Turkey's choice of a Chinese air defense system continues to dominate the agenda between Turkey and its Western partners in NATO. Turkey's foreign minister, Ahmet Davotoglu, is in Washington this week and that issue is on the agenda. And the deal was also the hot topic at a NATO Industry Forum last week, organized by NATO and Turkey's Undersecretariat for Defense Industries, which your Bug Pit was able to attend.
If you haven't been following, the controversy began in September, when after a drawn-out competition, Turkey announced that it had chosen the Chinese HQ-9 air and missile defense system. The Chinese system was competing against ones from Russia, the U.S., and Europe, so the competition appeared to have -- rightly or wrongly -- a geopolitical component. So the pick of the Chinese system renewed fears that Turkey, under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was drifting away from the West toward the East. More specifically, NATO partners are concerned that the system won't be able to be securely integrated into the NATO air defense system in which Turkey already participates (though many in Turkey claim that is merely a pretext by Western companies and governments who resent losing business and influence to China).
There was a short press conference at the forum, where for the first time (I believe) NATO and Turkish officials spoke about the issue in public side-by-side. A reporter from the Chinese news agency Xinhua asked if Turkey would bow to “pressure” from the United States and European countries to give up the HQ-9. NATO Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow, the top NATO official at the event, denied that Turkey had been pressured. “It's not correct to speak of 'pressure,'” he said. “It's up to each nation to decide what kind of capabilities they want to acquire. From a NATO perspective of course it's important that capabilities that allies acquire are able to operate together, that's a fundamental principle of the alliance. And I feel very confident ...that Turkish authorities are very much aware of this important aspect. So, there is a process underway, nothing has been decided definitively, and let's keep emotions under control and not speak of 'pressure.'”
The comments by the top Turkish official at the event, Undersecretary for Defense Industries Murat Bayar, made it sound as if Turkey was willing to back off. He emphasized that Turkey was listening to its NATO partners, and explained that “our procurement process is such that we begin with the first company with the intention to sign the contract but of course if there are difficulties that are not foreseen, we go down through the rank,” Bayar said. The second-ranking company in the competition was Europe's MBDA. Bayar said that Turkey hoped to come to a decision on whether or not the Chinese system was feasible within six months.
But in an interview with Jane's Defence Weekly (subscription only) Bayar dug in his heels a bit:
“I conceptually understand the preference among the partners for us to work with a NATO partner industry,” he said. “But the discussion will be: OK, this is a national program and we have a certain budget, and this was the best proposal. So if you want us to go for the second-best proposal, what is the method for that [decision]? I don't think we can explain that to our decisionmakers, to our parliament. If the argument is technically speaking, integration can't be done, I don't think it's valid.”
He described the process by which Turkish and Chinese engineers are working on an interface that would allow Turkey's HQ-9s to communicate with NATO systems without any sensitive NATO information being acquired by China. “We knew that if this were a non-NATO nation solution, there would be a need for an interface. And this was addressed, how it would be done and how we would approach it. Now we are working on the specifics of that." He gave as an example a "box" that Turkish engineers developed for a naval exercise in the Black Sea in which Russian ships participated. “This is one example of how it can be done. This box was put in a Russian ship to make it compatible with NATO crypto” standards, Bayar said.
But he also allowed that there could be some risk of the Chinese side gaining NATO sensitive information during the process of working out the system. Bayar said that Turkey has in place strict, NATO-standard rules for dealing with foreign countries on defense manufacturing. "We have that infrastructure and I'm not too concerned," he said. But he added: "But again, is there a risk? Of course. They're around, they're in the next room. That could be a risk.” And, he said, the technical solution may not work: “The hypothesis is that it can be done. But the devil is in the details, and as we dive into it there may be issues.”
Joshua Kucera, a senior correspondent, is Eurasianet's former Turkey/Caucasus editor and has written for the site since 2007.
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