Explaining the expansion of Turkey's arms industry

Abstract

This thesis investigates the new bureaucratic form of the Turkish arms industry established after Turkey’s shift to the Presidential system. This study has a three-pillar framework. The first pillar, the building arms literature brings the motivations of the states to build arms and the challenges they have faced throughout their endeavours. The second pillar is the international cases which are located close to Turkey in the rankings of the capacities to build arms according to the literature. The third pillar is the experiences of the former Turkish governments’ to build arms, which checks the continuity/discontinuity of four main factors that shape Turkey’s actions in defence building. These factors are Turkey’s relations within NATO, civil-military relations, foreign dependency and the desire for autarky in foreign policy, and building arms as an industrial policy. Upon this framework, this thesis tries to detect the continuity/discontinuity of the relations within NATO, civil-military relations, Turkey’s foreign dependency on defence, building arms with civilian purposes such as triggering industrialisation. This thesis suggests that the continuing dissonance within NATO and the already aggregated industrial capacity before AKP enabled the shift to producing local equipment in 2004, which led to growth in the indigenous production and the decrease of the foreign dependency. This thesis shows how military and civilian motivations differ in building arms and how civilian purposes became more appealing than the motivations of the military spheres’ in the process of indigenisation of defence production. AKP changed the structure of the Turkish defence industry by using the legislative capacity brought by the Presidential system to increase civilian influence in the decision-making mechanisms.