Armed Forces (1994-95): Total personnel on active duty 503,800, including 410,200 draftees serving for fifteen months. Reserves total 952,300. Component services: army of 393,000 (345,000 conscripts), air force of 56,800 (28,700 conscripts), and navy of 54,000 (36,500 conscripts plus 3,000 marines).
Major Tactical Military Units (1994-95): Army: one mechanized division, one mechanized division headquarters, one infantry division, fourteen armored brigades, seventeen mechanized brigades, nine infantry brigades, four commando brigades, one infantry regiment, one Presidential Guard regiment, five border defense regiments, and twenty-six border defense battalions. Air Force: fourteen fighter-ground attack squadrons, six fighter squadrons, three training squadrons, and eight surface-to-air missile squadrons. Navy: seventeen submarines, eleven destroyers, sixteen frigates, sixteen fast-attack craft, miscellaneous patrol, coastal, and mine-warfare combatants, and twenty-eight helicopters.
Military Equipment (1995): Heavy dependence on United States and other Western allies for armored fighting vehicles, artillery, aircraft, missiles, and fighting ships. Modernization programs underway stressing improved antitank and air defense capability. New effort to meet needs through domestic manufacture, including F-16 fighter airplanes on coproduction basis, artillery, tank upgrades, communication and navigation equipment, frigates, and submarines.
Military Budget: About TL93,453 billion (US$4.6 billion) plus US$3 billion for the gendarmerie in 1994. Defense expenditures estimated to be 9.4 percent of GNP in 1994. Turkey's defense expenditures per capita lowest among NATO countries.
Foreign Military Treaties: Member of NATO since 1952.
Internal Security Forces: Principal security agencies: National Police, believed to number about 50,000, oriented to urban areas, and gendarmerie, a force of about 70,000 active-duty personnel with 50,000 reserves, oriented primarily to rural and border areas. Gendarmerie under army command in wartime and in areas where martial law prevails; deploys three mobile brigades equipped as light mechanized infantry. Special police units fight drug traffic and terrorism and support gendarmerie and army operations against Kurdish insurgents. National Intelligence Organization primary body concerned with intelligence on subversive activity.
Data as of January 1995