Türkiye plans a 229% rise in defence spending across 2027-2029

Turkish Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz said on 6 September that Türkiye will raise defence spending by 229 percent over the three years covered by the new Medium-Term Program for 2027 to 2029. He presented the plan at the Presidential Complex in Ankara as the economic road map for the rest of the decade.

“In the defence industry, we aim for a Türkiye that develops its own technology and produces high added value,” Yılmaz said. “We are increasing defence spending by 229 percent.” Among the seven priority investment lines in the program, defence is the largest increase. Social housing is listed at 150 percent, mineral exploration at 139 percent, industrial infrastructure at 54 percent, railways at 49 percent, health at 43 percent and food supply at 42 percent.

The same document cut the 2026 growth forecast from 3.8 percent to 3.3 percent and raised the year-end inflation forecast from 16 percent to 28.4 percent. Growth is then supposed to climb to 4.2 percent in 2027, 4.6 percent in 2028 and 5 percent in 2029. Inflation is written down to 16 percent, 9 percent and 8 percent across those three years. Yılmaz noted that inflation had touched 75.5 percent in May 2024 and said the new path continues a decline that official policy claims to have started.

Those two pages of the program sit in tension. A state that is missing this year’s growth and inflation targets is also promising to more than triple a budget line that already stands, on SIPRI’s 2025 figure, at about $30 billion. The government’s answer is that defence production is an industrial policy. The program names research, production and “innovation capacity” in defence, health technology, semiconductors and artificial intelligence as a single cluster. It also promises more work on critical minerals, nuclear and hydrogen technology, and equipment used in energy and mining.

Turkish specialist outlets listed the hardware that the extra money is meant to buy. Mass production of the TF-KAAN fighter, first deliveries of the KIZILELMA unmanned combat aircraft, and more than ten ALTAY tanks for the land forces are the projects named most often. Those programs have slipped before. KAAN has flown. KIZILELMA has flown. ALTAY has been in development for 15 years. A percentage in a three-year program does not by itself put a squadron on a runway.

The political setting is regional rather than bookkeeping. Türkiye is a NATO member that buys from and sells to both sides of several wars. It has built a drone export business that now sits in inventories from Azerbaijan to Ethiopia. It is also living with a currency that has been managed through capital controls and with an inflation rate that the new program itself just revised up by more than 12 points for this year. A 229 percent rise that is not defined against a published base year in the vice president’s remarks will be read in Brussels and Washington as both a capability signal and a fiscal risk.

Yılmaz tied security to growth in a single sentence. Defence and security, he said, are among the basic conditions for economic development, and budget resources will be pointed at strategic needs. That is the argument every defence ministry makes in a tight year. The difference in Ankara is scale. A 229 percent jump, if it is applied to the SIPRI stock of $30 billion, implies an annual figure that would place Türkiye among the heaviest military spenders outside the United States and China by 2029.

Two checks will show whether the program is a plan or a slogan. The first is the 2027 budget law, where the defence line will have to appear in lira. The second is factory output: KAAN airframes, KIZILELMA aircraft accepted by the air force, ALTAY tanks on a parade square rather than a test track. Until those arrive, the 229 percent is a number spoken in a hall on a Sunday in September, next to a growth downgrade and an inflation upgrade that the same government had to read out loud.