President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pledged his support of local companies and hailed Turkey’s developments in the defense industry on Monday.
“The backbone of our plans must be based on national opportunities. If necessary, we must make sacrifices in the way of time and costs. If we had not done this for the past 15 years, we would not be able to carry out cross-border operations against terrorist organizations due to secret embargoes applied to our country,” Erdoğan said at the inauguration ceremony of the Turkish-made Kınalıada corvette.
“We have to keep an eye on our strategies and support companies operating in the field of the defense industry,” he continued.
“Turkey aims to end its dependency on the foreign defense industry by 2023. To achieve this, we should make more progress. We will continue to increase the number of projects that are critical to our country's security,” Erdoğan said.
“We have 14 projects that we have completed. In the approaching years, we have 10 projects planned. All these developments are an expression of our commitment to the solutions we have developed against threats in the field of defense,” he added.
President Erdoğan also said Turkey was committed to building its own aircraft carrier.
