F15s, F16s, and many aircraft that the Navy uses. Still I would think that its high time to get them out of Turkey with the stability of the region in question, let alone the debate on whether or not the coup was staged
>let alone the debate on whether or not the coup was staged
I don't understand why you are being downvoted for this. A decent number of military analysist and Turkish civilians have come to this conclusion.
-No government buildings were seized, only bridges and airports.
-Normally within the first 30 minutes of a coup a Turkish Military General was on TV directly addressing civilians as to why this had taken place, and what was going to happen.
-The past 5 coups took place in <2 hours.
-The Turkish Air Force established air superiority over Istanbul but never shot down the president's plane.
-Turkish troops weren't equip for crowd control, or even for fighting most were lacking body armor and helmets.
-Turkish troops didn't set up fire-hoses, or wear riot gear for crowd control like previous coups.
-More Judges have been fired from their posts in Turkey then Military Officers post coup.
-Most military units blatantly weren't involved. In the coup or even scrambled to defend against it.
Turkey has had 5 successful coups in the past 100 years why did this one differ so extremely from the previous ones?
Incompetence is a simple defense, but this is a NATO trained and drilled military. Officers education requires they be able to switch between nations, and officer sharing programs are common. Saying the Turkish military is incompetent is really damning to the whole of NATO, and it's attempts to standardize education/training across member nations.
In turkey we have a supreme military council every year, on august, called YAS, where promotions and dismissals. It is rumoured that these lot did this madness to not be dismissed, because that was planned. This is the most believable story to me.
A bigger, more weird stupidity is that, the parliament was on vacation, that is there were no parliamenters in the national assembly building when the coup started, they actually went there during the coup to defend the parliament. And since the beginning, in none of the coups, there were an assault of the parliament building.
But we must bear in mind that social media was crucial. People knew that sth. was going on very early, whereas in the past, they'd do the thing and then we'd know.
> The Turkish Air Force established air superiority over Istanbul but never shot down the president's plane.
He came istanbul after the airport was rather safe though.
> Most military units blatantly weren't involved. In the coup or even scrambled to defend against it.
It was the work of a junta within the army. In fact most other generals quickly ordered soldiers to retract. They didn't shoot the planes and the choppers down, but how could they? Those were flying over very populous cities, I guess in case they did attempt to take them down, there would be at least thousands of dead, because the jets were coming from a base only 30km away from the city of Ankara.
At the end of the day, 2 days into the aftermath, everything is too hazy to properly reason, I think.
One thing to point out is most solders arrested for taking part in the coup didn't know they were part of a coup. They were drilling responses to wide scale terrorist attacks.
Both the AP's story and RT corroborate that many troops didn't know they were involved in a coup.
"Saying the Turkish military is incompetent is really damning to the whole of NATO."
A determined invader could probably take Europe in 48 hours. The Cold War days of preparedness are gone; just witness the commitment of EU NATO members to ME conflicts; the lack of preparedness in Nice. The train has already begun derailing, one carriage at a time.
True to some extent, however. the police barriers were taken down hours before the attack, the numbers of police were also shown to be low; and last, but not least, they were not armed to deal with a credible threat.
Reports from SOF at Bataclan, for example, revealed that AK47-equipped terrorists forced the French SWAT teams to withdraw due to lack of firepower, and yet that lesson was not taken seriously to deal with attacks like the one at Nice.
I don't understand why you are being downvoted for this. A decent number of military analysist and Turkish civilians have come to this conclusion.
-No government buildings were seized, only bridges and airports.
-Normally within the first 30 minutes of a coup a Turkish Military General was on TV directly addressing civilians as to why this had taken place, and what was going to happen.
-The past 5 coups took place in <2 hours.
-The Turkish Air Force established air superiority over Istanbul but never shot down the president's plane.
-Turkish troops weren't equip for crowd control, or even for fighting most were lacking body armor and helmets.
-Turkish troops didn't set up fire-hoses, or wear riot gear for crowd control like previous coups.
-More Judges have been fired from their posts in Turkey then Military Officers post coup.
-Most military units blatantly weren't involved. In the coup or even scrambled to defend against it.
Turkey has had 5 successful coups in the past 100 years why did this one differ so extremely from the previous ones?
Incompetence is a simple defense, but this is a NATO trained and drilled military. Officers education requires they be able to switch between nations, and officer sharing programs are common. Saying the Turkish military is incompetent is really damning to the whole of NATO, and it's attempts to standardize education/training across member nations.