I am not sure about that.
Tai manufacturered 75% of the parts for f16 in turkey. And also, they manufactured the main fuselage of f35 in turkey.
TEI Also now manufacturing 60% of T701 engine
These weren't just assembly.
And iirc TEI alos got help from GE in additive manufacturing technology.
there was also some TOT regarding 'type 214' as turkey building all six of the submarines locally.
And with TSG anadolu I also believe there was some TOT included.
Aselsan even manufacturerd T/R modules for thales radars.
Roketsan manufactured parts for essm and stinger missiles in the past.
Some of nato standard rifles from us and germnay were also mass manufactured in turkey.
I think these were serious collaboration in the past which contributed lot to the Turkish defence industry.
But of course, nowadays for political reasons west became very embargo happy against Turkey.
There is no transfer of knowledge or experience in any of the collaborations you mentioned. Nobody transfers critical technologies to any country anyway. It is mostly assembly and some body/component outsourcing/production works done under the name of technology transfer. The know-how is obtained in exchange for decades of effort in the companies we mentioned and these companies know that some of the pieces they have transfered for production at their local partners with fancy ToT sentences will not actually benefit the technology of that country. What they do is take advantage of cheap labor to cut costs, but in return, they request extra money for local production.
With the F16, TAI learned the assembly of parts manufactured in the USA. If we had actually produced a fighter jet or gained this knowledge at that time, we wouldnt have spent so much time on domestic fighter aircraft projects we have carried out after the 40 years passed from F16 production.
Aselsan has integrated its own TR modules into Thales radars. Tahles didn't share TRM tech to Aselsan.
HY80 high tensile steel technology developed in 1963 and produced by Austuria for our U209/214s were sent for Turkish submarine projects and we just learned how to weld them in Turkey. Nobody gave the formulation of these steel tech to Turkey but at the moment Turkey is testing HY130 steel for its own submarine project.
Roketsan took part in the ESSM project in many areas like TVC, Guidance, Actuators, earhead but was assigned to carry out the engineering tasks and productions under the giant companies such as Thales, BAE and Raytheon which developed the main knowledge and technology of sections. Nobody gave Roketsan the composite fuel formula or the technology of the precision components that make guidance of ESSM precision. These technologies were developed gradually 20-25 years after the ESSM partnership.
Production technologies transferred to TEI developed in parallel with TEI's own capabilities and investments. The biggest technological achievement TEI has gained from abroad is the Blisk technology and they now apply it to domestic projects. Apart from this, dozens of materials, alloys, coating, cooling and raw material synthesis technologies have been developed by the consortium established by the industry-university partnership and still continue to be developed. As new technologies are developed, the volume of business received from abroad will increase accordingly.
