Next MENA Threat Landscape and Turkey’s Defense Posture

After slightly more than a decade under Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government, Turkey’s military trends are pretty promising for the future strategic posture of the nation.
 
The first and foremost development is a drastic shift in civil-military relations towards a democratic civilian oversight of the armed forces that ended the country’s decades-old, fragmented decision-making system which resulted from military guardianship. Thereby, now the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) has been turned into a true national defense body that is distanced from involvement in domestic politics in an anti-democratic way. Second, in parallel with the normalization of Turkish civil-military relations, Ankara managed to run a successful military modernization program that is promising to match Turkey’s defense needs. Besides, through the ongoing settlement process by which Ankara aims to put an end to its decades-long Kurdish problem in a peaceful way, the Turkish government is taking a crucial step that will free Turkey from its Achilles’ heel.
 
Meanwhile, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) security environment and threat landscape witnessed, or, to be precise, is still witnessing major fluctuations and destabilization. Notably, the regional military trends tend to move toward the two extremes of the conflict scale. Clearly, on one hand, we have strategic weapons proliferation, which has resulted from the missile environment and weapons of mass destruction (WMD); and on the other hand, the dramatic rise of asymmetric threats and hybrid wars. Furthermore, some game-changing weapon systems such as man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS or MPADS) are being introduced on several battlegrounds in a gradually intensifying fashion. In such a complicated overall military picture, in which state-led conventional warfare threats are on the decline while low and high intensity ones tend to be on the rise, forecasting “the next threat landscape” and getting prepared would be essential to meet Ankara’s regional leadership goals.
 
Strategic weapons and missile environment
 
On the strategic weapon systems angle of the emerging MENA military balances, missile proliferation holds a crucial place and the trend is likely to continue, especially given Iran’s aggressive push for both enhancing its own inventory as well as those of its proxies.
 
Even without reaching nuclear capacity, Iran’s missile proliferation trends pose a significant threat to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, Israel and Turkey due to Tehran’s efforts to improve precision guidance and warheads. If Iranian missile capabilities reach a certain level of precision, then we will be talking about an advanced destructive capacity against strategic targets such as oil industry infrastructure, desalination plants and key military units.
 
Moreover, should Tehran succeed in going nuclear, then it will increase its destructive capabilities from the “strategic” level to “existential,” at least for some of its neighbors. At this point, one should not naïvely reduce Iran’s nuclear ambitions into “simply deterrence” or “regime security” functions. Per contra, recent trends suggest that nuclear assets, especially tactical nuclear weapons (TNW), might indeed be used in conventional wars. For instance, Pakistani military doctrine grants a TNW option against a successful conventional incursion by India due to New Delhi’s Cold Start strategy. Likewise, the modern Russian military thinking considers TNW a means of compensating for Moscow’s conventional handicaps in Europe; a response to NATO’s increasing ballistic missile defense capabilities, as well as a reliable asset in a military buildup vis-à-vis the Chinese, as some 80,000 Russian troops in the Far East struggle to balance over 2 million Chinese troops in a large frontier area.
 
Along with the Iranian arsenal, the missile trends in the emerging MENA security environment are not limited to state-led threats. Notably, in the recent years, non-state actors like Hezbollah and Hamas have achieved critical improvements with respect to their missile/rocket inventories and range. Lessons learned from both the 2006 Lebanon War and the 2012 Israeli Operation Pillar of Defense showed that a non-state missile/rocket threat can reach formidable levels that can force a military machine like the Israel Defense Forces into “failure to get a decisive win,” if not into a defeat.
 
Hybrid wars at Turkey’s doorstep
 
The opposite extreme in Turkey’s security environment is the rise of asymmetric threats, especially in evolving forms of hybrid warfare.
 
Theoretically speaking, hybrid warfare can be defined as operational integration of irregular and conventional capabilities within operational integrity. In a broader context, hybrid warfare is a “multi-modal” form of fighting battles through the systematic incorporation of a wide-array of military and paramilitary concepts.
 
Since the 2006 Lebanon War experience, military analysts have been speaking of the rise of hybrid threats, though they should have anticipated it earlier due to lessons learned from the first and the second Russo-Chechen wars in the 1990s.
 
In 2006, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s elements not only acted as “simply irregulars, as usual,” but “managed to fight in moderate-sized units (up to a battalion sometimes) with standoff capabilities and disruptive assets through such as MANPADs and Anti-Tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs) in order to deny the IDF Armored Corps maneuvering capabilities. In fact, some 30 of Israel’s nearly 120 military casualties in 2006 were tank crewmen and this salient fact may provide an idea of the destructive character of hybrid warfare. Moreover, Hezbollah even showed its abilities to threaten Israeli naval assets by hitting the INS Hanit, an advanced Sa’ar 5 class corvette, probably with a C-802 missile.
 
Currently, another hybrid warfare case, the Syrian civil war, is ongoing right at Turkey’s doorstep. Furthermore, not only has the armed opposition been using hybrid concepts, but the Baathist dictatorship has also shaped its violent strategy utilizing a wide array of means, ranging from indiscriminate shelling and air forces, to Shabbiha paramilitaries with operational integrity.
 
The more non-state actors’ access to game-changing weapons increases, the more likely it is that hybrid conflicts will spread in Turkey’s hinterland. Besides, weakening state capacity in several nations following the Arab Spring would potentially augment this menacing development.
 
Turkey should keep up the good work
 
As the last decade’s conflicts and procurement trends in the Middle East showed, Turkey, an important NATO nation bordering a dangerous region, should prepare for the next decade’s MENA threat landscape. Under AK Party administration, Turkey’s military modernization record showed a crucial improvement and Ankara needs to keep up the successful momentum in order to meet its national security needs and support its foreign policy assertions. In this respect, Turkey’s anti–ballistic missile systems procurement and co-development project and the deal for F-35 jet fighters, which is expected to increase stealth standoff capabilities, would take a central role in shaping the nation’s military posture. Moreover, Turkey’s armored and close air support trends, due to the national main battle tank (Altay) and attack helicopter (T-129) projects, which would be augmented with other key procurements such as the CH-47 Chinook helicopter, would significantly improve Ankara’s air-land warfare capacity and maneuverability. On the naval warfare cannon, developments in the Milgem Project, as well as submarine inventory and amphibious warfare capabilities offer a pretty optimistic future.
 
In sum, so far Turkey has done a good by job shifting to democratically shaped civil-military relations and by creating a more effective defense industry. Turkish-American partnership is essential to Ankara’s best interests and as Turkish-Israeli relations normalize, fruitful military cooperation between the two Middle Eastern democracies can be resumed. But there is still room for improvement in this impressive uptrend. For one, this paper argues, that although Ankara reached an enormous level of competitiveness with respect to procurements and inventory vis-à-vis most European states, it still lacks Western-style war studies knowledge in Turkish academia, as well as military-scoped think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments or Institute for the Study of War.