The forum was the point. Alongside the NATO summit in Ankara this week, Türkiye's defense industry did the thing two decades of build-out were meant to lead to: it signed. At the alliance's Defense Industry Forum, Türkiye put its name to agreements across five capability areas that member states will develop together, from strike weapons to integrated air and missile defense, space and surveillance, critical raw materials, and the drones NATO wants to keep an edge in.
The projects run through the country's biggest names, Aselsan, Roketsan, STM, and the state research body TÜBİTAK. Haluk Görgün, who heads Türkiye's Defense Industries Secretariat, called them "the backbone of the alliance's deterrence architecture" and cast the forum as a hinge. "The Turkish defense industry is ready to be one of the driving forces behind the industrial transformation that NATO requires," he said, predicting that when the alliance's history is written, "a special chapter will be dedicated to the Ankara summit."
The most concrete piece was a missile. Türkiye committed to buy a significant number of Roketsan's ground-launched Atmaca cruise missiles, part of an effort that NATO's deputy secretary general, Radmila Shekerinska, valued at about 1.6 billion dollars once 155 mm ammunition is counted, with six allies joining a push to develop low-cost cruise missiles together. It is the kind of order that, a decade ago, Türkiye would have placed abroad.
Aselsan, the largest Turkish firm, showed how far the reach now runs. It sits among five companies, with Airbus, Lockheed Martin UK, Raytheon, and Thales, picked for NATO's next ground-based air-defense concept; it won an alliance tender for identification systems against a leading global supplier; and it holds a 410 million dollar contract in Poland. Its sensors are even watching the summit itself.
The scale behind the deals is what has changed. NATO's secretary general, Mark Rutte, counts around 3,000 Turkish defense firms operating across the alliance, an ecosystem grown from institutions like the Teknopark technology park the government set up with the arms secretariat in 2010. The host that NATO once valued for its geography now builds the equipment its allies are lining up to buy.
That is the shift the Ankara forum put on paper. Türkiye spent the F-35 years, and the arms embargoes before them, learning not to depend on weapons others could switch off, and it arrived at its own summit selling rather than asking. Whether "a new chapter," in Görgün's phrase, or simply a good week, the direction is not in doubt.