General Erdogan’s First War
Turkey’s Islamist president is the first civilian with control over his country’s military – and you can tell by the results.
Ismail Hakki Karadayi never sat behind the defense minister. Neither did Huseyin Kivrikoglu. Nor did any Turkish military chief of staff who came before them. It was always a seeming oddity that military officers from other member countries sat behind their civilian leadership at NATO ministerial meetings — except for the Turkish ones; they sat next to their ministers. But anything else would have been a breach in protocol. Turkey’s organizational chart was clear: The minister of national defense had no authority over the military command, and while both were formally subordinate to the civilian prime minister, the men in uniform didn’t always act that way.
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