Turkey is closing in on ambitious arms industry goals

Subject

Turkey’s rising defence expenditure.

Significance

The official figure budgeted for defence and security for 2020 represents a year-on-year increase of about 40% to 140 billion lira (27.2 billion dollars). However, extra-budgetary resources earmarked for defence push the total spend higher than the figure disclosed by the Turkish government. Some of this money will be absorbed by the strategic defence industry plan for 2019-23, which includes raising the domestic content of defence equipment to 73% and increasing exports past 10 billion dollars, from 2 billion in 2018.

Impacts

• Projects and investments using both basic and advanced technology ultimately aim to achieve 100% self-sufficiency in critical technologies.
• High defence costs at the expense of social programmes are justified as the price of combating terrorism.
• Despite the drive towards self-sufficiency, Turkey will continue to need imports and licence agreements for important components.