Why Doesn’t Turkey Intervene?

The Kurdish town of Kobani, bordering on Turkey, is on the verge of falling to ISIS. So most of us are wondering, why don’t the Turks move in? With parliamentary approval, and what was once the second largest army in NATO, shouldn’t it be a walkover?

Sadly, this is not the case. All of the armies in the world, with the exception of the U.S., and a select few others, have cavernous hollows in their structures, resembling more the brains of Alzheimers victims than competent military forces. In these other countries, armies are regarded as cultural refuges of manhood, and jobs programs for weapons that cannot be used as intended because so many anatomical parts are missing. A partial exception to this is the U.K., which, while exhibiting highest levels of competence and professionalism, had severe logistical problems in the Falklands War. Though a dated reference, they still don’t keep enough munitions on hand to fight a war.

The Business Insider has some figures. The 2014 budget for the The budget for the U.S. military is $612B. The Turkish budget is $18.2B. And out of this, Turkey has to pay for food, shoes, coats, underwear, and colorful flags. And let’s not forget spare tires, gas, oil changes, R&R, and patching the barracks roofs.

After all this is taken care of,  there is the minor question of weapons. Having decided to become self-sufficient in arms (against who, one might ask?), Turkey now makes a whole array of second-rate weaponry in vulnerable factories, with high foreign parts content, because it’s a jobs program. Lest it may seem that Turkey is singled out for criticism, the Typhoon “Eurofighter” was an even worse jobs program, a sinkhole of top gun delights and the pride of airshows, but nothing more.

During the Cold War, Turkey fielded an enormous army against the Soviet Union, but these were “static troops”, with logistics and maneuverability adequate for defense. Now we have a problem of “force projection”, in which the Turkish military have no experience at all. Tanks are not what they used to be. Turkish tanks are vulnerable to RPGs (rocket propelled grenades), a problem faced by all armies.  The most modern armies constantly remanufacture their tanks to mitigate evolving hazards, while the U.S. Army battle doctrine constantly evolves as well.

You don’t get this on $18.2B a year. Nor do you get the kind of “logistical tail” that transports tank fuel by helicopter. If the Turks send their tanks into Syria, they may have trouble keeping them fueled, unless they maintain the kind of continuous line that renders them vulnerable to asymmetric warfare.

Nor do you get the kind of military and management science that trains the rest of the free world. They take home their course notes, and then what? They cannot actualize.

So there may be a lot of hand-wringing going on in Turkey right now. Erdoğan may be asking questions of his military such as the above discussion implies. He may not be getting the answers he wants. One could hope that the General Staff of the Republic of Turkey has implemented crash courses in target designation, so that the full panoply of American air power can be brought to bear.

All of this is a mire of details, created in equal measure by nationalistic pride and the fear of losing,  which, for a small-budget military that is more about jobs than force projection, is a real possibility.