Defence Turkey: Mr. Undersecretary, first, would you please give us information about the position, running and the present situation of the logistics in our defence industry?

To gain to provide the logistics support for our defence industry and providing those services to the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) in this field is fairly a new topic. As well known, the first priority during the establishment and the development phases of our defence industry have always been on providing the defence systems support for TAF from the domestic sources as much as possible. At that point, no special effort has been exercised how to provide support to those systems, rather it has been considered that this might have been solved in the TAF existing logistics system. When looked through the historical perspective, the sustainment support responsibility has been on the TAF in consequence of the defence systems acquisition has been made in on-the-self procurements from external sources for long years thus, gaining to provide the logistics support has been a must in the TAF. As known, TAF has been running that responsibility with great sacrifice and success for long time. The initiative to own national systems started in the last 30 to 40 years and gained acceleration in the last 15 years, has caused a great change in the TAF inventory system. Finally, the national systems which have been introduced into the inventory under the domestic development projects have been used by TAF and the variety and the number of those systems have been increasing rapidly. This change has caused a new paradigm to appear from the sustainment point of the national systems. Yet, the companies which design and manufacture the defence systems have been operating in the country both with their infrastructure capabilities and the technical knowledge and management expertise. Well, those are our companies and they have an important place in providing TAF modernization requirements. To me, the following initiative would be that our defence industry to have functions in providing the sustainment support for those systems. Besides, the examples on the sustainment and operation which has been done by the domestic production companies has been increased. The important point here is to do this job in a long term planning process and in a discipline upon which an agreement has been made. From now on, our country has been reached at that point where the requirements determination, design, development, production and operation-sustainment support could be handled as a whole in the view of life cycle concept.