Italy – Türkiye and the Double Logic of Defence Cooperation

The world is becoming increasingly interconnected, not simply by digital networks and trading routes, but by the layered dependencies that hold societies together. A factory worker assembles a component sourced from three continents, which is then loaded onto a vehicle to be exported, and to do so, it travels roads whose security depends on agreements signed between governments. The chain is long, and any rupture can send unpredictable shockwaves through the whole system. Manufacturing, technology, and people are not just economic actors: they are nodes in a web of interdependencies.

Nowhere is this more acutely felt than in defence. Selling weapons or sharing intelligence is never a one-time transaction. A capability you deem safe to transfer today can be turned against you tomorrow. Yet the prospect of a country relying only on itself seems unlikely; indeed, few countries can fully rely on themselves for every dimension of defence production, and none has the capability to operate without shared intelligence from aligned countries. This creates a persistent tension: one well captured by Mark Galeotti’s (2022) concept of the “weaponisation of everything”. Countries must cooperate to survive, but cooperation always carries risk.

It is with this tension in mind that the relationship between Italy and Türkiye in the defence sector deserves a closer look. They are NATO allies, and yet they have held conflicting interests in shared theatres — Libya most notably. They are competitors in some markets and partners in others. And recently, they have formalised a two-way industrial relationship that embodies both the promise and the complexity of modern defence cooperation: while Italy provides electronic systems and European certification, Türkiye provides platforms and combat-proven drone technology. The result is something neither could easily build alone.

An Old Partnership, a New Moment

Italy and Türkiye share a longer defence history than is often appreciated. Since the 1967 Cyprus crisis and subsequent arms embargoes placed on Ankara, Italy (alongside Germany) emerged as one of Türkiye’s principal European military suppliers. Helicopters, naval artillery, satellites, maritime patrol aircraft: the bilateral supply relationship has been substantive and durable. The T129 ATAK attack helicopter, co-developed through AgustaWestland (now Leonardo) and Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI), is perhaps the clearest example: a programme built not on simple export, but on technology transfer, local production, and joint capability development. It would set the template for what came later.

The relationship has not always been smooth. Türkiye’s acquisition of the Russian S-400 air defence system in 2017–2019 strained NATO ties and complicated cooperation with European partners. Its unilateral military operations in Syria and Libya raised concerns in Rome and Brussels. And in recent years, Italian and Turkish positions on Gaza have diverged sharply, reflecting genuinely different strategic cultures. Yet these frictions have not derailed industrial cooperation — if anything, the most consequential chapter in the bilateral defence relationship is only now beginning.

LBA Systems and the Logic of Mutual Gain

On March 5, 2025, in a ceremony at Leonardo’s headquarters in Rome, attended by Italy’s Defence Minister Guido Crosetto, Leonardo and Baykar (Türkiye’s leading drone manufacturer) signed a Memorandum of Understanding for a joint venture. That venture, formalised at the Paris Air Show in June 2025 under the name LBA Systems, is a 50–50 partnership headquartered in Italy. Its scope encompasses the design, development, production, and maintenance of unmanned aerial systems, including the full Baykar portfolio: the TB2, TB3, Akinci, and the jet-powered Kizilelma to be assembled at three production sites across Italy.

The division of labour is revealing. Baykar brings combat-proven platforms and design leadership: the TB2 has demonstrated operational effectiveness in Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine, and beyond. Leonardo brings European electronic systems, sensors, payloads, and crucially, the certification capacity needed to qualify these platforms for the EU market. As Leonardo’s former CEO Roberto Cingolani put it at the Paris signing, there is a “gap within NATO and the rest of the world, particularly in Europe, for drones” and LBA Systems is designed to fill it. Italy effectively becomes the first EU hub for mass production of Baykar’s drone fleet, certified and integrated to European standards.

This is not just an industrial arrangement. It is a strategic signal. For Italy, the partnership diversifies its defence industrial base and positions Leonardo at the centre of a European drone market projected to exceed $100 billion over the next decade. For Türkiye, it embeds Baykar in the EU production and certification ecosystem, opening doors to European procurement that would otherwise remain closed to a non-EU supplier. Both sides gain something they could not easily achieve alone.

The Tension Within the Partnership

Yet the very logic that makes LBA Systems attractive also makes it structurally complex. The interdependence runs in both directions and so do the risks. Italy gains drone capability it cannot produce independently, but ties a portion of its defence industrial future to a partner whose foreign policy does not always align with Rome’s. Türkiye’s ambiguous positioning between NATO and Russia, its unilateral military actions in multiple theatres, and its confrontational stance toward Israel all create friction with Italy’s commitments to EU norms and transatlantic frameworks. If bilateral relations deteriorated seriously, the stakes of disentanglement would now be higher on both sides.

Other concerns linger. Türkiye’s defence industry, having surged dramatically since 2019, now competes in some of the same global markets as Italian firms — with lower production costs and a greater willingness to transfer technology to buyers in the Middle East and Africa. Questions remain about intellectual property arrangements, political influence in Turkish procurement, and whether Ankara can sustain its defence spending growth amid significant economic pressures at home. Turkey ranked 17th among global military spenders in 2024 with a defence budget of $25 billion, up 12 per cent from the previous year and more than double its 2015 level, an impressive growth, but not without vulnerabilities.

And yet the bilateral relationship has repeatedly demonstrated a capacity to absorb political friction and continue on an industrial track. From the Draghi government’s multilateralism to Meloni’s more assertive bilateralism, Italian policy toward Ankara has evolved in style but maintained a common thread: Türkiye is too important for Mediterranean security, for Libya, for migration, and now for drone production to be kept at arm’s length.

Conclusion

The Italy-Türkiye defence relationship is not a simple alliance story. It is a case study in what modern strategic partnership actually looks like: two countries with overlapping interests and diverging values, choosing cooperation not out of ideological alignment but out of mutual need. But stepping back from this specific case, there is a broader and more uncomfortable truth worth sitting with. Dependencies in defence, and more generally in the interconnected world, are not anomalies or policy failures. They are the normal condition of modern statehood. Indeed, almost no country, large or wealthy, produces everything it needs to defend itself, power its economy, or feed its population. The question is never really whether to be dependent, but on whom, on what terms, and with what degree of awareness about what you are trading away.

What makes the defence sector distinctive is that the stakes of getting this wrong are unusually high. A supply chain disruption in consumer electronics is costly. A supply chain disruption in critical military components, or a partner who decides to leverage shared technology at a moment of crisis, can be something else entirely. This is why the Italy-Türkiye case is worth watching beyond its immediate industrial details. It is a live experiment of whether two countries can sustain deep structural interdependence, while holding genuinely different views on some of the most contested questions in contemporary geopolitics: Russia, the Middle East, the boundaries of NATO solidarity, the meaning of European sovereignty.

History offers no clean answer. Sometimes interdependence stabilises relationships that politics alone would fracture: commercial entanglement gives both sides a reason to keep talking, to absorb friction rather than escalate it. Sometimes it does the opposite: it raises the stakes of conflict and creates leverage that a less scrupulous partner is tempted to use. The difference often lies not in the structure of the relationship but in the choices made within it, and in the quality of the institutions and agreements that govern it.

What LBA Systems signals, then, is not just an industrial milestone but a political bet — that the benefits of cooperation are worth the vulnerabilities it creates, and that those vulnerabilities can be managed through contract, through NATO frameworks, through the slow accumulation of mutual interest. Whether that bet pays off depends less on the industrial merits — which are real — than on how Rome and Ankara will navigate the turbulence that may shadow their relationship.

Questions for the Reader

1. Does LBA Systems represent a model for how EU states can access advanced drone technology outside the traditional Western supply chain or does it set a risky precedent?
2. Italy and Türkiye cooperate economically while competing in Libya, diverging on Gaza, and adopting different postures toward Russia. Is this level of political friction sustainable within a deepening defence partnership?
3. What does it mean for sovereignty when a country’s domestic production capacity is co-owned with a foreign partner?

Suggested Redings

1. Galeotti, Mark. The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.
2. Chiriatti, Alessia. “Unlocking Strategic Potential Outside the EU: Italy-Turkey Bilateral Partnership in Defence.” Documenti IAI No. 26|02. Rome: Istituto Affari Internazionali, March 2026.
3. Henry Farrell, Abraham L. Newman; Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion. International Security 2019; 44 (1): 42–79.