Actually you should. Why? Weapon development is not cheap. By the money that you earned by selling them, you can develop the newer ones. If you don’t sell, someone else will do it to be sure. Another point, you can Defence yourself against your weapon far more easily as you know it well. You can also add selling restrictions over them.
Yes r&d is expensive, but you can’t start selling strategic weapons to hostile nations. Even for money, unfortunately we don’t have many nations that we’re as close to like Azerbaycan because that would have made it a lot easier.
selling atak to Pakistan without having our own engine etc. or export permits in place clearly shows the importance of having such nations.( and domestic production of all things).
With the mindset you display, we’d be selling to UAE whatever they want, and next they’ll hire/headhunt important engineers or chief engineers from our defense industry.
That’d be the initial move to build up their own version of the defense products.
these are just thought up examples, but I’m sure the cautious people will understand the need for prudence,
Tunesia was/is one of the first export destinations of ANKA, but look at the country now. Parliament is pretty much dissolved.
I’d use the TB2 diplomacy to support export of other platforms that would support the industry. Like BMC, FNSS, Otokar ifv and such. Most of these countries are buying other Allie’s products to enhance cooperation, but also for political reasons. we know that some of our defense companies are competitiv, thus government should support their export, regardless of which company.