemal’s ideals of sec­u­lar­ism  dom­i­nated the pos­ture of the army, which has effec­tively spent most of its his­tory polic­ing inter­nal dis­sent. The rise of the Soviet Union as a global power and Turkey’s entry into NATO in 1952 trans­formed it into a bul­wark against the War­saw Pact from 1945 to 1991. NATO was ini­tially cre­ated to defend against the Soviet Union, which is fun­da­men­tally a defen­sive oper­a­tion in hold­ing a sta­tic line against any Soviet advance. Through­out this period Turkey’s mil­i­tary doc­trine was inher­ently defen­sive in its out­look, based on con­ven­tional force-on-force cal­cu­la­tions with nuclear con­sid­er­a­tions rel­e­gated to NATO and the US. As a major power in the region, the country’s NATO mem­ber­ship meant that the Turk­ish mil­i­tary has been set up as a defen­sive force to repel and absorb an inva­sion and is not pre­dom­i­nantly con­fig­ured to go onto the offensive.
Sec­ondly, the civil­ian lead­er­ship has more or less removed the mil­i­tary from domes­tic pol­i­tics through the pros­e­cu­tion of a large num­ber of offi­cers in the Ergenekon and Sledge­ham­mer plots.[3] The Turk­ish lead­er­ship is report­edly plan­ning to lower gen­er­als and admi­rals four year peri­ods of pro­mo­tion to three years and lower colonel’s pro­mo­tion period from five to four years.[4] This shorter pro­mo­tion period will result in a more rapid change in the offi­cer corps and allow a new class of offi­cers to rise to the top. How­ever, Turkey’s biggest prob­lem which has acted as a drain on the over­all armed forces is con­scrip­tion. Con­scrip­tion is man­dated by the Turk­ish Con­sti­tu­tion, but the leg­is­la­ture deter­mines how it is enacted. Cur­rently, a healthy Turk­ish man with no col­lege edu­ca­tion serves for 15 months. Prior to 2003, the min­i­mum require­ment was 18 months. On Octo­ber 21st 2013 the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment voted to reduce the amount of time con­scripted sol­diers are required to serve to a term of 12 months.[5] There are fur­ther excep­tions, such as men over the age of 30 buy­ing their way out of ser­vice for a fee. Thus con­scripts con­sti­tute the major­ity of Turk­ish ser­vice mem­bers, com­pris­ing some 500,000 sol­diers. With such a short ser­vice time, many con­scripts fail to gain expe­ri­ence after their basic train­ing. As a result, the Turk­ish mil­i­tary has a small pro­fes­sional core sur­rounded by huge lightly trained forces.
Thirdly, Turkey boasts NATO’s sec­ondTurkeyMod1a largest army, which is equipped with rel­a­tively mod­ern bat­tle tanks, self-propelled artillery and an increas­ingly capa­ble army avi­a­tion force. How­ever, much of this equip­ment is not indige­nously pro­duced. Whilst Turkey has made strides in avion­ics and par­tic­i­pated in joint ven­tures, such as the F-35.[6] Turkeys first indige­nously devel­oped mil­i­tary plat­form – the third gen­er­a­tion Main Bat­tle Tank (MBT), the Atley, is only now com­ing online and over the next decade will replace around 3000 older tanks.[7] Turkey still relies on for­eign plat­forms for its navy and air­force, but plans are afoot to change this. Turkey con­tin­ues to assem­ble F-16’s under licence,[8] how­ever Turkey has ambi­tious plans for Turk­ish Aero­space Indus­tries (TAI) to reduce depen­dence on US-produced fighter jets. In 2010 TAI was pro­vided with $20 mil­lion, to design a new fighter air­craft, which TAI might then develop and pro­duce in part­ner­ship with a for­eign com­pany by 2020.[9] Turkey’s most ambi­tious and most expen­sive devel­op­ment pro­gram, the TFX, is a Fifth-Generation Stealth Fighter expected to begin its test flights in 2023. The TFX is a next-generation fighter pro­gram in coop­er­a­tion with Sweden’s Saab and designed to replace Turkey’s fleet of F-16C/Ds start­ing in the 2020s.[10]
Fourthly, Turkey lacks any WMD capa­bil­ity and con­tin­ues to stick to out­dated non­pro­lif­er­a­tion regimes. Turkey con­tin­ues to accept NATO’s nuclear guar­an­tee. Turkey received US nuclear grav­ity bombs and dual-capable US air­craft at its NATO air bases in 1957, fol­lowed by US medium-range Jupiter bal­lis­tic mis­siles in 1959. Today Turkey has no indige­nous WMD capa­bil­ity. Only in May 2013, was a Japanese-French con­sor­tium selected to build Turkey’s sec­ond nuclear power plant.[11]  Due to this Turkey has a lim­ited bal­lis­tic mis­sile arse­nal and lacks any­thing beyond short range capa­bil­ity and even these are for­eign mis­siles. This is why Turkey was forced to look abroad for mis­sile defence capa­bil­ity, and its agree­ment with China, which included sig­nif­i­cant tech­nol­ogy trans­fer, received much crit­i­cism from NATOand the US as it would mean Turkey would be on the road to self-sufficiency.[12]
Whilst chal­lenges remain for the Turk­ish military-industry-government hier­ar­chy, the estab­lish­ment of the Under­sec­re­tariat for Defence Indus­tries (SSM) led to efforts and poli­cies in sup­port of local indus­tries. One of the main tasks of the SSM was to re-organize and inte­grate the exist­ing national indus­try so as to sat­isfy defence indus­try require­ments, encour­age new enter­prises and chan­nel them accord­ing to the inte­gra­tion require­ments. The SSM has also seeked pos­si­bil­i­ties for for­eign cap­i­tal and tech­nol­ogy con­tri­bu­tion and guided enter­prises and devel­oped plans for state par­tic­i­pa­tion in the defence indus­try. Despite the chal­lenges ahead the growth of the Turk­ish econ­omy over the last decade has seen sig­nif­i­cant fund­ing for the mil­i­tary which should aid the Turk­ish mil­i­tary to tran­si­tion into an effec­tive 21st cen­tury force.

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