Purchase of military equipment does not really work with tenders, even if it may look like it. The military+politicians decides the purchase based on military, political and economical aspects. The pure military aspects are not even the most important aspect in these purchases.I don't understand this? How a state can "order" something without a tender process?
Samething goes with Akıncı too. My old friends would remember, we used to check SSM's website for new tenders and we able to run guesses from the tender documents that have been posted.
Now, we only hear, 6 Akıncıs taken into inventory? Like where is the tender, how many are you going to buy, what abilities do you want?
Lately, i see nothing of that sort... maybe i'm mistaken, please show me tender documents if there are some on these acquisitions.
In the case of Akinci; industrial, economical and strategical aspects are important aspects. So this rules out any foreign drones (not that there are any available drone in this class for us as our allies refuse to sell them).
So we buy 6 Akinci and probably 6 Aksungur in initial step and then evaluate them in various scenarios and then give feedback to improve them.
In the long run, we will most likely but 30-60 Akinci/Aksungur over the next 5 years. After that, we will contiunue to buy the next generation which most likely will be 100 jet powered support fighter (f16 class) and in 10-15 years we will buy 100+ 6th gen air supperiority stealth drones. For obvious reason, these might not even be public.