Vice President Cevdet Yılmaz announced the Medium Term Program (MTP) covering the years 2027-2029 the other day. While the appropriation proposal ceilings for these years' budgets were shared in the program, the shares allocated to defense attracted attention. Ceilings are generally implemented as a budget at the end of the year.
According to the MTP, an appropriation ceiling of 1 trillion 532 billion 647 million lira (approximately 31 billion 650 million dollars) was allocated to the Ministry of National Defense in 2027. The share of this appropriation in the general budget among public administrations was 6.1 percent. The ceiling allocated to MSB was projected to reach 1 trillion 799 billion in 2028 and 2 trillion 65 billion in 2029. MSB's 2026 budget was 822 billion lira. In other words, the budget increases by 86 percent from 2026 to 2027 and by 151 percent from 2026 to 2029.
Of the MSB's 2027 appropriation ceiling, 936 billion lira was planned for goods and services procurement expenses and 501 billion for personnel expenses. In other words, the resources to be spent on purchasing goods and services were almost twice as much as personnel expenses. However, in the 2026 budget, purchases of goods and services were below personnel expenses. 395 billion lira was allocated for personnel expenses and 362 billion lira for goods and service procurement expenses.
This widening of the gap towards the purchase of goods and services; It was evaluated as the "Eurofighter price" by experts who spoke to Cumhuriyet.
Turkey reached an agreement with the UK last year to purchase 20 Eurofighter fighter jets, and announced the agreement price as "Approximately 5.4 billion pounds". This corresponds to approximately 350 billion lira.
While presenting the MTP, Cevdet Yılmaz said, "We aim for a Turkey that develops its own technology in the defense industry, can meet its own needs and produces high added value. In this context, we are increasing defense expenditures by 229 percent. There is neither development nor democracy where there is no security."
The Ministry of National Defense cannot meet the 229 percent rate given by Yılmaz on its own, neither in one year nor in three years. It is understood that the Presidency's Defense Industry Presidency (SSB) budget and the Defense Industry Support Fund (SSDF) are also taken into account here, along with the Ministry of National Defense. It is possible to find data about SSB in MTP. The SSB's budget increases by 39 percent compared to 2026, reaching 2 billion 158 million liras. However, the picture in SSDF, where hundreds of billions of lira of taxes are transferred, is unclear.
The purpose of the SSDF, which was established in 1985, is explained in the annual activity reports of the SSB as "to ensure the modernization of the Turkish Armed Forces and to allocate the necessary resources for the establishment of a modern defense industry." These reports state that the data is not shared for "privacy reasons". In the latest 2024 report of the Court of Accounts on SSB, income tax, corporate tax, motor vehicles tax, inheritance and transfer tax are pointed out as the main source of SSB. The report says that 215 billion lira was collected for the SSDF in 2024, 168 billion of which was spent on goods and services procurement expenses. This constitutes almost half of the resources allocated to the Ministry of National Defense (440 billion lira) in the same year. SSDF data for subsequent years cannot be accessed.
When all these are evaluated together, it can be seen that defense expenditures have increased significantly in recent years. Regional conflicts and increasing defense industry investments are among the reasons for this. It also appears that the increase is in line with NATO's 5 percent spending target. In 2023, the Ministry of National Defense budget was 182 billion lira and the SSB budget was 344 million lira. Their total was $9.7 billion at the January 2023 dollar exchange rate. In 2027, it tripled again in dollar terms. The share of MSB in public administrations in the budget, which was 6.1 percent in 2027, was 4.1 percent in 2023. SSDF is a question mark.
