Onur Ant Ankara Wonk
BLOOMBERG - NOV. 15, 2015
Turkey canceled a long-delayed plan to buy a missile defense system and will develop its own instead. The country, which has the largest army in NATO after the U.S., picked China Precision Machinery Import-Export Corp.’s $3.4 billion bid as the best offer in 2013. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu signed the decree to cancel the project, a government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the information isn’t public. Plans to purchase and co-produce the system were conceived about a decade ago and deadlines for companies to offer revised bids have been repeatedly extended. Turkey remained in talks with U.S. firms Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co. and French-Italian partnership Eurosam GIE for the project, Ismail Demir, head of defense industry under-secretariat said in October. In response to criticism that the Chinese system wouldn’t be compatible with NATO, Turkey said it wouldn’t integrate the missile defense mechanism.
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