İKV Uzman Yardımcısı Hatice Zeynep Şen tarafından kaleme alınan “Sustainability in Türkiye’s Defence Industry: A Comparative Assessment Against Global Benchmarks” başlıklı İngilizce değerlendirme, İKV Brief serisinden yayımlandı. Bu değerlendirme notunda, Türk savunma sanayii şirketlerinin (ASELSAN, TUSAŞ, ROKETSAN, HAVELSAN, STM ve MKE) sürdürülebilirlik performansı, emisyon azaltım hedefleri, döngüsel ekonomi, tedarik zincirinde yerlileşme ve nitelikli insan kaynağı gibi başlıklar üzerinden küresel savunma şirketleriyle ve AB’nin CBAM, ETS ve TSRS gibi düzenlemelerine uyum kapasitesiyle karşılaştırmalı olarak ele alınıyor.

SUSTAINABILITY IN TÜRKİYE’S DEFENCE INDUSTRY:A COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT AGAINST GLOBAL BENCHMARKS

Hatice Zeynep Şen, IKV Junior Researcher

Sustainability has become a defining criterion for assessing industrial sectors, and the global defence industry is no exception. Absent a coordinated green transition, the defence sector’s share of global carbon emissions could conceivably rise from roughly 2% today to as much as 25% by 2050 in an upper-risk scenario.[1] Türkiye’s defence industry also occupies a distinctive position in this debate. Over the past two decades, it has grown from a modest, import-dependent sector into one of the country’s principal export and technology clusters, with annual turnover surpassing USD 20 billion and exports exceeding USD 10 billion in 2025.[2] This growth is also reflected in international rankings as five Turkish firms featured among the world’s 100 largest defence companies based on their 2024 arms revenues, according to SIPRI’s rankings published in December 2025,[3] a milestone that has intensified debate over how a sector historically judged on deterrence and technological sovereignty should also be assessed on its environmental and social footprint, and on how it compares with its international peers. This paper benchmarks these efforts against the sustainability practices of the world’s leading defence companies, examines in detail how Türkiye’s leading defence firms are responding across energy, supply chains and workforce, and considers what this comparative position means for the sector’s capacity to meet the compliance expectations of its principal international partners.

On balance, Türkiye’s defence industry remains a fast follower on formal climate target-setting and Scope 3 disclosure, but it shows distinctive strengths in circular-economy practice, supply-chain localisation and human-capital renewal, areas in which closer alignment with international standards would further strengthen access to European supply chains and procurement partnerships.

WHAT DOES SUSTAINABILITY MEAN IN THE DEFENCE INDUSTRY?

Before turning to Türkiye’s position, it is worth being precise about what ‘sustainability’ actually covers in a defence-industrial context, since the term is used more broadly here than in most sectors. At its core sits the environmental dimension familiar from other industries: direct emissions from a company’s own operations (Scope 1), emissions from purchased electricity and heat (Scope 2), and the far larger and harder-to-measure emissions embedded in a company’s supply chain and in the use of its products once sold (Scope 3), although the boundaries companies draw around Scope 3 reporting vary considerably across the sector. The defence sector’s Scope 3 footprint is typically dominated by fuel-intensive platforms such as combat aircraft, ships and armoured vehicles, making decarbonisation structurally more difficult for the defence sector than for most manufacturing industries.[4]

But the environmental dimension is only one of at least five that are now routinely folded into the sector’s sustainability agenda. A circular-economy dimension concerns the reuse, refurbishment and end-of-life recovery of materials, which is unusually important for an industry whose products (armoured vehicles, munitions, naval platforms) are metal- and alloy-intensive and whose service lives and eventual decommissioning timelines are measured in decades. A supply-chain dimension concerns not only suppliers’ environmental footprint but also the resilience and localisation of the supply base itself, a concern with particular weight in defence given the sector’s exposure to export controls, sanctions, and strategic dependency risk. A human-capital dimension concerns the continuity of a highly specialised, security-cleared engineering workforce whose training cycles are far longer than in most industries. A financial and compliance dimension, distinctive to defence, concerns the sector’s access to capital and its treatment under sustainable-finance frameworks. Lenders and investors have historically been more reluctant to classify weapons-related activity as ‘sustainable’ than they are for almost any other lawful industry. Industry representatives have summarised this last tension succinctly: “there can be no sustainability without security”[5], a framing that has shaped much of the sector’s own advocacy on this question.

This paper applies a four-part framework, namely environmental performance, circular economy, supply-chain resilience and human capital, plus one cross-cutting compliance and financing dimension, as the framework for assessing both international practice and Türkiye’s own position.

THE EVOLUTION OF EU DEFENCE SUSTAINABILITY POLICY

The European Union’s engagement with defence-sector sustainability has evolved considerably since it first placed the issue on the agenda, moving from an environmental policy framed almost entirely around climate mitigation to one that now explicitly reconciles sustainability with the EU’s post-2022 security and rearmament priorities. The starting point was the Climate Change and Defence Roadmap, published by the Council of the European Union in November 2020 and drafted jointly by the European External Action Service (EEAS), the European Commission and the European Defence Agency (EDA).[6] The roadmap set out three strands of action: adapting military missions and infrastructure to a changing climate, directing defence research toward lower-emission and more resilient technologies, and coordinating with partners such as NATO on climate-security cooperation, backed by an annual review process with an intermediate assessment due by 2025. It thereby folded defence into the wider European Green Deal for the first time. It was followed in 2021 by a concrete funding instrument, when the European Defence Fund’s Energy Efficiency and Energy Management call earmarked up to EUR 133 million for projects on energy-independent military systems, next-generation energy storage and alternative propulsion for defence platforms.[7]

The 2022 Strategic Compass, the EU’s principal strategic document on security and defence through 2030, extended this environmental agenda into the operational domain, setting a goal of reducing the environmental footprint of the Common Security and Defence Policy’s own missions in line with the EU’s 2050 climate-neutrality target, and committing member states to track indicators such as energy use and waste management across the Union’s civilian and military operations.[8] Yet even as this environmental and operational agenda advanced, a parallel and largely separate problem was emerging on the financing side. The EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) and taxonomy framework neither explicitly classified defence investment as sustainable nor excluded conventional defence production as such. The technical standards underpinning these rules did reference “controversial weapons”, but this category is legally distinct from conventional arms and confined to weapons prohibited under international conventions. Asset managers, through their internal ESG policies, nonetheless applied this ambiguity inconsistently, creating uncertainty over how such indicators would be applied to ordinary defence activity. Rather than absorb that regulatory and reputational risk, some European banks and asset managers adopted restrictive internal policies toward defence-related lending and investment over the course of 2021-2023, prompting the sector’s own European trade association to warn Brussels that treating defence as inherently unsustainable risked undermining Member States’ ability to protect their citizens.[9] This financing problem, rather than the environmental agenda, is what ultimately forced the most consequential policy shift. In May 2024, amid Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, the European Investment Bank waived a longstanding rule that had required dual-use projects to derive more than 50% of expected revenue from civilian applications to qualify for financing, a change with a significant signalling effect across the wider European financial sector.[10]

The EIB’s Board expanded the Group’s financing eligibility in June 2025, following the Commission’s ReArm Europe plan, to cover military infrastructure, equipment, services and technology, beyond the narrower dual-use projects the May 2024 waiver had targeted, though weapons and ammunition themselves remain outside its lending scope. The Commission went further still on 17 June 2025, adopting the Defence Readiness Omnibus, a package intended to help unlock up to EUR 800 billion in defence investment over four years by relaxing InvestEU eligibility criteria for defence projects and introducing a fast-track authorisation procedure that caps approval times at 60 days, down from several years in some Member States. The package included a Commission Notice, published in the EU Official Journal in December 2025, which clarified that the SFDR’s ‘controversial weapons’ indicator captures only four specific categories, namely anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions, chemical weapons and biological weapons, rather than defence activity as a whole.[11] Taken together, this sequence - climate roadmap (2020), operational greening (2022), financing exclusion crisis (2021-2023) and financing reconciliation (2024-2025) - illustrates the evolution of EU policy.

EU policy initially treated defence sustainability almost exclusively as an environmental question. Under the pressure of the war in Ukraine and the associated rearmament drive, it has since arrived at a considerably broader position, one in which access to sustainable finance, supply-chain resilience and industrial capacity are now treated as inseparable from the EU’s climate and ESG agenda rather than in tension with it. It is against this evolving and still-consolidating framework that Türkiye’s own defence-sector sustainability effort must be assessed.

TÜRKİYE’S POSITION: WHY SUSTAINABILITY MATTERS FOR TÜRKİYE’S DEFENCE INDUSTRY?

For Turkish defence firms, sustainability is not primarily a matter of public relations. It has become an increasingly important condition for continued access to capital, to export markets and to the multinational supply chains in which Turkish companies are increasingly embedded. As of 2024, the Public Oversight Authority’s Turkish Sustainability Reporting Standards (TSRS) require standardised sustainability disclosures from enterprises falling within specified categories and meeting the applicable threshold tests, potentially covering large defence companies that meet those criteria.[12] This framework is based on the ISSB standards, which also support greater alignment with evolving EU sustainability-reporting expectations. It reflects Ankara’s effort to keep pace with EU sustainability legislation as part of its 2053 net-zero pledge. Türkiye’s mandatory ISSB-based reporting framework was introduced later than the EU’s own non-financial reporting regime. Its initial application, however, broadly coincided with the first CSRD reporting cycle. TSRS also remains considerably behind the voluntary but long-established reporting practices of major international defence primes, several of which have published annual sustainability reports for over a decade.

The stakes are reinforced by the sector’s deepening trade exposure to the European market. Roughly 55% of Turkish defence and aerospace exports go to NATO and EU countries.[13] Separately, Ankara has established the statutory basis for a national emissions trading scheme through the Climate Law (Law No. 7552), which entered into force in July 2025. The implementing regulation, comprising 42 articles, was published in the Official Gazette on 27 August 2026, though the timing and scope of the pilot phase itself were left to a subsequent Carbon Market Board decision rather than fixed in the regulation.[14] Facilities belonging to Turkish defence companies are exempt from the regulation’s allocation and trading obligations, though their emissions monitoring, reporting and verification requirements continue to apply. Armed forces installations themselves fall outside the regulation’s scope entirely.[15] This step is intended to align with the European Green Deal and mitigate the impact of the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which entered its definitive phase on 1 January 2026, on Turkish industrial exports. While finished defence platforms currently fall outside CBAM’s product scope, certain carbon-intensive inputs used in their production, particularly iron, steel and aluminium products, may fall within it, meaning CBAM could affect Turkish defence manufacturers indirectly through the cost and carbon performance of parts of their upstream supply chains.

HOW THE WORLD’S LEADING DEFENCE COMPANIES APPROACH SUSTAINABILITY?

Before assessing where Türkiye stands, it is useful to establish what “good practice” looks like among the world’s largest defence contractors. Five cases, covering six companies drawn from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and the transatlantic aerospace sector, illustrate both the common ground and the considerable variation that exists among Türkiye’s principal international competitors and partners. The companies were selected to combine revenue leadership, geographic diversity, relevance to Türkiye’s principal export and cooperation markets, and availability of comparable public sustainability disclosures; Airbus and Boeing are treated as a single, transatlantic aerospace case given the structural similarity of their dual-use commercial and defence businesses.

Lockheed Martin (United States)

The world’s largest defence contractor by revenue has committed to net-zero emissions by 2050 and to a 36% reduction in its Scope 1 and 2 emissions from a 2020 baseline by 2030, alongside a target to match 40% of its global electricity use with renewable sources by the same date.[16] The company runs RENEWAY, a supplier-facing programme that provides education and consultation to help its suppliers adopt renewable electricity, and in 2024 met its goal of extending third-party-validated sustainability assessments to suppliers representing 60% of its spend.[17] Notably, however, shareholder resolutions and independent assessments have repeatedly criticised Lockheed Martin for excluding Scope 3 emissions, which account for roughly 95% of its total footprint, from any formal reduction target, and for lagging behind peers such as Airbus, BAE Systems and Safran, which have set science-based targets covering their full value chain[18] - a reminder that even the world’s largest defence contractor by revenue has struggled to extend credible climate accountability beyond its own factory gates.

BAE Systems (United Kingdom)

Europe’s largest defence company has set one of the sector’s more ambitious targets. It aims for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across its own operations by 2030 and across its full value chain, including Scope 3, by 2050. Interim commitments have been validated by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), covering a 44% cut in Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2030 and a 25% cut in Scope 3 emissions over the same period.[19] BAE Systems has also committed to ensuring that 55% of its suppliers by spend adopt science-based targets of their own by 2028.[20] On the product side, the company has fielded more than 14,000 electric-hybrid drive systems, which it says have saved over 30 million gallons of fuel and more than 335,000 tonnes of CO2, and has invested heavily in simulation and synthetic pilot training as a means of maintaining readiness while reducing the fuel burn associated with live flying hours.[21]

Rheinmetall (Germany)

Germany’s largest ammunition and armoured-vehicle manufacturer, and one of the principal beneficiaries of Europe’s post-2022 rearmament drive, has committed to carbon neutrality across its Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2035.[22] Rheinmetall screens its supplier base for environmental, social and governance risk through the EcoVadis platform, and has tied 20% of executive and managerial incentive pay to environmental and social performance metrics since 2022-2023[23], a governance mechanism that goes further than most of its Turkish counterparts have yet disclosed publicly.

Leonardo (Italy)

Italy’s principal defence and aerospace group has gone the furthest among these six companies in aligning its climate strategy with the Science Based Targets initiative, reporting more than a 40% reduction in its Scope 1 and 2 emissions over the past four years through operational efficiency and decarbonisation projects such as NEMESI, which is transforming its Pomigliano d’Arco and Nola sites into automated, digitalised ‘smart factories’.[24] Because supply-chain emissions account for approximately 42% of Leonardo’s total footprint, the company has set a formal target requiring its suppliers to adopt science-based decarbonisation targets of their own by 2028, backed by dedicated support for small and medium-sized suppliers to build the necessary measurement and reporting capacity.[25]

Airbus and Boeing (transatlantic aerospace)

Although both companies are dual-use manufacturers whose defence divisions sit within a broader commercial aerospace business, their sustainability strategies illustrate the technological frontier towards which the wider sector is moving. Both have aligned their corporate targets with the sectoral net-zero-by-2050 ambition endorsed separately by industry bodies, the International Air Transport Association and the Air Transport Action Group, and by ICAO member states through the UN aviation body’s own long-term global aspirational goal.[26] Airbus aims for all of its aircraft and helicopters to be capable of operating with up to 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) by 2030 and continues to pursue ZEROe, its hydrogen-powered aircraft concept, although a 2025 roadmap revision moved the programme beyond its original 2035 entry-into-service ambition, while preserving the company’s longer-term commitment to hydrogen propulsion.[27] Boeing has partnered with Norsk e-Fuel and other producers to scale up SAF supply and has tested more than 260 environmental technologies across 13 ‘ecoDemonstrator’ aircraft since 2012.[28] This mirrors, at a much larger scale, the biofuel testing already under way in the Turkish and Swedish air forces.[29] Because both companies’ SAF and hydrogen targets are driven primarily by their much larger commercial-aviation businesses, this comparison is necessarily an indirect one for their defence divisions specifically.

Three patterns recur across these five cases and represent the principal characteristics increasingly associated with international good practice: first, formal, time-bound net-zero commitments, typically 2030 for direct operations and 2050 for the full value chain, increasingly validated by the independent Science Based Targets initiative; second, structured supplier-engagement programmes that extend decarbonisation pressure down the value chain, whether through direct financial and technical support (Lockheed Martin’s RENEWAY, Leonardo’s supplier-capacity building) or through risk-screening platforms (Rheinmetall’s use of EcoVadis); and third, product-level innovation, hybrid-electric ground systems, synthetic pilot training, sustainable aviation fuel and hydrogen propulsion, that treats decarbonisation as a source of technological differentiation rather than merely a compliance cost.

WHERE TURKISH COMPANIES STAND: A COMPANY-BY-COMPANY REVIEW

Measured against this benchmark, Türkiye’s leading defence companies display real and growing sustainability programmes but remain at an earlier stage in formal target-setting, while showing distinctive approaches in circular-economy operations, digitalisation-driven footprint reduction and supplier localisation. The certified management systems, emissions disclosures and circular-economy operations that Türkiye’s largest defence manufacturers have put in place differ by sub-sector, reflecting the very different production processes involved in building aircraft, electronics, rocket propellants or armoured vehicles, but six companies illustrate the range of approaches now under way.

TUSAŞ (Turkish Aerospace)

TUSAŞ, the country’s flagship aerospace and defence company, achieved an A- rating in CDP’s Climate Change category and an A rating in its Water Security category in 2025, placing it on CDP’s Global A List.[30] Its 2025 disclosures report Scope 1 emissions of 92,061 tonnes of CO2 equivalent and Scope 2 emissions of 61,259 tonnes though the company notes these figures remain unverified as of publication, together representing a one-third reduction in emissions intensity relative to revenue since 2021. TUSAŞ also reports a recycled/recovered water rate of 27%, a hazardous-waste recovery rate of around 73%, and total energy savings of 7.34 GWh from efficiency projects in 2025 alone, alongside 545 approved domestic suppliers. What TUSAŞ has not yet published, unlike BAE Systems or Leonardo, is a company-wide net-zero target with a defined year, or third-party validation of its emissions-reduction trajectory through a framework such as SBTi.

ASELSAN

ASELSAN, Türkiye’s largest electronics and systems house, has pursued a more explicitly time-bound decarbonisation strategy than most of its domestic peers, and is the closest any Turkish defence company has come to matching Western practice. Having begun treating sustainability as a corporate-level priority in 2021, the company adopted an internal roadmap toward net-zero emissions by 2050, a target that at least matches Lockheed Martin’s and Rheinmetall’s in ambition, if not yet in third-party validation. On the ground, renewable energy installations commissioned at its Gölbaşı Technology Base generated approximately 1.808 million kWh in 2024, water savings reached 5,250 tonnes in 2025, and its İstanbul Teknopark building received LEED certification in 2025 on the strength of its energy-efficient design.[31] ASELSAN has adopted ISO 46001 water-efficiency management certification, reports its emissions through CDP (for which it won a Climate Leadership Award in 2020), topped the Borsa İstanbul Sustainability 25 Index on its 2025 entry, and in 2024 became the first company in the Turkish defence sector to conduct Life Cycle Assessments (LCA) of its products, a methodology comparable in spirit to the supply-chain accounting Leonardo and BAE Systems have already built into their formal Scope 3 targets, though ASELSAN’s version is not yet tied to a published numerical target for suppliers. ASELSAN’s 2025 TSRS-aligned sustainability report gives this roadmap numerical substance for the first time, with interim Scope 1-2 reduction targets of 55% by 2030, 60% by 2035 and 70% by 2045, en route to net zero in 2050, alongside a 10% Scope 3 reduction target by 2030; the share of renewable sources in the company’s electricity consumption rose from just 0.25% in 2024 to nearly 32% in 2025, and a further 113 MW solar plant under construction in Niğde and Şanlıurfa is expected to add around 185 million kWh of annual generation once it comes online in late 2026.[32]

ROKETSAN

ROKETSAN, the country’s principal rocket, missile and precision-munitions manufacturer, has embedded environmental and energy commitments directly into its corporate management policy rather than treating them as a separate workstream. Its published management policy commits the company to designing, producing and testing ‘in a manner respectful of human health and the environment’, and its dedicated Energy Management Policy pledges to measure energy performance regularly, increase efficiency, favour renewable sources where feasible, and treat energy criteria as a factor in procurement decisions.[33] These commitments are backed by a wide portfolio of certifications, including ISO 14001 (environmental management), ISO 50001 (energy management) and ISO 45001 (occupational health and safety), alongside its quality and information-security certifications (ISO 9001, AS 9100, ISO 27001), and the company holds a LEED green-building certification for at least one of its facilities. Notably, ROKETSAN is one of the few Turkish defence manufacturers to make energy-efficiency criteria for suppliers and purchased equipment an explicit, publicly stated element of its procurement policy, a modest but real analogue to the supplier-facing decarbonisation requirements now standard among leading international defence primes, even if ROKETSAN has not gone as far as Leonardo or BAE Systems in requiring suppliers to publish their own science-based targets.

MKE (Machinery and Chemical Industry Corporation)

MKE, the state-owned manufacturer of ammunition, small arms and explosives, illustrates a different, and in some respects more literal, form of sustainability. For MKE, sustainability means the circular reuse of materials at industrial scale. Through its dedicated Recycling Operations Directorate, with facilities in Kırıkkale, İzmir and Kocaeli, MKE collects and processes surplus or decommissioned air, land and naval vehicles, machinery, equipment, and hazardous and non-hazardous metal and alloy waste from Turkish public institutions, the armed forces and allied organisations under bilateral and NATO arrangements, feeding recovered scrap back into its own production and selling surplus material to licensed recycling firms under market conditions.[34] MKE’s recycling programme has no clear equivalent among the other companies reviewed in this brief. Their circular-economy initiatives instead tend to focus on manufacturing waste rather than end-of-life platform recovery. This gives MKE a distinctive circular-economy function, recovering materials from decommissioned and surplus military equipment that would otherwise require disposal, an approach with particular relevance to a sector whose end products (armoured vehicles, artillery systems, naval platforms) are unusually metal- and alloy-intensive.

HAVELSAN

HAVELSAN, Türkiye’s leading defence software, simulation and command-and-control systems house, illustrates a fifth and distinct pathway: sustainability achieved primarily through digitalisation rather than through factory-floor emissions reduction, reflecting the company’s software- rather than hardware-intensive production model. HAVELSAN states that it conducts all of its supplier and partner audits online in order to reduce its carbon footprint, has eliminated wet-ink signature processes through e-signature, and runs its Business Ecosystem supplier portal on an entirely paperless, digital basis, using AI-based verification tools to minimise the use of physical access cards.[35] This is conceptually close to BAE Systems’ investment in simulation-based pilot training, which similarly substitutes digital processes for physically and environmentally costly activity, though HAVELSAN’s programme is applied to its own back-office operations rather than to a customer-facing training product. While more modest in scale than the emissions or circular-economy programmes of its hardware-manufacturing peers, this digitalisation-led approach illustrates how sustainability practices in the defence sector are shaped as much by a company’s underlying production model as by sector-wide targets.

STM

STM, the naval-systems, software and engineering-services house behind projects such as the MİLGEM frigate programme, frames sustainability as a governance-wide responsibility that extends beyond environmental impact to cover human capital, social contribution and corporate governance, organising its approach around three declared pillars: “value for people and society”, “value for the environment” and “value for business”.[36] On the environmental side, the company has adopted a Zero Waste programme, prioritises energy efficiency and circular-economy practices across its operations, and has published sustainability disclosures on its approach. What distinguishes STM’s public framing from that of its domestic peers is how directly it ties sustainability to strategic autonomy. The company positions supply-chain management as a critical enabler of domestic capacity-building, describing higher localisation rates and reduced dependency on foreign components as a form of sustainable value creation rather than only an industrial-policy objective. This framing closely echoes SSB’s own rationale for supply-chain localisation.

Taken together, these companies show Turkish manufacturers converging on several of the priority areas established by international good practice, including energy efficiency, certified environmental and energy management systems, and waste and water management, while also displaying two distinctively Turkish emphases: MKE’s large-scale, institutionalised recycling of surplus and decommissioned military materiel, and the digitalisation-driven footprint reduction pursued by software-intensive firms such as HAVELSAN. What remains clearly underdeveloped relative to the international benchmark is third-party validation. None has a target certified by the Science Based Targets initiative. None discloses supplier-level Scope 3 targets with the specificity of Leonardo’s 2028 deadline. And only ASELSAN has published a company-wide net-zero year. Timing offers at least a partial explanation: TSRS-aligned reporting only became mandatory in 2024, roughly the point at which several Western primes were already several years into SBTi-validated programmes. The gap appears to be narrowing, given the pace of ASELSAN’s and TUSAŞ’s recent disclosures, though it remains too early to say how quickly.

Table 1: Comparative Sustainability Indicators

Source: Based on the company and institutional disclosures cited throughout this brief.

OTHER DIMENSIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY IN THE DEFENCE INDUSTRY

Strengthening Local Supply Chains

A further, and for Türkiye especially distinctive, pillar of sustainability is the deepening of the domestic supply chain. Türkiye’s Presidency of Defence Industries (SSB) treats supply-chain localisation not merely as an industrial-policy goal but as a resilience strategy that reduces exposure to external shocks, sanctions risk and currency volatility. Western defence industries have long addressed similar concerns through export-control regimes, security-of-supply rules and domestic-content policies. However, the intensity and policy framing of localisation in Türkiye have been shaped by decades of embargo risk and currency volatility. According to SSB’s official indicator, the domestic content ratio of the equipment in the Turkish Armed Forces’ inventory has risen from around 20% in 2002 to over 80% today, with SSB targeting 85% by 2028, though the methodology behind this calculation, including how imported critical sub-systems are weighted, is not fully disclosed publicly.[37] The sector now comprises more than 3,500 firms and over 1,400 active projects, supported by industrial clusters such as SAHA İstanbul, which has grown from 27 founding members a decade ago to more than 1,300 today. Localisation does not in itself guarantee lower environmental or social impacts; its relevance to sustainability in this brief lies principally in resilience, continuity of supply and reduced exposure to external disruption.

SSB reportedly requires prime contractors to allocate at least 21% of contract value to qualified, value-added work carried out by sub-industry firms and SMEs[38], a rule separate from the Defence Industry Capability Inventory (YETEN) portal, which by 2025 catalogued more than 4,000 firms.[39] Individual companies reinforce this framework through their own supplier programmes. TUSAŞ’s 2025 disclosure reports 545 approved domestic suppliers and 1,154 approved foreign suppliers.[40] The company also considers its own sustainability policies when qualifying new suppliers. ASELSAN maintains a dedicated ‘Supplier Sustainability Award’ recognising subcontractors with strong environmental and social practices. ROKETSAN operates its own Supply Chain Portal and supplier-application process for prospective domestic partners, while HAVELSAN’s Business Ecosystem portal formally evaluates and onboards firms with complementary capabilities before admitting them to its supplier base. SSB’s own Industrial Competence Assessment and Support Programme (EYDEP), which certifies SMEs against defined capability and quality benchmarks, saw the number of certified firms rise from 728 to 1,216 during 2025 alone.

This suggests that certification is beginning to reach deeper into the sub-industry base rather than remaining concentrated among prime contractors.[41] The platform-level localisation reflected in headline figures nonetheless conceals continued dependence on foreign suppliers for the most technologically demanding sub-systems, notably engines, transmissions and missile seeker heads, meaning the next stage of supply-chain resilience will have to reach deeper into these critical component layers.

Securing the Continuity of Qualified Human Capital: Early Signs of an Improving Talent Balance

A further pillar, and in many respects the least discussed internationally, is the sustainability of the sector’s human capital. Available indicators suggest a potentially more favourable position for Türkiye here than in almost any other dimension of the sector’s sustainability effort, although the Turkish and European data are not drawn from directly equivalent measures. Across Europe, an ageing defence workforce means that up to 25% of engineers and technicians are at or near retirement age, with some skilled trades expected to lose 40% of their workforce to retirement by 2030.[42] Rheinmetall alone plans to expand its workforce by 29%, or up to 9,000 people, by 2028, while Leonardo has publicly acknowledged that “young people favour other sectors over industry” despite the job security the company offers, and the EU’s Defence Industry Transformation Roadmap calls on Member States to support the reskilling of 600,000 people for the defence industry by 2030, drawing on the broader Union of Skills framework.[43] In the United States, the picture is similar. One aerospace original equipment manufacturer estimates it will need an additional 123,000 technicians over the next two decades, and talent shortages, not supply chains, are now the leading operational constraint cited by aerospace and defence executives.[44]

Recent indicators suggest that Türkiye may be moving in the opposite direction. Turkish defence and aerospace companies today directly employ over 100,000 people, roughly half of them engineers. Built up in barely two decades, this workforce represents a notably rapid expansion by international standards.[45] SSB’s “National Competence Initiative” (Millî Yetkinlik Hamlesi)[46] programme frames this workforce as something requiring continuous renewal, spanning early-age outreach, dedicated vocational high schools, undergraduate scholarship and internship schemes, and postgraduate and mid-career training delivered through the sector’s own “Defence Industry Academy”, an institutional architecture considerably more centralised than the fragmented, company-by-company recruiting drives now under way across Europe.

Individual companies have built substantial talent pipelines of their own. Baykar organises TEKNOFEST together with the T3 Foundation, which it founded and continues to fund exclusively. Since 2018, the festival has drawn more than 11 million visitors and around 4.5 million competitor applications, and hosted three separate events in 2025 alone.[47] Through the T3 Foundation, Baykar also runs the Özdemir Bayraktar National Technology Scholarship Programme, which has supported more than 20,000 students since 2018 and is funding 5,000 students in the 2025-2026 academic year across six scholarship tracks, a joint scholarship programme with the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities supporting 200 students from 18 countries, and the Baykar Science High School, one of only two science high schools in Türkiye offering a specialised “Information Technology and Software” and “Aviation and Space Technologies” curriculum to students selected from the top 1% of the national high-school entrance exam. TUSAŞ operates a similarly branded vocational high school that has become a sought-after destination for high-achieving secondary-school students[48], a pipeline strategy considerably more forward-positioned in the education system than the university-partnership and job-fair recruiting typical of European producers such as Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems or PBS Group, which have resorted to running their own in-house training schools only after conventional recruitment channels proved insufficient.

SSB data indicate a positive balance in this narrower measure for the first time in the reported series. The number of engineers leaving Türkiye for careers abroad, within the segment of the workforce SSB tracks, fell from 339 in 2023 to 98 in 2025, while the number returning to join the domestic ecosystem rose from 47 to 190 over the same period. This two-year series reflects only the segment of the workforce SSB tracks, not the sector’s total stock of engineers, and is best read as an early signal rather than confirmation of a reversed structural trend.[49] SSB has reinforced this trend through “Technology and Competence Meetings” held in cities with large Turkish engineering diasporas, including Berlin, Munich, Amsterdam and London, reaching more than 2,000 participants and including a workshop titled “From Brain Drain to Brain Power” aimed at understanding what would motivate expatriate engineers to return.[50] SSB projects that the sector’s total workforce could reach around 158,000, though the source does not specify a target year; if achieved, this would represent a sizeable defence-industrial workforce by European standards, at a moment when several of the continent’s largest defence employers are struggling to keep their existing headcount from shrinking through retirement.

For a sector defined by long product-development cycles, often spanning a decade or more between concept and serial production, the continuity of this specialised workforce is arguably as important to long-term competitiveness as any single environmental target. If the demographic and recruitment pressures now visible in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States persist, Türkiye’s rapidly expanding engineering base could become one of the sector’s most distinctive competitive assets internationally, rather than remaining merely a domestic human-resources achievement, provided that the recent improvement in retention and return indicators proves durable.

TÜRKİYE’S COMPLIANCE CAPACITY WITHIN THE EU FRAMEWORK

Turkish defence companies’ compliance capacity functions less as an environmental question than as a form of market access. Most of Türkiye’s integration into European defence cooperation currently proceeds through bilateral channels, with Turkish firms securing contracts and partnerships in Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, Romania and the United Kingdom, consistent with the sector’s broader trade exposure to NATO and EU markets. What European partners increasingly expect from these relationships is not a single certificate but a bundle of practices that has become standard among EU-based prime contractors and their own suppliers, namely externally verified emissions data, a published decarbonisation trajectory with interim targets, and visibility into a supplier’s own environmental footprint deep enough to satisfy the corporate sustainability reporting and due-diligence obligations European buyers face at home. Turkish exporters selling carbon-intensive inputs also face this expectation from a different direction, since EU customers importing goods that fall within the carbon border mechanism increasingly ask upstream suppliers for verifiable emissions data of their own accord, independently of the mechanism’s formal scope.[51]

Measured against that bundle, Türkiye’s position is uneven but improving. ASELSAN’s 2025 sustainability report is the clearest sign of movement, since it pairs a net-zero pledge with dated interim reduction targets and a supplier-facing Scope 3 goal, the closest any Turkish company has come to the format international primes have used for several years. TUSAŞ’s CDP ratings and TSRS-aligned disclosures, MKE’s documented circular-economy operations, and ROKETSAN’s environmental and energy-management certifications each cover part of the same ground, even though none yet carries third-party validation through a framework such as SBTi. Taken together, these steps suggest a sector that is closing the distance to European expectations company by company rather than through a single coordinated push, with the strongest movement concentrated in the same two or three firms that also lead on export volume.

The remaining gap is real but not large. What separates Türkiye’s leading companies from their European counterparts is less the absence of environmental effort than the absence of external verification, dated supplier-facing targets, and a track record long enough to demonstrate consistency over time, precisely the gap flagged throughout this brief. European banks and investors are, in parallel, only now resolving the regulatory ambiguity that discouraged defence financing during 2021-2023, just as Turkish firms are beginning to publish disclosures comparable to those of their EU counterparts, a timing that works in Türkiye’s favour. Closing the remaining distance quickly would let Turkish companies enter that more open financing environment as credible, rather than provisional, partners.

CONCLUSION

Measured against the practices of the world’s leading defence companies, Türkiye’s sustainability effort is best described as a fast follower rather than a leader, for the reasons set out above. No Turkish company has an SBTi-validated emissions trajectory, and only ASELSAN has published a company-wide net-zero year. As TSRS-aligned reporting only became mandatory in Türkiye in 2024, this reflects timing as much as ambition. The pace at which ASELSAN and TUSAŞ have moved suggests the gap is narrowing, though it remains too early to say how quickly.

At the same time, the sector displays real strengths that are distinctive within the corporate sample reviewed here. These include MKE’s institutionalised recycling of decommissioned military materiel, HAVELSAN’s more modest but emerging digitalisation-led approach to footprint reduction, and, most notably, a rapidly expanding engineering base at the very moment when Rheinmetall, Leonardo, Thyssenkrupp and their American counterparts are struggling to replace an ageing workforce. None of these should be read as proof of a durable structural advantage. Each rests on a narrower evidentiary base than the international comparison set out above, and the improvement in engineering retention recorded by SSB for 2025 is, for now, a single-year signal.

For Turkish policymakers and companies alike, the task ahead is twofold. First, they must close the remaining gaps in formal, third-party-validated climate targets - most evident in comparison with BAE Systems and Leonardo - as well as in Scope 3 measurement and dated supplier-decarbonisation targets. Second, they must consolidate the sector’s distinctive strengths in supply-chain localisation and human-capital continuity. A defence sector that reduces its carbon footprint but cannot retain its engineers, or that localises its supply chains without also making them auditable and compliant with the standards its European partners expect, is likely to face greater difficulty converting today’s export momentum into durable, long-term competitiveness. Conversely, a sector that succeeds in aligning environmental performance, supply-chain depth and human-capital continuity, while also building the institutional compliance capacity its international partnerships increasingly require, would be better positioned to consolidate the remarkable growth Türkiye’s defence industry has achieved since the early 2000s.