Serious question...
is it really necessary to have this much quadcopter and unmanned ground vehicle projects from many different companies? It seems like turkish defence sector wasting their limited resources. same can be said about some other stuff such as armed vehicles, radars, sonars. I dont know i might be wrong but at least state affiliated companies should be more carefull about that and work in a less ambitious manner. Because i can see the competition grow day by day. What do you think?
A single company doing all the development/production for a type of product such as drone will very quickly lead to stagnation. This is what we did see MKEK which had monopoly in their field. That resulted in stagnation for very long time which had a catastrophic result for us. Not just by MKEK but our general society were very stagnant for centuries. This stagnant society is actually extremely un-turkish since we all know that we love to find solutions to any problem.
To much competition will obviously lead to that some over-production which may result in wasted resources but these will sort itself. Also, I rather waste Turkish monetary resources during peace-time than not having the technical tools during crisis-time. In reality, we are actually not even wasting resources since
the actual resource is the human capital which we develop by working on these products so every project is adding to this wealth.
So, it is better to have 2-3 companies doing development/production of any type of product. This is specially try for our military companies since there is also a very big export market which can support these companies by taking some market share other countries. The biggest problem is that some of the old companies are stuck in the old fashion way of working by either just producing license product or just straight out copy other products without any innovative addition. Here MKEK is again one of the old companies which really need to change. Just look at the CIWS equivalent they presented here, it is just a straight copy. In a competitive environment, these type of companies should disappear by market forces but in this case we are wasting tax money on them.
So, I like that we have 2-3 companies developing similar products since it will actually strengthen all companies. With strong companies, we can start developing unique products.