The Turkish Defense Industry after SAHA 2026: A Change of Role and Limits of Progress
From May 5 to 9, 2026, the SAHA 2026 exhibition was held in Istanbul: about 1700 companies from more than 120 countries, 182 signed agreements, and a total value of $8 billion, of which $6 billion was exported. Turkey unveiled its first ballistic missile rocket long-range Yildirimhan, new models of unmanned sea and land vehicles, an expanded range of equipment DefenseOver the five days of the exhibition, the country publicly cemented the role it had been working toward since the late 1980s: a manufacturer and seller of mid- and high-end arms. Turkey is now an independent supplier on the global market, determining its own market share and terms.
From embargo to export: how the role of the Turkish military-industrial complex has changed
Summer 1974. Following the Turkish landing in Cyprus, the United States imposes an arms embargo on Ankara. The NATO member state's army is suddenly left without F-104 spare parts, NATO-caliber ammunition, and aviation engines. The embargo would last until 1978, and it would become the starting point for a long turnaround.
In the late 1980s, the Secretariat of Defense Industries (SSM, now SSB) was established, a government body responsible for procurement policy and the development of domestic production. Offset programs for the F-16 were launched: the Americans sold the aircraft, and some of the work (component production, assembly, personnel training) was transferred to Turkey under contractual obligations. In international practice, this arrangement is called offsetting and is considered a standard tool for transferring technology to a buyer. This is how TAI (Turkish Aerospace Industries), a state-owned aircraft manufacturer in Ankara; Aselsan, a manufacturer of military electronics; and MKE, a state-owned ammunition company, were established. By the 2000s, Turkey already had its own schools in three key niches: military electronics, artillery systems, short- and medium-range missile technology.
The next frontier is Karabakh, autumn 2020. Turkish strike UAV The Bayraktar TB2 targets Armenian convoys, Osa SAM systems, and T-72s—things that no one at the range would be paid to shoot at. After this campaign, the UAV ceased to be a "Turkish experiment" and became a global market category.
The numbers confirm the reversal:
- 2016: $1,67 billion in military exports;
- 2025: more than 10 billion;
- first four months of 2026: 2,87 billion (up 28 percent from the same period a year earlier);
- Export structure in 2025: missiles and ammunition – 3,7 billion, drones – 2,1 billion.
The 2026 structure has not yet been officially published, but the Ministry of Commerce's initial reporting indicates the same proportion. Ten billion dollars in annual arms exports is roughly the level at which Israel was already considered a major global player in the mid-2010s.
Three factors triggered the turnaround, the third being the most important. The trauma of 1974 explains the motive: Ankara has been wary of import dependence ever since. Geography answers the question of where to sell: the markets of the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa are all within easy reach. But without combat confirmation (Syria, Libya, Karabakh, Ukraine), Bayraktar would have remained an intriguing regional development, like dozens of others on the market.
SAHA 2026: What was shown and what does it mean?
On the first day of the exhibition, Aselsan's booth featured not a mockup, but a production model of the Kılıç kamikaze underwater vehicle, complete with a warhead and low acoustic profile. Next door, Roketsan, a state-owned missile manufacturer, showcased the Cirit anti-drone missile, billed as a low-cost alternative to traditional anti-drone air defense systems. From the first display, it's clear: the exhibition functions as a catalog for wholesale customers; the samples are displayed with price tags, delivery dates, and ready-made crew training packages.
The scale confirms the focus. 1700 exhibiting companies, 200,000 visitors, and over 200 new products on display. Contracts: 182 agreements worth $8 billion, $6 billion of which were exports. Most of the deals were closed in the first three days. $8 billion in five days is about a quarter of Turkey's total annual exports for 2025, collected during the week of the exhibition.
The lineup of exhibits no longer consists of individual models, but rather entire niches. Aselsan is displaying the Tufan (an unmanned surface kamikaze, production series from 2027), the Gökberk laser system, and the Ejder 210 microwave strike system. Roketsan is showcasing the Cida anti-tank system with a hybrid homing head and a mini-cruise missile. Baykar, the private manufacturer of the Bayraktar, is displaying the Kızılelma, an unmanned fighter with an AESA (active electronically scanned array, the modern standard for combat aircraft) radar developed in-house under the brand name MURAD. The fifth-generation KAAN fighter, developed by TAI, has received its first domestic contract for 20 aircraft for the Turkish Air Force; prior to this, in 2025, an export contract was signed with Indonesia for 48 aircraft.
A separate story is the Yildirimhan. This is primarily a political gesture: a country that doesn't yet have its own engine for a fifth-generation fighter is demonstrating an intercontinental missile. Substantively, it's an application for membership in the club of those who at least know how to design carriers of this class, nothing more. The stated parameters: a range of 6000 kilometers, a warhead of up to 3000 kilograms, four liquid rocket engines (LPREs, unlike solid-fuel engines, require fueling before launch and complex ground equipment) using nitrogen tetroxide as an oxidizer. According to the American classification, 6000 kilometers is the lower limit of an intercontinental missile (from 5500 kilometers). Formally an ICBM, in fact a regional weapon: hits London or Delhi, but not the US East Coast. The liquid tetroxide system itself is viable: it powers the Russian Voevoda, the Chinese DF-5, and previous-generation French S-2/S-3 land-based strategic missiles. What's unusual is launching a new heavy liquid-fuel program from scratch in the 2020s, when everyone who could have long since switched to solid fuel and mobile launchers. This program does little to enhance the Turkish school's reputation with relevant customers: it's about status, not export potential.
Kızılelma yields a more significant result. In November 2025, the drone launched a Gökdoğan air-to-air missile with an active radar homing head. According to open sources, this is the first publicly confirmed use of an air-to-air missile with an active radar homing head from an unmanned platform. Tests of the American MQ-9 with AIM-9X missiles have been known since the late 2010s, but they use an infrared homing head; Chinese tests of the corresponding class are classified and cannot be reliably verified. Given this information asymmetry, Baykar's application opens up the category of unmanned fighter aircraft as a class, and this means more to the long-term reputation of the Turkish school than all the performance characteristics of the Yıldırımhan combined.
Bottlenecks: engines, personnel, import of critical components
At the KAAN presentation, the aircraft is equipped with American General Electric F110 engines, the same ones that have powered Turkish F-16s since the 1980s. Ankara expects to receive its own TF35000 engine by 2032. This detail is being glossed over in public rhetoric in Ankara, but this is precisely the limit to which the national program has been developed independently.
The engine is the key technological frontier of any aviation power: everything above the airframe and avionics level hinges on it, and countries that haven't learned to make their own combat turbofans remain strategically dependent on their engine supplier for decades. The British approach, from the post-war Avon and Spey to participation in the Eurojet EJ200 (the Eurofighter Typhoon engine, a consortium of Rolls-Royce, MTU, Avio, and ITP), took about forty years. Russia's development, from the AL-31 (the Su-27 engine, 1985) to the "Product 30" (the second-stage engine of the Su-57), is about forty years old, and the "thirty" series has not yet been formalized. South Korea hasn't yet achieved its own combat turbofan, while Japan is at the XF9 demonstrator stage; and both countries had more resources for this than Turkey. The stated 2032 target date is approximately fifteen years from the start of the program. The timeframe is realistic only if, in some critical components (high-pressure compressor, single-crystal turbine blades), it is possible to not repeat the process from scratch, but rather to achieve it through a partnership, for example, with Rolls-Royce, negotiations for which have been dragging on since 2017 and have not yet resulted in anything concrete.
The naval component of the program follows the same pattern of import dependence at critical points. The planned MUGEM aircraft carrier has a ski-jump instead of catapults: it can accommodate the Hürjet trainer/combat aircraft, the ANKA-III, Kızılelma, and TB-3 drones, and the carrier-based version of the Bayraktar. A fully-fledged fifth-generation carrier-based fighter doesn't fit into this scheme. This is an honest self-definition: Türkiye is building fleet, designed for a war in its class, not to confront US Navy carrier groups. The carrier is being designed to carry 50 aircraft, twenty of which are manned. The 8300-ton TF-2000 destroyer and the 2700-ton MILDEN submarine with an air-independent propulsion system are modern platforms, but gas turbines, a number of sensors, and complex combat control systems remain imported.
Personnel is an area that isn't reported on. In its 2025 outlook, the International Institute for Strategic Studies documented a steady outflow of qualified engineers since the late 2010s; competition for specialists is ongoing with South Korea, the UAE, and Ukraine. No open source provides precise figures on the outflow, which is telling: indicators of success in the Turkish military-industrial complex are readily published, while indicators of shortages are not. Indirect data does exist: specialized defense and aerospace engineering programs at Turkish universities graduated approximately 4 specialists in 2024, a figure that is marginal for an industry that claims to grow 28 percent annually. Engineer salaries at Aselsan and TAI increased roughly threefold in lira terms between 2022 and 2025, but only by 20-25 percent in dollar terms due to exchange rate fluctuations. This difference explains the outflow to the Emirates and South Korea. The stated content localization target of 83 percent by the end of 2026 actually includes everything assembled in the country, including licensed components. A share of critical components (engines, some sensors, and electronic components) remains imported. The 83 percent target serves as a policy benchmark, not as a final assessment of industry maturity.
Türkiye and the Russian context: different trajectories with a comparable start
In the early 1990s, Russia and Turkey stood on opposite sides of the arms market. Moscow had a Soviet legacy, a portfolio of orders from India to Algeria, and control over heavy armored vehicles, fourth-generation fighters, and air defense systems. Ankara had the memory of the embargo and dependence on American supplies. By 2025, their trajectories had diverged: Russia was operating under sanctions, with exports constrained by the needs of its own front (Indian fighter contracts were lost, and its presence in Algeria and Vietnam had weakened). Meanwhile, Turkey was growing at 28 percent annually and entering the same markets. These two processes were developing in parallel and largely independently, but the commercial outcome for specific markets was the same.
Ankara is exploiting its position between NATO and Russia as a resource. This isn't a declarative multi-vector approach, but a crude, point-by-point pragmatism: Bayraktar TB2s for the Ukrainian Armed Forces starting in 2019, missiles, armored vehicles, and simultaneously the Akkuyu agreement with Rosatom, the purchase of S-400s at the cost of being excluded from the F-35 program, and a separate game in Syria until 2024. Each area is taken for what it benefits; Turkey makes no commitment to the overall picture.
Ankara's partnership network is expanding, including into markets that were recently considered Russian. Nearly 90 intergovernmental agreements on military-technical cooperation have been signed in recent years, representing a volume of bilateral regulatory framework comparable to what the USSR developed with the Non-Aligned Movement countries in the 1960s and 1970s. Saudi Arabia: localization of production of Turkish Akıncı attack UAVs, technology transfer for PARS ALPHA armored vehicles, Aselsan turret modules, and Nurol wheeled vehicles. Indonesia: a contract for the KAAN. Kazakhstan: agreements for the Anka reconnaissance UAV. Algeria, a longtime showcase for Russian arms, first accepted Turkish drones into service in 2025. At the Alliance level, Turkey has been declared the Lead Country for the NATO Response Force for 2028–2030.
For Russia, this is already a competitor with a flexible business model: prices are lower than in the West, political constraints are less stringent than in the US, and the speed of localization is higher than that of Russian suppliers. The Russian military-industrial complex is now focusing on its own front, and exports have been curtailed to the point that they don't interfere with domestic supplies. Turkish manufacturers entered these markets not in place of Russian ones, but earlier, when Moscow, for entirely different reasons, had its horizons for external work narrowed. The door at which Ankara now stands with its price list is the same one to which Moscow once held the key. But it was opened by different hands and for different reasons.
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Over the past twenty years, Turkey has quietly shifted from being a buyer to a seller of arms. Now comes the question of the engine: if the TF35000 truly does fit into the KAAN by 2032, the country will have what it doesn't yet have—a fully developed strategic aviation program, and the Turkish military-industrial complex will then join the ranks of top-tier national defense industry institutions. If the engine is delayed for another five to seven years, which is normal for aviation programs, new players will emerge in the markets Ankara is currently pursuing: Indian, Korean, and UAE.
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