The Turkish authorities’ confusing statements over allegations that it is the only partner in the A400M project that has hiked its total spending accordingly have thus fallen short of removing suspicions that Ankara was ready to pay a higher amount than Airbus had originally requested. “We [Turkey] will not pay more than what Parliament has set for us as a ceiling price,” Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül said on Jan. 6.
However, he refused to declare what that price was, thus raising suspicions over the Turkish commitment to Airbus on the A400M aircraft rather than dispelling them.
Airbus wants the partner governments, Germany, France, the UK, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg and Turkey, to accept a 25 percent price increase, equal to 5.3 billion euros for the project to survive. On Jan. 5, it also gave a deadline of the end of this month for the governments to agree to come up with more money for it.
Airbus Military Chief Executive Domingo Urena-Raso, meanwhile, confirmed on Dec. 11 in a joint French and German newspaper interview that buyers faced a choice of taking the same number of planes at a higher cost or fewer planes for the same cost, adding that only Turkey had hiked its total spending.
Gönül, in response to that statement, could not give a satisfactory answer to the media on Jan. 6 while stressing that Turkey had neither wanted the number of aircraft to be increased nor the cancellation of the project.
Despite Gönül’s refusal to reveal the cost of the project to Turkey, I found out that Ankara committed to buy 10 A400Ms, costing around TL 2.53 billion (1.10 billion euros). But if Turkey has accepted the latest request by Airbus to raise the price, it has to pay TL 3 billion (1.38 billion euros) for the 10 aircraft.
The total project cost of A400Ms is 20 billion euros ($28.8 billion) for 180 aircraft while it will go up to about 26 billion euros if the partners agree to increase their portion in accordance with the number of aircraft they are going to purchase. If any of the partners do not agree to increase the price in accordance with their share, the project will fail.
Turkey has already spent an unspecified amount of money, said to be in the millions of dollars, to set up an infrastructure at the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) facilities in Ankara, where it has produced some parts for the A400Ms, which is also intended to boost its infrastructure for future projects. But due to the ongoing debate over the future of the A400Ms, production work at TAI facilities has also been stopped.
If the A400M project is scrapped it will leave Turkey with millions of dollars spent in return for nothing, in addition to losing its partnership status in a European consortium project to which it has attached great importance. For Europe as a whole, scrapping the project will set a bad example for future European joint projects in the category of military transport aircraft.
Turkey has 52 CN 235 Spanish-made CASA military transport aircraft, 9 Casa CN 235s for maritime patrol requirements, 13 US Lockheed Martin made C-130s as well as 19 C-160s, whose lifecycle has already come to an end. The possible termination of the A400M project in the end will not cause any weakness in the Turkish military transport aircraft inventory although Turkey has already started unofficial talks with companies including Lockheed Martin to purchase 10 C-17J transport aircraft as a stop-gap measure.
If Turkey had a mechanism where the civilian democratic oversight of the military’s activities in general and arms purchases in particular were at work, then the rationale behind the Turkish acceptance of a price hike in A400Ms would be less likely to be questioned. But in the absence of this mechanism and due to growing unemployment, it becomes natural for the public to at last begin questioning Turkish arms purchases and whether they are necessary.
Turkish Defense Minister Gönül has, for example, again hidden behind “secrecy,” upon a question posed by Turkish deputy Ufuk Uras last week over plans to buy Patriots and the fact that people carry the burden of transferring resources to arms buying that does not contribute to an increase in production for the country.
Gönül is the only civilian at the Defense Ministry, which is staffed by generals, and him hiding behind the shield of secrecy in response to a deputy justifies the Turkish public’s increased suspicion over arbitrary arms purchases.
