Defense News:
FARNBOROUGH, England —Whether Turkey plays ball with the United States and opts for Patriot missiles over a Russian alternative will be decided by politics, not capability requirements, said Raytheon’s missile defense chief.
Capturing news at the Farnborough Airshow Monday was the statement made by Tina Kaidanow, acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs, that U.S. officials were “trying to give the Turks an understanding of what we can do with respect to Patriot.”
This comes less than a week after Turkey Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu defended his government’s choice to buy the Russian S-400 missile defense system during an event on the sidelines of the NATO Summit in Brussels, stating he “wanted to buy from the U.S. for the last 10 years,” but it didn’t work, and that in the end, Russia offered the best proposal.
