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Comment by rolleiflex | Hacker News Reader

> Though Turkey has a sizeable engineering capacity, it's not a rich country.

Well, to add a small clarification to this, you probably mean not rich compared to the US. Turkey, even with its current economic crisis, is still a top 20 world economy, a member of OECD and last I checked, just a couple steps behind Korea in GDP. You mostly don’t get to train and retain engineers capable of a world-leading drone program without some accumulated wealth.

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Korea has a significantly higher per capita GDP and Turkey is in a full blown currency crisis. In terms of societal capacity the two economies aren't comparable.

Not to contradict you to the economic stability but Turkey is capable of having both an economic crisis and the economic and educational and manufacturing capacity to deploy innovative UAV. In fact, it's military spending might be propping up many parts of the economy.

Iran is an economic basketcase. You think they have no capacity for research and development? Israel doesn't agree.

But for developing military systems, GDP matters more than GDP per capita. Turkey is a big country.

The Netherlands has an annual budget of 300 billion but the military gets less than 2% of that.

Ofcourse should global security ever deteriorate the EU can potentially field an army as large and advanced as any in the world. The cold war was not won by the US alone. But every cent spent on missiles can't go to healthcare or education.

To be clear, by a couple steps I meant couple steps in the world top economies list. I wasn’t implying comparable GDP, though Turkey shouldn’t be too far on that either.

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