Rising Challengers
How South Korea and Türkiye are rewriting the rules of defence competitiveness
For most of the postwar era, everyone knew who sat where in the arms trade’s pecking order. It came down to legacy production lines, mature supply chains and export relationships built up over decades, plus the kind of deep research institutions and military-to-military ties that only come with time. Large domestic markets helped too. Nobody had to guess who mattered.
That hierarchy has not disappeared. The US and Europe still handle most of the world’s major arms transfers, and the established suppliers remain formidable. But underneath the familiar names, the ground is moving. Global rearmament is picking up pace. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) put global military spending at $2.9 trillion in 2025, the 11th-straight annual rise. European spending climbed 14% in real terms; Asia and Oceania rose 8.1%.
Capability used to be the main topic of conversation. Not anymore. Buyers now want to know how fast a system can be delivered, whether local industry gets a piece of the programme, and, perhaps above all, whether the supplier will still respond when things go badly wrong.
That shift has created space for a new tier of defence competitors. They are not out to unseat the traditional suppliers, not exactly. What they are doing is picking apart old assumptions about where competitive capability actually comes from, competing instead on speed, adaptability, production readiness, price, technology transfer and the knack of turning a domestic requirement into something exportable.
South Korea and Türkiye are the clearest examples of this. Their routes there, however, are different. South Korea’s strategy rests on manufacturing discipline, steady domestic demand, tight acquisition alignment and a reputation for delivering on time. Türkiye got there by pursuing strategic autonomy, absorbing lessons from military operations and rapidly expanding a domestic ecosystem whose modern institutional foundations date back to the 1970s and 1980s. Put the two together, and they make an argument worth taking seriously: industrial history alone does not decide defence competitiveness; policy and investment can build it, up to a point.
The global defence market is not just growing, it is changing shape. Ukraine exposed stockpile depletion and production bottlenecks in suppliers once thought untouchable. The Indo-Pacific has reinforced how much resilience and industrial depth matter. In the Middle East, one crisis after another has sharpened appetite for air defence, drones, missiles and command-and-control systems.
Governments everywhere are asking themselves some version of the same question: is our industrial base deep enough and agile enough to take sustained pressure?
South Korea and Türkiye reward that kind of attention. Their export figures reveal something about the production capacity, state support and industrial ambition sitting behind the hardware.
According to SIPRI, South Korean arms exports more than doubled between 2010-14 and 2020-24. By the latter period, South Korea had become the world’s 10th-largest exporter of major arms, holding 2.2% of global transfers, up from 0.9% a decade earlier. In 2021-25, it climbed again, to ninth place, with a 3% share; export volumes ran 24% higher than in 2016-20. SIPRI credits much of this to short turnaround times, sharp pricing and generous technology-transfer terms, landing at a moment when European producers were struggling to scale up.
Türkiye's trajectory looks just as striking, although the numbers measure something different, and it is worth being careful here. SIPRI tracks transfers of major conventional weapons using a trend-indicator value meant to capture volume rather than money. Turkish official statistics report dollar revenue across the wider defence and aerospace sector, including goods and services. The two datasets should not be set side by side as if they were counting the same thing. Turkish sources say that defence and aerospace exports reached roughly $10.5 billion in 2025, about 48% up on the year before. By July 2026 the rolling 12-month total had climbed to $11.2 billion.
Impressive figures, from both countries. But the industrial machinery behind the numbers tells the more interesting story.
South Korea’s rise gets filed under ‘K-defence’ more often than not, as though it were some kind of cultural phenomenon. It is not. The real story is institutional. The Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) was founded in 2006, pulling together functions that had been scattered across government into something closer to a single acquisition system. Its brief covers force-improvement programmes, procurement, and support for the defence industry, exports included.
Competitiveness, in other words, was never going to rest on individual companies alone. Requirements, risk-sharing arrangements, government export backing, all of it shapes the outcome. South Korea has also had the advantage of a genuinely strong industrial base to draw on: advanced manufacturing, electronics, shipbuilding and aerospace. Put that together and you get products that are not just technically credible but available quickly, which turns out to matter enormously.
Poland is the case everyone points to. In 2022, Warsaw signed framework and executive agreements with a clutch of South Korean suppliers, scrambling to replace kit sent to Ukraine while expanding its own forces at the same time. Hyundai Rotem supplies the K2 tank. Hanwha Aerospace supplies the K9 self-propelled howitzer and the K239 Chunmoo rocket system. Korea Aerospace Industries supplies the FA-50 light combat aircraft. At its most ambitious, the original framework envisaged as many as 1,000 K2 tanks, 672 K9 howitzers and 48 FA-50s, on top of a sizeable Chunmoo order. Those ceilings should not be mistaken for quantities locked into binding executive contracts, but they do capture the scale of ambition on both sides.
The first batch, 10 K2 tanks and 24 K9 howitzers, reached Poland roughly three months after the initial execution contracts were signed. This is fast by any standard. Poland’s Armament Agency reported that by September 2025 the country had taken delivery of 160 K2 tanks, 192 K9 howitzers and 126 Homar-K rocket-launcher modules, the Polish variant of Chunmoo.
Now comes the harder part: localisation. In July 2026, the first K9PL howitzers built to Polish specifications rolled out of Hanwha’s Changwon plant. The current batch is still Korean-built, but the wider programme aims for growing Polish industrial participation, and eventually, subject to further agreements, production inside Poland itself. Technology transfer and local manufacture remain objectives under construction, not accomplished facts. Seoul is trying to turn a fast shipment into something more durable: an embedded industrial partnership. DAPA Minister Seok Jong-gun made the underlying philosophy explicit at the 2024 Center for Strategic and International Studies–DAPA defence cooperation conference, arguing that the demands exposed by a prolonged war were something no single country could handle alone. Allies, on this reading, need to link up their production, maintenance and supply systems rather than each try to go it alone. South Korea is not just selling equipment; it wants to become part of allied defence industrial capacity itself.
There is a vulnerability buried in all of this, though: customer concentration. Poland accounted for 58% of Korean transfers of major arms in 2021-25. Add the Philippines and the UAE, and South Korea’s three biggest customers made up roughly 85.5% of the total. The customer base is certainly broader than it was 10 years ago, but the recent surge is still heavily dependent on an extraordinary Polish rearmament cycle that will not last forever.
SIPRI flags a longer-term risk on the innovation side too. South Korea’s state-centred model is very good at absorbing development risk and industrialising mature systems. What it needs to do more of is give private firms greater incentive to bet their own money on uncertain, next-generation technology. Production excellence has bought South Korea a strong hand. Technological leadership is a different game, and it will require a riskier kind of investment.
Türkiye took a different road, shaped by years of restrictions on foreign equipment and a hard determination to stop depending on external suppliers. The Secretariat of Defence Industries (SSB) describes its job as strengthening the domestic defence ecosystem, meeting the armed forces’ needs with home-grown technology, growing exports, and spreading defence industrial capability out into the wider economy.
Defence competitiveness gets built through choices about what to develop, localise, finance, export and protect.
The Turkish military itself has served as both anchor customer and testing ground. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) points to Operations Olive Branch, Peace Spring and Spring Shield in Syria as the moments where Turkish equipment got tested under real conflict conditions. Those campaigns exposed weaknesses along with strengths, including real trouble keeping troops supplied with enough ammunition, sensors and equipment at the pace operations demanded. Such lessons fed straight back into procurement priorities, production planning and further development.
The breadth of what has come out the other end is remarkable. Türkiye now builds not just uncrewed aircraft but naval platforms, armoured vehicles, missiles, electronics, radars and air-defence systems, backed by a growing cluster of specialist companies. Reuters’ review of trade data found Turkish arms going to nearly 40 countries. Broader Turkish customs figures put defence and aerospace exports at 178 countries in the 12 months to May 2026, while other official statements cite 185 countries and more than 230 products. These figures do not use the same thresholds or product definitions, and the larger counts likely capture plenty of small aerospace, component or service transactions; 178 countries does not mean 178 deep military partnerships, and so should not be read that way.
Baykar offers one useful measure of scale. The privately held company reported $2.2 billion in exports in 2025, accounting for 88% of its $2.5 billion total revenue. It says it has signed export agreements with 37 countries across its TB2 and Akıncı lines, and describes itself as the world’s largest exporter of uncrewed combat aerial vehicles for the third year running. The financial figures come from the company itself, and so does the superlative, but nobody disputes the international reach behind them.
One milestone stands out: the Akıncı agreement signed with Saudi Arabia in July 2023, during President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s visit to the kingdom. Baykar’s chief executive called it the largest defence and aviation export contract in the history of the Turkish republic. Neither the value nor the number of aircraft was ever officially disclosed. The deal included training, logistics and technology transfer, and Saudi Arabian Military Industries set itself a target of building up to 70% of the aircraft locally. Saudi personnel finished Akıncı training in October 2025, ahead of the type entering service.
Indonesia shows how far this playbook can travel. A drone-production joint venture agreed in February 2025 laid out plans for local manufacturing. In May 2026, Baykar and PT Republik Aero Dirgantara signed the first export framework for the newer Kızılelma uncrewed combat aircraft: 12 aircraft, deliveries starting from 2028, with Baykar saying it also included options on another 48, plus maintenance and industrial-cooperation terms. It is a genuine commercial marker. It is also worth remembering that a framework signed for a system still working its way into production is not the same as delivered operational capability.
The systems level tells a similar story. In November 2025, Turkish companies signed contracts worth $6.5 billion to reinforce and expand the country’s Steel Dome integrated air-defence architecture. SSB describes a 47-component system: radars, missiles, electro-optical sensors, command-and-control nodes and layered defences of different ranges. Pulling that together demands a different order of industrial complexity because it attempts integration at the national level.
Nonetheless, strategic autonomy remains a target rather than a finished state. IISS research warns that absolute autonomy is more or less impossible to achieve: indigenising one part of a supply chain can just swap one dependency for another, particularly around propulsion, advanced materials, microelectronics and specialised subsystems. Türkiye’s ambitions also collide with rising programme costs, competition for skilled labour, and general economic strain. The strongest version of its model, then, is not isolation, but selective autonomy paired with international partnership.
South Korea’s strength lies in production credibility: disciplined manufacturing, active production lines, alliance compatibility and delivery at speed. Türkiye’s lies in autonomy-driven expansion: operational relevance, rapid iteration, industrial breadth and a willingness to customise. These are relative strengths, not exclusive traits. Seoul’s emphasis falls on delivery. Ankara’s falls on adaptation.
Both matter because buyers today want more than performance. They want to know whether a supplier can scale, localise production, train operators and remain dependable when demand spikes. Financing and export permissions matter too, as does whether access to software, spares and upgrades can survive a political dispute. Neither country stumbled into this position. Their success was deliberately built. Whether their success lasts depends on what happens after the first sale. Both models depend on institutional alignment. DAPA and SSB occupy different formal positions, but each connects national requirements, procurement, industrial development and export strategy. Without that coordination, production capacity and supply chains are difficult to sustain.
South Korea’s shift from exporter to embedded partner is already under way. SIPRI’s 2021-25 figures make it the second-largest supplier of major arms to European Nato members, with an 8.6% share of their imports, behind the US at 58% and ahead of Israel and France. Cooperation frameworks with the EU and partners across the Middle East and Asia point to a deliberate push to lock in that position. Market access is still conditional, though. European preference for locally built equipment, export-finance requirements and controls on US-origin technology can all get in the way of South Korean offers.
Türkiye has its own version of the same problem. Its companies benefit from flexible supply chains and a real willingness to customise, and European analysts increasingly view Turkish capacity as something that could complement the continent’s industrial base rather than compete with it. But disputes over Cyprus, Greece, Syria, Russia, and EU eligibility rules keep shaping how much political acceptance Türkiye actually gets.
Trust, in defence, is not just about whether a supplier responds during a crisis, although that matters too. It is about alignment. Predictable export controls. Transparent financing. Secure software and data. Confidence that a political disagreement somewhere will not suddenly cut off support.
Hardware is the visible part: the tanks, the drones, the missiles, the ships. The competitive system sits underneath all of that: engineering depth, software, sensors, testing, certification, repair infrastructure, and the machinery that takes operational feedback and turns it into product improvements years after a system first enters service.
In South Korea, most of that depth traces back to the wider industrial base and decades of steady domestic military demand. In Türkiye, it increasingly comes from the network of firms clustered around Baykar, Turkish Aerospace, ASELSAN and ROKETSAN.
However, contracts and early deliveries only tell you so much. They say almost nothing about lifecycle performance. Availability rates,
spare-parts delivery, upgrade execution, training capacity and through-life costs will determine whether these relationships hold up over time. Market access starts with the first sale. Whether the resulting dependency is worth having gets tested through sustainment, years down the line.
Export success brings obligations too. Defence exports can strengthen allies and deepen industrial resilience, but they also create responsibilities around end-use monitoring, diversion control and mitigating civilian harm. Sales to authoritarian governments or customers caught up in ongoing conflicts can carry real reputational and political costs – costs that may limit access to technology and markets down the line. A genuinely competitive supplier needs a credible system of restraint and accountability wrapped around its export activity, not bolted on as an afterthought.
The examples of South Korea and Türkiye illustrate a change in how defence industrial competition works. The established powers have not lost their weight, but they have stopped being the only reference points for what defence industrial success looks like. Few countries could copy either model wholesale. Their histories, threat environments, alliances and political choices are too particular to transplant.
Defence competitiveness is not handed down by inheritance. It gets built through choices about what to develop, localise, finance, export and protect. South Korea has turned manufacturing depth into speed and scale. Türkiye has turned embargo-driven necessity and operational feedback into adaptable products and political reach.
Whether either country’s rise sustains long-term depends on what the first export surge cannot yet prove: innovation beyond mature niches, dependable lifecycle support, resilient access to critical technologies, and the political trust needed to stay embedded in a customer’s forces for decades rather than years.
South Korea and Türkiye are rising by design. Whether that design can last will determine how the story ends.
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