Turkey announces initial payment for $23B F-16 jets deal

ANKARA — The Turkish Defense Ministry said Thursday that an initial payment for a military sale package that includes 40 new F-16 Block 70 fighter jets had been made.

“The contracts came into force with the initial payment made,” a Turkish Defense Ministry official told reporters, according to Turkey’s state broadcaster TRT and other media outlets.

“Technical talks with US government officials and manufacturing company officials regarding the procurement of the F-16 Block 70 aircraft are ongoing,” the official added, without providing further details. 

Ankara is seeking price modifications to the estimated $23 billion military package, as well as potential reimbursement of the roughly $1.4 billion it paid to buy F-35 fighter jets before being removed from the stealth fighter jet program.

“We have a collectible of $1.45 billion. We will continue to take steps towards collecting this receivable,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said last month in New York, where he traveled to attend the UN General Assembly summit.

“This is no small amount. We will continue to take steps toward collecting this,” he added.

Ankara’s bid to acquire F-16s has been a nearly five-year saga.

Turkey tabled its bid in 2020 after it was blocked from buying the F-35s under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act over its 2019 purchase of Russian S-400 air defense systems. The CAATSA was overwhelmingly passed by Congress in 2017 to deter any significant defense transactions with Russia.

The Biden administration stopped short of formally endorsing the F-16 sale until January earlier this year, when Turkey approved Sweden’s NATO membership, dropping nearly two years of objections. The expansion of the transatlantic alliance became a key foreign policy agenda item for the Biden administration amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In a bid to maintain the deterrence capabilities of its air fleet, Turkey, which has NATO’s second-largest army, is also seeking to expedite the procurement process. Among the options Ankara is pursuing is the joint production of F-16 parts. Turkey had previously manufactured some parts for both its own and regional countries’ fleets.