How Erdoğan is crippling Turkey’s air power

Turkey has suspended its plans to activate the Russian S-400 air defence system on concern for further U.S. sanctions, but the impact of the acquisition is being felt negatively across the defence sector, said Burak Bekdil, an Ankara based columnist and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.

“Turkey's acquisition of the Russian air defence architecture, its inability even to activate the system, and the consequences of that acquisition are textbook examples of how the defence industry can be mishandled in diplomacy,” Bekdil wrote in an article for the Gatestone Institute on Monday.

The United States has excluded Turkey from a programme to buy the F-35 stealth fighter jet and imposed sanctions on its defence procurement agency in response to its $2.5 billion acquisition of the Russian missiles in 2019. It has threatened further measures should the system be activated, calling on Turkey to hand it back to Russia.

Turkey is now blackmailing the United States and NATO that it may decide to buy Russian Su-57 fighter jets as a substitute for the F-35s, but “this is bluffing,” Bekdil said.

“Turkish Air Force generals know too well that switching from NATO-standard aircraft to Russian ones after 70 years is not like changing your American car in favour of a Japanese one,” he said.

“Building a new operational structure, modifying air bases, new repair, service and maintenance systems will be too costly, time consuming and technologically difficult.”

Turkey is proud of its own indigenous TF-X fighter jet program, but the government-sponsored narrative about the Turkish fighter jet in the making is for domestic political consumption only, Bekdil said. “These are fairy tales Turks love to hear.”

On the S-400 missiles, Russia appears to care little about what Turkey might do with the weapons, he said.

"This is a sale. We received our money. The Turks can ride the missiles to go to the beach or to carry potatoes with them. It's not our concern," said Aleksey Yerhov, Russian ambassador to Ankara, according to Bekdil.