In February 2024, Turkey efficiently accomplished the maiden take a look at flight of its prototype Kaan fighter. The airplane’s title is taken from an historic Central Asian royal title, and Turkish media declared that its efficiency made “the legacy of our ancestors proud.” This then naturally raises the query: is the Kaan actually a king of kings or only a pretender to the throne?
Turkey now claims membership of a small, technologically superior membership of nations which have flown a fifth-generation plane of their very own design: the USA, Russia and China. It’s the fruits of long-term funding within the nation’s protection expertise and industrial base. Nonetheless, the ensuing hype round Kaan will not be fully justified. Turkey relied closely on overseas assist to develop Kaan, undercutting authorities claims that it’s a triumph of indigenous design and elevating questions on its skill to progress past a prototype.
That stated, focusing solely on the technical credentials of Kaan might miss the broader goals of Turkish defense-industrial funding. Demonstrating the commercial and technological functionality wanted to develop a fifth-generation fighter additionally enhances Turkey’s strategic place and appeals to a home viewers. Equally importantly, Kaan serves as a “store window” for Turkey’s rising functionality in unmanned aerial automobiles just like the Bayraktar TB2. These achievements are the results of a purposeful and long-term strategic industrial effort, of which Kaan is a key element.
A Quest for Independence
Turkey’s modern development of its protection expertise and industrial base began following U.S.-imposed sanctions for its invasion of Cyprus in 1974. Unable to amass the tools it wanted to confront a menace to its nationwide safety, the Turkish authorities focused inwards.
Turkey’s willpower to construct protection tools at residence accelerated within the Eighties, when Ankara believed that suppliers were delaying equipment it wanted to fight the Kurdistan Staff’ Get together. This push continued into the Nineteen Nineties, a decade that saw substantial growth in Turkish protection firms and analysis and improvement establishments. Turkey focused on drones deemed vital to Ankara’s struggle towards the Kurdistan Staff’ Get together and put in danger as relations with Israel deteriorated.
Protection funding continued to develop after the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Growth Get together or AKP) got here to energy in 2003. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan describes the protection trade as “both security insurance and a technology locomotive.” To this finish, based on official figures, authorities protection analysis and improvement spending tripled between 2007 and 2019. This give attention to self-sufficiency and indigenous improvement was emboldened by considerations that the USA remained reluctant to promote Turkey the tools it wanted to deal with urgent safety threats.
Turkey’s protection trade has subsequently expanded significantly over the past 20 years. 4 Turkish companies now characteristic among the many world’s top 100 largest defense firms. And based on figures from the Swedish Worldwide Peace Analysis Institute, as of 2023 Turkey is the world’s eleventh largest exporter of protection merchandise, up from sixteenth only some years in the past. Turkey’s navy additionally increasingly acquires indigenous equipment, relatively than foreign-made.
Regardless of this, Turkey nonetheless stays dependent on international partners for parts and technical experience to fabricate its outputs at scale. Its imports at the moment are qualitatively completely different: As an alternative of importing full platforms to equip its armed forces, it primarily imports subsystems and components for manufacturing. Nonetheless, the nation nonetheless stays among the many world’s top importers of protection tools. Whereas that is not a problem unique to Turkey, it signifies that the nation has not achieved its primary stated goal of self-sufficiency and stays susceptible to exterior constraints.
To cut back import dependencies whereas sustaining entry to superior overseas applied sciences, Turkey takes a two-pronged method. First, it has one of many world’s most strong industrial cooperation or “offset” insurance policies, guaranteeing overseas suppliers should spend money on Turkish trade to win protection contracts. Second, it diversifies the supply of its protection imports as a lot as doable. Turkey in the present day receives 15 percent of its defense imports from Russia, regardless of its NATO membership. Its companions and suppliers additionally embody a variety of smaller states with area of interest areas of competence. Engine technologies from Ukraine and tank components from South Korea are two not too long ago reported examples. This method, distinctive inside NATO, has enabled Turkey to advance its capabilities and scale back import dependencies, exemplified by Kaan.
Nonetheless, this method nonetheless has limitations. Turkey’s formal removing from the U.S.-led F-35 program in mid-2019 following its buy of Russia’s S-400 air protection system demonstrated this vividly. This system would have been a functionality and financial win for Turkey however the U.S. authorities judged that an ally working each F-35s and an air-defense system designed to counter it was an unacceptable threat. Turkey’s ejection from the F-35 program uncovered a big shortfall in functionality planning by demonstrating the restrictions of its in-house fight air capabilities on the time and highlighting its reliance on foreign-supplied fight plane.
But this episode didn’t persuade Ankara to alter its method. Quite the opposite, it seems to have solely bolstered the lesson Turkey took from the Nineteen Seventies: Self-sufficiency is vital. Turkey’s willpower to stay politically impartial inside NATO regardless of its underlying technological dependencies continues to current challenges. Final 12 months, protection cooperation with the USA stalled once more when Congress held up a $20 billion package to revitalize Turkey’s F-16 fleet till Ankara ratified Sweden’s NATO accession. Germany additionally refused to assist a U.K.-led measure to supply Turkey with Eurofighter Typhoons. Functionality shortfalls now exist throughout Turkey’s whole fight air pressure, which Kaan can’t but plug.
Kaan subsequently represents a paradox: each reflecting Turkey’s willpower to beat dependence on overseas suppliers, while underscoring the depth of this reliance. This reveals a recurring dilemma dealing with most aspiring defense-industrial powers: Accessing first-class tools and expertise usually requires technology transfer and different relationships with established producers to boost functionality. Protection economists recommend countries must progressby way of a means of lowering overseas dependency, from the wholesale acquisition of expertise from extra subtle builders, by way of assimilation, till attaining indigenous analysis. This path in follow requires a degree of political alignment with both the USA and NATO or, arguably, different defense-industrial powers similar to Russia and China, to which Turkey has not but been prepared to commit.
Turkey has pursued a raft of technically bold flagship tasks in recent times, with drones and aviation in continued focus. Media coverage has centered on Bayraktar TB2s and their performance on the battlefields of Libya, Azerbaijan, and Ukraine, whereas improvement efforts in Turkey have centered on Kaan as a technological standard-bearer program.
Ambitions Take Flight
Kaan efficiently accomplished a 13-minute take a look at flight on Feb. 21, 2024, an occasion that attracted quite a lot of discover domestically and abroad. NATO’s Joint Air Power Competence Centre defines a fifth-generation platform as one that’s “able to working successfully in extremely contested fight environments, outlined by the presence of essentially the most succesful present air and floor threats.” This implies a give attention to stealth options and a excessive diploma of knowledge processing, enabling integration with future autonomous platforms.
This can be a daunting technical enterprise. Attaining the required low observability credentials requires the event of a raft of supplies, coatings, and coverings, solely a few of which might draw on Turkey’s well-established composite materials industry. These will then should be built-in with sensors, flight management techniques, and a jet engine that retains the low radar signature required for such a sophisticated platform. These capabilities depend on common, extremely superior knowledge updates to make sure that Kaan’s digital warfare and focusing on techniques stay on the innovative — akin to the common technology block updates which might be rolled out to the F-35. This complete manufacturing course of then must be repeatable and scaleable to permit Turkey to area fifth-generation functionality.
As not too long ago as 2019, critics suggested that Turkey was possible over-stretching with Kaan, primarily based on the nation’s restricted technical expertise in key areas together with propulsion techniques. Finishing a take a look at flight solely goes a number of the option to proving detractors flawed.
However the reality stays that constructing a fifth-generation fighter is difficult. The US, with its wealth of protection funding and technological functionality, is the one different NATO ally to have tried absolutely indigenous fifth-generation plane packages, within the type of the F-22 and the F-35 (although the latter did contain some overseas design participation). Even nationally impartial fourth-generation plane similar to France’s Rafale and Sweden’s Gripen are few and much between. Furthermore, their “independence” usually disguises their reliance on key externally equipped techniques. There are myriad, well-publicized case studies from all over the world that exhibit that indigenous fight air packages are troublesome and costly.
Within the case of Kaan, questions stay across the extent to which worldwide companions had been intrinsic to this achievement. Notably these embody technical recommendation from the British BAE Systems, delivered as a part of a U.Okay.-Turkish settlement signed in 2017, and Basic Electrical of the USA, integral to the propulsion of the Kaan platform up to now through their F110 engine (although work is underway to develop a home different). This, in flip, raises questions round Turkey’s skill to transition a profitable one-time take a look at flight of a fifth-generation plane right into a repeatable, exportable, and sustained program in-service. Inherent export restrictions might, in flip, prohibit Turkey’s selections going ahead.
Whether or not or not Turkey’s profitable, albeit quick and operationally restricted, take a look at flight of Kaan will pull by way of right into a militarily and commercially profitable fifth-generation plane franchise stays to be seen. And to an extent, it nonetheless depends on the goodwill of exterior companions similar to the USA. Nonetheless, to view its success in technical phrases alone is to overlook the broader function of Turkey’s improvement efforts in protection, specifically worldwide and home status and as a technical “gateway” to its extra instantly commercially viable drones.
Turkey’s True Goals
Turkey watchers have lengthy famous that Turkey seeks to use its protection trade to do extra than simply provide its personal armed forces. As with many different exporting nations, Turkey has often seen its protection trade as a option to further strategic policy aims and exhibit its independence and power. In feedback to a Turkish newspaper, the CEO of Baykar, the corporate behind the Bayraktar drones, described his nation’s enterprise as a “national technology endeavor” and described how the TB2 enabled the nation to “marketing campaign in an unprecedented means on this planet.” Erdoğan frequently talks about how the efficiency of Turkey’s protection trade strengthens its worldwide status. Turkey’s protection trade provides a source of international prestige, serving as “a logo of Turkish technological innovation and self-sufficiency.”
That is neither a brand new phenomenon, nor one distinctive to Turkey. The worth of protection industries extends past the easy financial worth. Definitely, defense equipment presents international locations the ability to protect their interests and deter struggle. However maybe equally importantly, it has a reputational profit: International locations create and foster protection industries out of a perception that home defense-industrial functionality is a prerequisite for a rustic’s standing and success, a perception described as “technonationalism.”
Maybe essentially the most hanging instance of this has been the quantity of consideration generated across the efficiency of Bayraktar TB2 in Azerbaijan, Libya, and Ukraine. Baykar has bought the TB2 to 24 countries at last count, together with co-production agreements with Azerbaijan and Ukraine. This will then be used to concrete political ends. The rise in exports — on Turkey’s phrases and situations — has pushed Turkey’s use of “drone diplomacy” that has expanded Turkey’s “sphere of influence.”
The TB2 is just one instance of Turkey’s use of protection exports and co-production agreements to attain strategic good points. Turkey’s authorities hopes that its protection exports will increase its ability to dictate the terms of worldwide relationships with international locations it provides. Right here, one may level to Turkey’s own experience of different international locations making an attempt to leverage its dependence on imports to have an effect on coverage selections. Moreover, the availability of the TB2 to different international locations makes these international locations depending on Turkey for upkeep and restore and creates a dependency on Turkish assist in the event that they search to combine TB2 with different battlefield belongings.
This additionally appeals to a domestic audience: Protection-industrial efficiency holds broad cross-partisan enchantment, as demonstrated within the continuity throughout social gathering strains of the defense-industrial improvement technique. Actors throughout the political spectrum proceed to reward defense-industrial improvement. The Justice and Growth Get together particularly consists of it in authorities media, whereas platform names similar to Kızılelma and Malazgirt explicitly enchantment to Turkish nationalism.
The event of Kaan has been no exception to both the sample of serious press protection, or Turkey’s efforts to make use of defense-industrial relationships to attain strategic ends. Future plans for Kaan’s improvement search to additional leverage its fame: Public statements recommend that Turkey is actively exploring partnerships with Azerbaijan and Pakistan for additional improvement. Given Turkey’s use of defense-industrial cooperation up to now, its ambitions with Kaan might transcend the technical and kind the idea of a technique of alliance constructing.
Sadly for its NATO allies, Turkey doesn’t appear involved that these is probably not relationships that serve the alliance’s agenda: Pakistan enjoys vital defense-industrial cooperation with China, whereas Azerbaijan continues deepening its ties with Russia. As with the S-400 acquisition, NATO allies similar to the USA and the UK might really feel this places their technological contributions in danger. Nonetheless, such partnerships additionally might restrict the extent to which NATO can retain affect over Turkey’s acquisition of superior fight plane.
Conclusion
Kaan is definitely a formidable nationwide achievement for Turkey. Nonetheless, its vital reliance on overseas parts and experience is indicative of a broader problem within the Turkish protection trade.
Turkey clearly has extra improvement and testing work to do if Kaan is to achieve its potential, together with creating indigenous options for a number of key parts and designing the technical wrap-around that really make a fifth-generation platform. Because of this, Kaan is unlikely to make a significant contribution to Turkey’s frontline fight air necessities hole this decade. In the meantime the geopolitical panorama continues to shift quickly, and threats abound. Arguably, then, Turkey’s necessities for fight mass at tempo will solely be met by way of off-the-shelf purchases such because the F-16 or Eurofighter Hurricane. This reliance on a foreign-supplied platforms might disappoint Turkey’s political leaders.
Nonetheless, the continued improvement of Turkey’s defense-industrial base marks potential alternatives for the nation, in addition to potential complications for NATO allies. Co-development agreements and collaboration with international locations similar to Pakistan and Azerbaijan on Kaan, and no-strings-attached gross sales of Bayraktar drones, help Turkey’s regional posture in some areas. Nonetheless, they arrive on the expense of its relationship with the USA, whose applied sciences could also be elementary to realizing Turkey’s fifth-generation ambitions.
No matter its long-term viability, Kaan’s maiden flight has achieved vital strategic targets. The plane program helps a posture of independence and resilience, while stoking a way of nationwide pleasure. It additionally serves as an commercial for Turkey’s extra commercially viable aerospace capabilities, specifically a rising fleet of drones. If Turkey’s true goal is regional management, the navy utility of complicated platforms similar to Kaan could also be solely a secondary consideration.
Rebecca Lucas is a senior analyst in protection and safety with RAND Europe and is closely concerned with RAND’s Centre for Defence Economics and Acquisition. Her analysis focuses on the defense-industrial base, acquisition coverage, and supply-chain evaluation, in addition to a regional give attention to Turkey.
Stuart Dee is a analysis chief within the protection and safety analysis group at RAND Europe, focusing totally on protection economics and acquisition, in addition to points regarding the U.Okay. industrial base and protection exports. He’s additionally a member of RAND’s Centre for Defence Economics and Acquisition.
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