ANKARA (Hürriyet Daily News)—The Turkish defense industry could earn benefits worth over $2 billion from Raytheon Co.’s contracts worldwide if a U.S. group that includes the firm wins a Turkish tender to help provide defense systems to the country.
The U.S. partnership of Raytheon, a top missile maker, and Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense company, has offered their Patriot air and missile defense systems in the tender, which seeks to provide for Turkey’s long-range-missile and air-defense systems, or T-Loramids. The systems fire both Lockheed Martin’s Patriot Advance Capability-3 (PAC-3) and Raytheon’s GEM.T anti-air missiles.
Other competitors include the Italian-French Eurosam, proposing its SAMP/T Aster 30; Russia’s Rosoboronexport, marketing the S300; and China’s CPMIEC (China Precision Machinery Export-Import Corp.), offering its HQ-9.
Mike Boots, the Turkey Patriot program manager at Raytheon, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review on Thursday that his company had special cooperation agreements with Turkey’s Aselsan, a military electronics powerhouse and the country’s largest defense company, and Roketsan, Turkey’s main missile and rocket maker.
“Through our contracts with the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, the Turkish defense industry [mainly Aselsan and Roketsan] already have agreements worth a few hundred million dollars for the sale of Patriot components to these countries,” Boots said.
“If we win the Turkish contract, another $2 billion may come to the Turkish industry related to our sales to several Middle Eastern countries and other customers elsewhere,” Boots said.
“If we win the Turkish contract, the local partners will already be producing Patriot components for the national program, so they will have a great chance to win part or all of this $2 billion from our expected sales to other countries. The Turkish defense industry will already be experienced in making their parts,” Boots said.
In addition, in line with a requirement by the Undersecretariat for Defense Industries, Turkey’s procurement agency, all foreign companies seeking Turkish deals need to guarantee in advance that at least half of the work should be done by Turkish companies locally.
“This way, work worth more than another $2 billion will stay in Turkey, to be undertaken by Turkish companies,” said Boots, implying that the price of the U.S. systems could be around $4 billion. The price depends mostly on the configuration of the systems and the supplier’s quality and policies.
Turkey’s T-Loramids program is not a commercial tender, but Ankara is instead holding rival government-to-government talks with the United States, Italy, France, Russia and China. Turkey’s national air defense systems are designed against both ballistic missiles and enemy aircraft.
Turks must have too many enemies, and I wonder who created enemies for those “loyal” Turks!!
Armenian Enterpreneurs Worldwide don’t have to think twice in investing in Armenia’s Military
Industry Sector by upgrading it and developping further medium and heavy industries and
boosting the Technology(R n D) and encouraging scientists to stay and work @ Homeland, Armenia!!! (7)
Armenia needs to also upgrade it’s air defenses with cost effective systems such as the BUK (SA-11) and the Akash Indian air defense missile system which is much cheaper then Western systems. There are other fairly good Indian weapons systems that Armenia should buy because they are good quality and much cheaper than western systems also. India and Armenia have a common enemy which is Pakistan and they really need to build a strong military ties. Pakistan and Azerbajan are both allies.