I totally agree with you. Nothing beats indigenously produced weapons in terms of their impact in the battlefield. There are no problems with sourcing them in bulk and in any quantity you want. As they are totally made by your technicians; As well as being able to freely upgrade them to your and battlefield’s needs, as an added benefit, your enemies won‘t know what they are facing. Hence won’t know how to defend against them.personal opinion I would rather have the country still try to make everything domestic production as much as possible and that is aircraft engines despite having agreement with Rolls Royce and avionics despite having an agreement with BAE, no western country likes people that encourage critical thinking for their countries and they still can change their mind later based on geopolitics.
With respect to building a real 5th generation stealth fighter jet; Turkey may have had to tackle a number of obstacles had she had gone along on her own. By taking BAE Systems’ technological input, we may have at least shaved off a decade from the production time of the TFX. Come next March, our first prototype will roll out of hangar under it’s own power, albeit with US built under powered engines.
Producing a stealthy engine is not easy; It is especially sdifficult, if you have not built a turbofan engine before. So to get help from a giant like Rolls Royce is the right thing to do while we are developing our own turbofan power pack. This too is going to cut between a decade if we have snags in the development stages; or under normal conditions, half a decade if our work on our indigenous engine doesn’t hit any snags.
Final version of our TFX will have a Turkish built engine. The plane itself, although is being helped by BAE engineers (some 300 among over 5000 Turkish ones), is actually being designed and produced to our own needs and within the scope of what our airforce wants.
If one has to use an analogy; We are being shown the most efficient way to fish. But we are catching the fish we want in the manner that suits us best.
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