Saturday, May 12, 2007

Turkey Signs $1.78 Billion Deal With United States



$1.78 billion is nearly one third of Armenia's 2006 GDP. Three guesses as to what is being bought. Got it? No?
NATO member Turkey signed a $1.78 billion deal on May 11 to buy 30 F-16 fighter jets from U.S.-based Lockheed Martin Corp as part of an ambitious program to modernize its armed forces. Under the agreement, the aircraft will be produced, assembled, tested and delivered by Turkish aerospace firm Tusas in Ankara...

In its biggest ever procurement project, Turkey signed a memorandum of understanding in January to buy 100 F-35 joint strike fighters worth nearly $10.7 billion from 2014 under a program led by Lockheed Martin.
Turkey is obviously on a buying spree. Even though the planes will be assembled in Turkey, the United States will benefit handsomely from this deal. Once more, the military gap between Turkey and Armenia widens.

This is one of the reasons that the United States has not officially recognized the Armenian Genocide. If you were on the supplying end of billions of dollars worth of defense equipment and a friend of an important NATO country in a strategic location, would you do anything to jeapordize that relationship? Forget morality, this is business and politics.

Source: DefenseNews

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