NATO’s Largest-Ever Defence Industry Forum Comes to Ankara — Turkey Steps Into the Spotlight
In late April, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte made an unannounced stop at ASELSAN’s Technology Base in Ankara. The words he chose on his way out carried weight: Turkey, he said, has undergone a “defence industrial revolution.”
Two and a half months later, all 32 NATO leaders are heading to the same city. The Beştepe Presidential Compound will host the Alliance’s 36th Summit on 7–8 July — and alongside it, the largest defence industry forum in NATO history.
The Same Host, A Transformed Country
Turkey last hosted a NATO summit in Istanbul in 2004. At the time, its defence industry relied on imports for roughly 80 percent of its needs — from aircraft engines to missile guidance systems to armoured vehicle electronics. Two decades on, that ratio has inverted. According to the Presidency of Defence Industries (SSB), the domestic production rate now exceeds 80 percent.
Turkey remains NATO’s second-largest land force. But it is no longer simply a consumer of allied capability — it has become a supplier to it. The Ankara summit is, in effect, the formal announcement of that shift on an allied stage.
A Forum That Surpasses The Hague
Last year’s NATO Defence Industry Forum in The Hague was already the most ambitious industrial event the Alliance had staged. Ankara will be bigger.
Announcing the decision at the NATO Conference of National Armaments Directors (CNAD) in Brussels, Rutte called it “the most wide-ranging industrial event in Alliance history.” Governments, defence primes, start-ups, investors and innovation organisations will convene under one roof — a signal that NATO now measures collective strength not only in troop numbers but in production capacity, supply chain resilience and technological agility. By those metrics, Turkey’s leverage within the Alliance has grown considerably.
Görgün in Brussels
While Rutte toured ASELSAN, Turkey’s defence industries chief Prof. Dr. Haluk Görgün was in Brussels for the same CNAD meeting. He held bilateral sessions with Italy’s National Armaments Director, Vice Admiral Giacinto Ottaviani, the European Defence Agency, and NATO’s Assistant Secretary General for Defence Investment, Tarja Jaakkola.
Görgün’s summary of the meetings was direct: “We are a solution partner for NATO through our defence industry.” A few years ago that sentence would have been aspirational. Today, with Rutte having toured ASELSAN’s facilities and called the country’s transformation a revolution, it reads as a statement of fact.
A Heavy Agenda
The summit’s agenda is not light. Ukraine aid packages and long-term financing mechanisms will dominate the first day. Defence spending — the Alliance is pushing toward a five-percent-of-GDP benchmark — will be a source of friction among several allies. The Southern Neighbourhood Action Plan, agreed at the Washington summit, will move from paper to practice.
Turkey sits at the intersection of every one of these threads. It has been a critical supplier of UAVs and ammunition to Ukraine. It serves as a bridge to the Middle East and North Africa in the Alliance’s southern engagement push. And it arrives at the spending debate as a country whose defence budget has grown consistently for over a decade. A bilateral meeting between President Erdoğan and President Trump is also expected on the summit’s margins.
More Than Protocol
Hosting a summit confers real advantages — control over the agenda’s framing, bilateral scheduling, the ability to shape the narrative of the two days. But the deeper significance of Ankara 2026 lies elsewhere.
Turkey is staging NATO’s most consequential industrial gathering on its own soil, with its own production infrastructure on display. The tour Rutte took through ASELSAN will, in a sense, be ratified by the presence of 32 allied leaders. In Istanbul in 2004, Turkey opened the door as an ally. In Ankara in 2026, it pulls up a chair as a defence industrial power.
