A U.S. Senate committee passed its version of a $716 billion defense policy bill on Thursday, including a measure to prevent Turkey from purchasing Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets.
The amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, from Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen and Republican Senator Thom Tillis, would remove Turkey from the F-35 program over its detention of U.S. citizen Andrew Brunson, Shaheen’s office said.
Brunson, a Christian pastor who could be jailed for up to 35 years, denied terrorism and spying charges in a Turkish court this month. He has been in pre-trial detention since 2016.
It also faults NATO ally Turkey for its agreement with Russia in December to buy S-400 surface-to-air missile batteries. Ankara wants the system to boost its defense capabilities amid threats from Kurdish and Islamist militants at home and conflicts across its borders in Syria and Iraq.
According to Shaheen’s office, the intention to purchase the Russian system is sanctionable under U.S. law.
“There is tremendous hesitancy (about) transferring sensitive F35 planes and technology to a nation who has purchased a Russian air defense system designed to shoot these very planes down,” said Senator Shaheen.
Relations between Ankara and Washington have been strained over a host of issues in recent months, including U.S. policy in Syria and a number of legal cases against Turkish and U.S. nationals being held in the two countries.
Turkey has said it would retaliate if the United States enacted a law halting weapons sales to the country.
Turkey plans to buy more than 100 of the F-35 jets, and has had talks with Washington about the purchase of Patriot missiles.
The move to buy S-400s, which are incompatible with the NATO systems, has unnerved NATO member countries, which are already wary of Moscow’s military presence in the Middle East, prompting NATO officials to warn Turkey of unspecified consequences.
The NDAA is several steps from becoming law. The House of Representatives passed its version of the legislation earlier on Thursday. The Senate must still pass its version of the bill and the two versions must be reconciled before a final compromise bill can come up for a vote in both the House and Senate later this year. reuters
Counter-productive. Turkey will only end up buying Russian jets which are superior the the F-35 junk.
Even if Turkey buys Russian or American 5th-generation fighters, they still leave Greece in a compromised position. Given Turkey’s Russian alliance and its purchase of S-400 missiles – a bizarre decision given that they’re a NATO member – the US government has a duty to prevent this technology from falling into an opponent’s hands. This is what happened in Serbia in 1998 when an F-117A was downed and the pieces sold off to Russian and Chinese interests.
The truth is that nobody really knows what the F-35, SU-57, J-20 or any of these fighters is capable of, or how stealthy they truly are to coordinated multi-band radar systems. There is a lot of disinformation that exists specifically to prevent the adversaries of the countries selling these planes from discovering their capabilities. Yet of all of these, only the “junk” IDF F-35s have flown any real combat sorties. If the United States was smart, they would allow sale to Greece instead, as its older fighters would not be a fair match for these planes.
Greece’s more significant problem is Russian involvement in the creation of nuclear power plants in Turkey. The ability to breed spontaneously fissile isotopes from a reactor means it’s only a few refinements away from a nuclear device. Given the extreme hard-line rhetoric of Erdogan, this is a tremendously dangerous point in Greece’s history. AQ Khan gave North Korea the ability to create nuclear weapons, and it would not surprise me if the Sunnis in Turkey and Pakistan would not ally with each other to put nuclear weapons capability within Turkey’s grasp. That is a topic that requires more discussion here, but it is all ultimately interrelated.
Combine these factors with NATO apathy and lack of EU combat readiness, and this could be a recipe for disaster soon.
@ Lefteris The existence of NATO itself is a recipe for world disaster. Greece should have left ANTO and the tyrannical EU in 2010. Get up some courage in the government.