Turkey runs one of NATO's largest and most operationally tested militaries, built around a roughly 355,000-strong active Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) core, alliance membership dating back to 1952, and a defense industry that now arms most of that force domestically.¹ Add the paramilitary Gendarmerie and Coast Guard, both around 150,000 strong and under military command in wartime, and the combined figure climbs past 480,000, the number Ankara points to when it calls itself the alliance's second-largest army after the United States.² What sets Turkey apart from most forces its size is how recently it has actually fought. Over the past decade its troops have intervened directly inside Syria and Libya, and its weapons tipped the balance in Azerbaijan's favor during the 2020 Caucasus war, an operational record spread across the whole force rather than resting on any one branch or platform.

That force sits inside a country of roughly 85.8 million people and an economy the IMF now puts closer to $1.6 trillion nominal, well above the archive's own dated baseline figure.³ The industrial base behind the TSK is built around Baykar's armed drones, ASELSAN's electronics, and a naval shipbuilding program that has quietly become one of the most productive in Europe, converting recent fighting experience into an export business rather than leaving it as paper capability. The result is a military the archive's own scoring already rates above several wealthier NATO members, on the basis of operational record rather than raw spending.

The TSK is organized into Land Forces (Kara Kuvvetleri), Naval Forces (Deniz Kuvvetleri), and Air Forces (Hava Kuvvetleri), commanded through the General Staff and, since the 2016 restructuring described below, subordinated to the Ministry of National Defense rather than operating with the semi-autonomous status it held for decades.⁴ Land Forces are organized around four field armies, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and Aegean Army, reflecting Turkey's exposure on multiple fronts at once.⁴

Conscription remains universal for Turkish men, with a standard service period the archive records at around 120 days, but the force is in the middle of a deliberate shift away from a conscript-heavy model toward a professional one, underway since the late 1990s. The share of active personnel serving as paid contract soldiers rose from about 38 percent in 2017 to roughly 55 percent by 2021 and has continued climbing since, while combat operations in southeastern Turkey, Iraq, and Syria have been fought almost entirely by professional soldiers rather than short-service conscripts.⁵ The TSK has nonetheless struggled to fill tens of thousands of vacant contract positions, a real bottleneck behind the professionalization push.⁵

That transition has not dented the institution's standing at home. Independent surveys, including Gallup's long-running polling and a 2024 Asal Research study, consistently find the TSK to be Turkey's most trusted public institution by a wide margin, ranking well above the police, the presidency, and parliament, a pattern that has held for decades even through the strain of the 2016 coup attempt described below.⁶

Land Forces field a large armored and mechanized inventory built around the aging but still-substantial M60 and Leopard 2 fleets, backed by thousands of armored personnel carriers and self-propelled and towed artillery, with the indigenous Altay main battle tank now beginning to enter service in numbers (see Inventory). The Air Force still centers on a large F-16 fleet, and the Navy has shifted its doctrine decisively toward frigate- and corvette-sized surface combatants built at home rather than the destroyer-class ships some older references still credit it with.

Turkey's most consequential recent inventory story is not a single platform but a family of them. Baykar's Bayraktar TB2 proved itself in Syria, Libya, and the 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, and the larger, jet-powered Bayraktar Akıncı has followed it into service. Baykar has now held the position of the world's largest armed-drone exporter for three straight years, with $2.2 billion in exports in 2025 alone and agreements covering 37 countries.⁷ Its next step, the unmanned fighter jet Bayraktar Kızılelma, scored the first-ever beyond-visual-range air-to-air kill by an unmanned combat jet in a December 2025 test and is expected to enter TSK service in 2026, with a first export contract already signed with Indonesia.⁸

On the ground, the Altay main battle tank finally reached serial production in September 2025 after a long and troubled development, with a dedicated BMC factory near Ankara delivering its first tanks the following month.⁹ The first production batch runs on a South Korean Doosan diesel powerpack because the original German engine deal was blocked, with the indigenous BMC Power Batu powerpack scheduled to take over from the second production block onward.⁹ Turkey has also started fielding heavyweight precision munitions of its own. The Ministry of National Defense's R&D center unveiled the GAZAP thermobaric bomb at the IDEF 2025 defense show, a roughly 970-kilogram weapon already carried on the F-16 and older F-4, described in Turkish and international coverage alike as among NATO's most powerful conventional air-delivered weapons in its class and slated for future integration with KAAN.¹⁰

In the air, the fifth-generation KAAN fighter flew for the first time in February 2024 and remains in flight testing, with serial deliveries now pushed to 2029, well behind the program's original schedule.¹¹ Turkey meanwhile operates the world's second-largest F-16 fleet after the United States itself and has been negotiating to buy 40 new Block 70 jets after scaling back an earlier, larger package.¹²

The F-35 story is more complicated. Turkey was removed from the program in 2019 after taking delivery of Russian S-400 air-defense components, and CAATSA sanctions followed in December 2020.¹³ As of mid-2026 the diplomatic picture is shifting again. At a NATO summit hosted in Ankara in July 2026, President Trump said Washington would lift the CAATSA sanctions and called Turkey's possible return to the F-35 program something the United States would certainly consider, without naming a number of aircraft or a timeline.¹⁴ President Erdoğan told reporters at the same summit that he understood five jets to have already been promised, a specific claim Trump's own remarks stopped short of confirming, and the legal barrier written into US law still requires Turkey to give up the S-400 system entirely before any transfer can proceed.¹⁵

At sea, Turkey's MILGEM program has moved from the four Ada-class corvettes to a larger İstanbul-class frigate line, with the lead ship commissioned in January 2024 and further hulls following through the late 2020s, alongside new Reis-class submarines built under German Type 214 license, the first of which entered service in August 2024.¹⁶ Despite figures still circulating that credit Turkey with a destroyer fleet, the country currently operates none. Its planned first indigenous air-defense destroyer, the TF-2000, will not be commissioned before roughly 2030, and the ships often mislabeled as destroyers are in fact the MEKO-derived frigates and MILGEM corvettes described above.¹⁷

Turkey's defense industry has reached a genuinely high level of self-sufficiency. The Presidency of Defense Industries (SSB), the state's central procurement and industrial-policy authority, put the domestic localization rate above 80 percent as of mid-2025, meaning the great majority of the TSK's equipment needs are now met from inside the country.¹⁸ Five Turkish companies now sit inside SIPRI's list of the world's 100 largest arms producers, led by ASELSAN at 47th with $3.5 billion in arms revenue, followed by Turkish Aerospace Industries at 65th, Baykar at 73rd, ROKETSAN at 87th, and MKE at 93rd in its first appearance on the list, together posting combined 2024 arms revenue of $10.1 billion, up 11 percent year on year.¹⁹

ASELSAN, Turkey's largest defense electronics firm, reported roughly $4.1 billion in 2025 revenue, up 15 percent, with export contracts more than doubling year on year.²⁰ Turkish Aerospace Industries (branded TUSAŞ) carries the KAAN fighter program and the Hürjet trainer, which is already in service and intended to eventually replace Turkey's aging T-38 trainer fleet. ROKETSAN builds Turkey's missile and rocket systems and posted more than $2 billion in 2025 revenue, up 50 percent on the year before.²¹ STM, best known for the compact Kargu and Alpagu loitering munitions already in TSK service, made its first sale of the systems to a NATO and EU member state in Europe in January 2026, a milestone for a product line that had until then sold mostly outside the alliance.²²

Armored-vehicle makers Otokar and FNSS round out the picture, both competing for export contracts abroad while supplying the TSK's mechanized forces at home, and the older state arsenal MKE (Mechanical and Chemical Industry Corporation) still produces the rifles and light weapons Turkish infantry actually carry, including the MPT-76 battle rifle that replaced the license-built Heckler & Koch G3 in 2014.

President Erdoğan has publicly set a target of ranking Turkey among the world's top ten arms exporters by 2028, up from its current position in the high teens on SIPRI's tracked list, a goal industry analysts treat as ambitious given recent export growth but not out of reach.²³

This buildup traces directly to a specific historical shock. The 1975 to 1978 United States arms embargo, imposed after the 1974 Cyprus operation described below, left Turkish forces unable to secure spare parts and communications equipment from their main supplier at the time. ASELSAN was founded in November 1975, within months of the embargo taking effect, explicitly to reduce that dependency, and Turkish official accounts still describe the company as a direct response to the embargo.²⁴ ROKETSAN's founding in 1988 is a step further removed, arriving via the Undersecretariat for Defense Industries created in 1985 as the institutionalized lesson of that same episode rather than as a direct embargo-era reaction.²⁴

The Republic of Turkey emerged from the Turkish War of Independence (1919 to 1923), fought simultaneously against occupying Allied forces and local rivals after the Ottoman Empire's defeat in the First World War. Led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Turkish forces won the decisive Battle of Dumlupınar in 1922 and forced the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923, which replaced the punitive earlier Treaty of Sèvres and secured the borders of the new republic, proclaimed that October.²⁷ The war's western front, fought against Greek forces that had landed at Smyrna (İzmir) in 1919, is often treated as a separate Greco-Turkish War, and it ended with a compulsory population exchange in 1923 affecting roughly 1.5 million Greek Orthodox Christians and half a million Muslims, a demographic rupture still felt in Greek-Turkish relations today.²⁸

Turkey joined NATO alongside Greece in February 1952, the alliance's first enlargement after its founding, a step historians widely link to Turkey's contribution of a brigade to the Korean War two years earlier, which demonstrated Ankara's reliability as a Cold War partner.²⁹

The defining crisis of the 1970s was the 1974 invasion of Cyprus, codenamed Attila. A coup by the Cypriot National Guard, backed by Greece's ruling military junta and aimed at union with Greece, ousted President Makarios on 15 July 1974. Turkey landed forces near Kyrenia on 20 July under its rights as a treaty guarantor, and a second push in mid-August extended Turkish control over roughly a third of the island, close to today's UN buffer line.³⁰ Casualty and displacement figures are disputed between Turkish, Greek Cypriot, and international sources, but a jointly agreed missing-persons list eventually totaled 2,002 names, and well over 100,000 Greek Cypriots were displaced south while tens of thousands of Turkish Cypriots relocated north over the following year.³⁰ The operation triggered a United States arms embargo that ran from February 1975 to the summer of 1978, with consequences for Turkey's defense industry described above.²⁴

From the 1980s onward, Turkey fought a long internal conflict against the PKK, an insurgency that began in 1984 and had claimed a cumulative death toll commonly estimated near 40,000 by the time it effectively ended in 2025.³¹ The conflict repeatedly spilled across the border into northern Iraq over the decades, including a roughly 35,000-troop cross-border campaign in 1995 and a further incursion in 2008 against PKK bases.³¹ That long war closed in a way few observers expected. From prison, PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan called on the group in February 2025 to dissolve itself and lay down its arms, and the organization convened a congress that May and announced it was dismantling its structure and abandoning armed struggle, formally ending four decades of conflict.³²

Turkey became a direct participant in the Syrian Civil War from 2016 onward, running four distinct cross-border operations against Islamic State and the YPG-led Kurdish militia on its southern border. Operation Euphrates Shield (2016 to 2017) cleared ISIL and blocked Kurdish YPG forces from linking territory along the border. Operation Olive Branch (January to March 2018) captured the Afrin canton from the YPG, at a cost of 43 Turkish dead and, according to Human Rights Watch, civilian casualties from strikes that failed to take adequate precautions.³³ Operation Peace Spring, launched in October 2019 after a US troop withdrawal from the area, pushed Turkish and allied forces across a 32-kilometer buffer zone agreed with Russia at Sochi.³³ Operation Spring Shield followed in early 2020 after a Syrian government airstrike killed dozens of Turkish soldiers near Idlib. Turkish F-16s shot down two Syrian jets in response, and the campaign is widely cited as the first large-scale use of Bayraktar TB2 drones against a state military's armor and air defenses at scale.³⁴ The fall of the Assad government in December 2024 and Öcalan's dissolution call three months later reshaped this fight again. In March 2025 the Syrian Democratic Forces, the YPG-led umbrella Turkey had fought across all four operations, signed an agreement with Syria's new government to fold its military and civilian structures into the Syrian state, a deal Ankara welcomed cautiously as consistent with its longstanding goal of ending YPG-led autonomy on its border, even as implementation has since proven contentious.³⁵

Turkey's role in Libya shifted dramatically between two episodes a decade apart. In the 2011 NATO intervention, Turkey was a reluctant, secondary participant contributing naval assets to the arms-embargo patrol rather than joining the airstrike campaign.³⁶ By contrast, after signing military cooperation agreements with Libya's UN-recognized government in November 2019, Turkey deployed advisors, air-defense systems, drones, and Syrian proxy fighters in direct support of Tripoli, a campaign that culminated in the Turkish-backed capture of Al-Watiya airbase in May 2020 and the collapse of a 14-month siege of the capital weeks later.³⁶

Turkey did not fight directly in the 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, but its material, advisory, and diplomatic support for Azerbaijan was substantial, and analysts widely believe Turkish crews likely operated some of the newly delivered TB2 drones during the war's opening phase before Azerbaijani crews were trained.³⁷

The 2016 coup attempt on the night of 15 to 16 July, launched by a faction within the armed forces and blamed by the government on the Gülen movement, killed at least 251 people before collapsing within roughly 24 hours amid police resistance and mass civilian opposition.³⁸ In its immediate aftermath, 149 of the TSK's 325 generals and admirals, nearly half, were dismissed, a figure that grew far larger over the following years of sustained purges.³⁸ The coup reshaped Turkey's chain of command permanently, subordinating the General Staff to the Ministry of National Defense and giving the presidency direct authority to appoint the Chief of General Staff, a decisive shift toward civilian control that came at the cost of a depleted, less experienced officer corps in the years immediately after.³⁸