CSBA in the News

“Capabilities in development would enable larger caliber guns to launch HVPs at air and missile threats over medium ranges (10–30 nautical miles),” read a May report on air and missiles from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment (CSBA).

The F-35B’s participation in Red Flag is a major step forward for the program, said Jesse Sloman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think tank in Washington.

And it could be much worse than that. As Erdoğan fought to regain himself, Eric S. Edelman, a former American ambassador to Turkey and former leading Pentagon official under President George W. Bush, cautioned: “The danger here is this could spiral out of control and turn into a full-blown civil war.”

“We basically have turned a blind eye to Erdogan’s drive towards an authoritarian, one-man system of rule in Turkey,” said Eric Edelman, a U.S. ambassador to Ankara from 2003 to 2005 and a deputy secretary of defense under George W. Bush. “The president has acknowledged it, but we haven’t really done much about it, if anything.” That needs to change, Edelman said. “If there’s anything we’ve learned from the last six years in that part of the world, it’s that one-man rule isn’t very stable.”

“They’re going to be focused on rooting out coup plotters, and that’s going to preoccupy all the national security services; and everything else, including going after ISIL, will be secondary,” said Eric S. Edelman, a former United States ambassador to Turkey and top Pentagon official under President George W. Bush. “It may affect their ability to protect themselves from ISIL blowback in Turkey.”

Moreover, the failure to anticipate events goes to our lack of adeptness at handling Erdogan, once President Obama’s favorite world leader. Former ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman tells me, “The reason people didn’t see it coming is that Erdogan has been so successful at turning things to his advantage (like the elections last year) that people had stopped thinking about the potential downside risks. The military had clearly been broken as an institution by the various conspiracy trials and jailings of general/flag officers (over 100 in jail at one point).” The lack of a coherent policy toward Turkey is a bipartisan failure. “In general, in both the Bush and Obama Administrations we have tended to turn a blind eye to the negative trajectory of domestic developments in Turkey because we have seen the country as ‘too important to fail’ for other reasons — Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. I think that has been a mistake.”