BORA! BORA! BORA!

Aaron Stein 0:02

Or they could just be run over by a Belarusian origin truck.

Jeffrey Lewis 0:09

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron 0:25

And I'm Aaron Stein, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Refugee Career Center for the Middle East.

Scott LaFoy 0:30

And hey guys, I'm Scott LaFoy, former Masters candidate, and as of noon today, Masters graduate. Hey, congratulations!

Aaron 0:40

Thank you. Congratulations, Scott. I mean, I think you chose the worst day in the history of recent DC history to sit outside for a couple of hours.

Scott 0:48

It's the worst. I'm so dehydrated.

Jeffrey 0:51

Sorry, is that because it's nasty and hot there?

Scott 0:54

Yeah, it's like 92.

Jeffrey 0:55

Oh, I wouldn't know anything about that.

Scott 0:58

I hate you.

Aaron 0:59

Yeah, we're not going to talk about California weather and whales frolicking and wine. Not this week. We say the wine podcast was last week about France.

Jeffrey 1:09

Aaron, we are resurrecting the Turkey Wonk podcast.

Aaron 1:13

It's Turkey Week in Washington, D.C. We had a visit from His Eminence, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

Jeffrey 1:20

Roughed up some demonstrators.

Aaron 1:22

Capped off a rather short 24 hours in D.C. with sort of a phony welcome speech. The president to Washington staged rally outside of the Blair House, and we capped it off with a fight outside of the ambassador's residence on Embassy Row. Quite the spectacle.

Jeffrey 1:41

But following true arms control wonk podcast practice, if you test a new missile, you get a podcast.

Aaron 1:51

You know, and we're not talking about North Korea.

Jeffrey 1:54

And we're not talking about North Korea because the Turks tested a, quote, new, close quote, missile?

Aaron 2:02

That's right. They fired off up on the Black Sea coast from Sinop a 280-kilometer missile they are calling the Bora. The Borat? The Bora, which means storm in Turkish. They rolled it out, too, at the Istanbul Defense Forum, or IDEF, 2017.

Jeffrey 2:26

Okay, so we have a missile test with some not very great video that we'll put up on the Slack channel. And we've got slightly better images of at least the vehicle and the canisters from IDAF. And maybe a picture of the missile in an illustration that's released as part of a brochure. Does that represent more or less our open source knowledge of the nitty gritty of this missile?

Aaron 2:52

Yeah, you know, surprisingly, Googling around to find as many images as possible, there just aren't that many, and they're grainy, and they look like people either took them out of a magazine or the actual stand itself.

Jeffrey 3:03

Yeah, and I get the sense that some of them, the marketing materials, aren't actually pictures, right? They're Photoshop jobs that have been put together, like the one of the – this is one where the vehicle is sort of sitting there, and the canisters are sort of turned at a dramatic angle, and it's firing over the head of the photographer.

Yeah.

Aaron 3:23

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Jeffrey 3:24

I'm not sure I believe that that's a real picture.

Aaron 3:26

Yeah, it looks like computer animation, Photoshop, yeah. And so on top of grainy pictures, we're not sure if they're really accurate pictures.

Jeffrey 3:35

And so I guess we want to talk about what we think the missile is. And we know what the vehicle is now, thanks to a little bit of open source sleuthing. And maybe once we sort of establish what these things are, maybe we can try to understand what it is that Turkey thinks it needs missiles for and what we think the future of the Turkish missile program is.

Aaron 3:55

How does that sound? Yeah, that sounds like a perfect way to go about it.

Jeffrey 3:58

So the easy thing is the vehicle. Right, right. Because they didn't bother to sandblast off the manufacturer's name.

Aaron 4:07

No, and this was interesting because, again, the grainy pictures. We spent, I think, about 20 minutes furiously Googling with a lot of expletives on my part about getting very, very excited when we figured out what it was.

Jeffrey 4:20

I only issued one expletive and it was enjoy. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a Belarusian heavy vehicle made by Volat.

Aaron 4:35

Right. Which surprised me a little bit, you know, because when you read about these things in the Turkish press, they're very, you know, they're very interesting. They go out of their way to say that everything is indigenously manufactured because this becomes a salient political point for the ruling party. Weapons designs are thought of in terms of Turkey achieving its maximum economic and self-sufficient potential.

And the vehicle and Belarus do not go together in my mind. And so I was really excited to learn that the vehicle this thing is on was of Belarusian origin.

Jeffrey 5:14

Oh, well, you know, the Chinese, so Belarus had the big factory that made all of the Soviet missile transporters. And so those, you know, the Chinese did a ton of cooperation with Belarus. It's funny because when we first looked at the image, you know, I actually kind of thought it looked like a Chinese transporter. But that's because the Chinese transporters look like Belarusian transporters because there was a bunch of text transfer.

But they left the Volat logo on.

Aaron 5:43

Right. As the only one on this pod who is not an expert in Chinese missiles, this is news to me. And we sort of had an inkling that the origins of the Bora could be Chinese because the Turks have had a sort of interest in ballistic missiles since the 1990s. And it goes back to actually failed sales agreements with the United States.

First, for the joint production technology transfer, the M270 MLRS artillery rocket system, but also for the sale of ATAKOMs. And this leads to something in Turkey called Project J, which people don't know a lot about. It's this idea that you can build a surface-to-surface missile Ballistic missile and then there's rumors or at least reports in multiple different Turkish newspapers that it comes about, at least the initial looks into Project J are based upon a deal with China and then particularly the B611 SRBM as the ultimate sort of test vehicle or at least the initial technology transfer and sale of the origins of the Turkish ballistic missile program.

Jeffrey 7:03

Yeah, I guess the thing to observe is that the vehicles may be made in Belarus, but Belarus does not export solid-fueled ballistic missiles. And so clearly we had to look elsewhere. And I mean, to me, the canister... Really looks Chinese which is kind of, I guess, that's a weird thing to say. I mean, you know, you canister is not really I mean, it is functional, but there's a lot of stuff on it that's just kind of aesthetic, you know, just choices you make about about how it looks.

But the canisters really looked Chinese to me. And, you know, the thing is, the Chinese have, like, a whole bunch of these solid-fueled, short-range ballistic missiles that they have made available for export, right? So... There is this series of the B611s, right, which we in the U.S. call the CSS9, which it could be. There is this, we call it the CSS14.

It's either the P12 or the BP12A is the longer range one. And there's also something called the M-20 and there's something called the S-Y-400. I mean, it's like a ton of different choices. So I'm not sure that we can sort of confidently get at exactly what it is. But I do think it's pretty clear that it's one of those because they released some technical specifications on it, right?

Aaron 8:34

Yeah. Yeah. It was an interview with the defense minister, Fikri Ishik, and he said it has a range of 250, 280 kilometers, excuse me, with a 450 kilogram warhead.

Jeffrey 8:45

And I noticed that they, Roketsan, the company that makes this, put out something that looks also the same. And they called it the Khan missile. Did they just change the name on that?

Aaron 8:57

It's Boracan.

Jeffrey 8:58

It's Boracan.

Aaron 8:59

That's why. Okay.

Jeffrey 9:01

Yeah. Okay. And, you know, that is, I mean, the interesting things about that, and, you know, maybe Scott would want to jump in, but that had a 470 kilogram warhead weight, which, you know, for all intents and purposes for these things, it's the same. But said it was a composite solid. All of that points back to China which is exactly the sort of place where you might go get a missile of, you know, almost exactly these specifications. I mean, I think we were looking at some of the descriptions of the you know, marketing materials, and I, I ended up.

Which one did I end up focusing on? I think it's the BP-12A is my top candidate for this sucker. Not that it matters, right? Because if it turns out it's the BP-12A or if it's the B-611M, I mean, they're all, you know, it's all the same kind of underlying reality, which is the Chinese are assisting the Turks in building these.

Aaron 10:05

And I would assume that there's an in-country production line. I don't think that they're importing the missile basically as is. But one thing that's interesting about this is, you know, I called the Bora and the Khan the same. I mean, they are the same, but the Khan is the designated export version.

Scott 10:23

Ah.

Aaron 10:24

Whereas the Bora is the internal version. Okay. And so it does look like one of the aspects that they would like to do is to basically re-export what they exported with their initial agreement with the Chinese after they manufacture it locally.

Jeffrey 10:41

Oh, that's interesting.

Aaron 10:43

They're looking at this as potential Turkish solid fuel, Chinese derivative export. And I think they showed it off in Abu Dhabi.

Jeffrey 10:58

Oh. Well, yeah, I think it's one of the reasons why I'm not too hung up on the specifics, because the MTCR, the Missile Technology Control Regime, draws this line for missiles that have a 500-kilogram payload and can go more than 300 kilometers. I think it is not an accident that all of these Chinese missiles for sale and that the Turkish missile for sale will be said to have...

470 or 450 kilogram payloads and we'll go 280 kilometers, right? It's all going to fall just shy of those MTCR thresholds, even if actually probably the reality is I suspect they might even get a little bit above that. But, you know, obviously this is just self-reporting, so I suspect people would self-report slightly under the limit.

Aaron 11:51

Yeah, I mean... But, I mean, I guess... Within the Turkish context, this always brings up the proliferation question. Are they reacting to, I guess, it was usually within the context of the Iranian case about pressures to try and develop their own ballistic missile force. And so what I think is interesting, asking two Chinese missile experts, is how does China use these systems?

And perhaps we can glean what Turkey wants to use these systems for.

Jeffrey 12:22

Well, you know, I mean, the Chinese case is really interesting because the initial development of these systems, these short-range, solid-fueled ballistic missiles, was for export. I mean, as far as I can tell, the Chinese expectation was that these things would be sold to Pakistan and other countries. And it's kind of only later... That the second artillery comes along and it's like no those are those are really nice like we'd like some of those and so i think a desire for expert export earnings actually drove the development of the capability but then the the chinese military i think well at least the second artillery found that it was great to get out of the nuclear weapons business and into the conventionally armed missile business where they they could i think play a pretty a more active role

Aaron 13:17

Yeah, I mean, in Raketsan, there's been a directive down from this current government is to basically build out the indigenous defense sector. And one of the areas in which they are focusing on is on missile technology. And so a lot of the things that's driving... Turkish interests are not just for battlefield use, but also can they set up the internal production line and then build an indigenous capability to then be able to sustain high technology, in their words, exports to advance their economy.

And so in a way, I see some parallels to the To the Chinese case is that, yes, there are battlefield applications, but it also is part of a broader government-down effort to try and create new industries in Turkey for exports.

Jeffrey 14:13

So you actually think that the interest here is export-oriented and industry-oriented and not necessarily being driven by any particular requirement of the Turkish Armed Forces?

Aaron 14:26

I think it's both. I mean, I think, you know, In the 90s, they clearly identified a gap in being able to strike targets with ballistic missiles. You just look at their neighbors. It was Iraq and Iran at that time. And you come out of the Iran-Iraq War and the prominent role played by ballistic missiles. And then the Gulf War, you know, where Tomahawk came on the scene.

And obviously this isn't Tomahawk, but they have a concurrent cruise missile program as well. But you see how it gets gummed up and slowed down because they don't want to buy off the shelf. And so they did buy Atacoms from the United States. I believe it was 72. But they were pissed off, you know, because of the technology transfer limitations in place on U.S. suppliers.

And so that becomes the genesis for the early talks of the Chinese, according to most reports. And you can see the slow development of this, you know, from the mid-1990s and now we're up in 2017. I think that largely focuses on things slowing down because of the complicated negotiations off of how do you set up offsets, Chinese production lines that are moved into Turkey and then the integration of Turkish components with Chinese systems to then push out.

This is what you see in the missile defense talks, first with China and then now with Russia and then with the US and European suppliers as well. It's not just about buying the system. It's like we want to basically understand how the engine works.

Jeffrey 15:55

Huh, that's interesting. So do you think that that means the Turks master this particular missile system and then spend their time marketing it? Or do you think that this is the bridge to a capability that results in increasingly longer-range missiles? Both. Oh, okay.

Aaron 16:18

I think that's both. One thing that you see in the domestic media reports is Is that you have seen various Turkish ministers say that the intention is to get up to 2,500 kilometers on the ballistic missile side.

Jeffrey 16:31

Oh, really? Yeah, really.

Aaron 16:34

You've even seen some sort of wacky stuff about having independent space launch capability from a while back. I would say in the 2013-ish era. So I guess I'm going to flip it back to you guys. I mean, was this the basis for China to then build out longer range missiles? Or as you just said, was this more export focused from the outset?

Jeffrey 16:56

Well, from the outset, it was export focused. But then I think the the second artillery which was the which is China's missile force. And this is the question I want to ask you about Turkey, which is how they're going to organize for this. But you had this independent entity, the second artillery which Wanted service autonomy and they wanted control over their mission area and they wanted a capability that was pretty useful. I mean, the, the old nuclear plan was okay, if there's a war, you guys go hide in caves and you're like, we'll call you if we need you. And I, I think like if you're the Second Artillery, you're like, that's a sucky mission, yeah and so.

So the second artillery was very much like conventional missile capabilities allow us to participate in a wide range of scenarios and participate in a way in which we're playing a leading and important role. And so you had this bureaucratic entity which moved aggressively to develop a very different doctrine for its conventional missiles than it had for its nuclear ones.

And so I guess my question is, is the Turkish... Military is the, is the missile force, is it going to be subordinate to the army, in which case it's glorified artillery or you know, is it like when the Saudis did it, they did it through their air defense force and then sort of separated off this independent arm and created this, you know, separate bureaucratic entity, like what kind of organizational future do you see for the Turkish military handling long-range missiles? Yeah, I think it's going to be glorified artillery.

Aaron 18:33

But in this case, for this particular system, I think it's going to try and replicate elements of the ATACMS that the U.S. uses. And so I think that that's actually the goal of this. But the longer range systems, and in particular, I mean, you're sort of really… This is all theoretical. You know what I mean? Whether or not they actually have the capabilities to indigenously design this.

And if they don't, you start to run those MDCR restrictions, of course, right? You know, about longer range systems. I mean, on the cruise missile side, you can see it through the Air Force. But on the ballistic missile side, you know, to be honest, I don't know. It's a little wishy-washy because it's so new inside of Turkey.

And you are having pushdown. I think a lot of this is pushdown from actually the elected civilian government that imposed these technology transfer requirements on procurement more than the military, which I think at some time would like to speed up the procurement of these systems through buying off the shelf. And I think that that is actually where some frictions come up between the two sides.

Jeffrey 19:43

And I, I admit, I don't know anything about Turkey's military. So one, one question I have is, I mean, is Turkey a, a lot of countries are, you know, they have one particularly dominant force, right? So in China forever, it was the ground forces. Obviously in the UK, it was the Royal Navy. Is Turkey a, an army centric country or is it a country where the air force is particularly important?

Aaron 20:09

It's an army. It's the largest component. You know, it's certainly – yeah, it's an army. I would say the second would be the Air Force. Then the third would be the Navy in terms of ranking of the services, in terms of importance. Artillery has a special sort of resonance because of its legacy within the Turkish Armed Forces.

So that's why I presume it will be through the artillery – through the army, excuse me.

Jeffrey 20:35

But these things haven't actually been deployed yet, right? This is one of the very first tests that we've seen, or is it the first test?

Aaron 20:40

I think it's the second test. It's either the first or the second. It is a relatively new system. And again, I think that it is because it's a relatively new system, but again, it's instructive. Because if we go by sort of the lineage of this, They clearly didn't buy it off the shelf. There was clearly some sort of effort to involve technology transfer here so that you set up a Turkish line.

And it is through that there, those bureaucratic, I guess, elements of the program that slow down deployment. And I think that that goes to show when you're trying to understand why they need or why they think they need 280-kilometer missile.

Scott 21:29

Mm-hmm.

Aaron 21:30

I mean, they may have real battlefield wants, and the Army may really want it. I mean, they have used battlefield rockets firing into Syria, for example, recently. But you have a civilian side that really wants not just the missile, but they want to know how to build it so they can build their own defense industry.

Jeffrey 21:57

Wow. The Boracan.

Aaron 21:59

Yeah, the Boracan. Exactly. It's not as interesting as protesters fighting in Washington.

Jeffrey 22:10

Well, what if they used a Boracan missile on the protesters?

Aaron 22:14

I don't know. Or they could just be run over by a Belarusian origin truck.

Jeffrey 22:23

They hit them with the Borcon missile and then the Volat comes and just sort of squishes the rest of everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why not?

Aaron 22:31

What else? Sort of odd thing, scratching thing. My country of expertise can exercise my – can bog down my week in a whole bunch of nonsense. Dr. Stein, what do you think about the fight outside of Embassy Row? Tell me.

Jeffrey 22:46

Wow. That's pretty interesting. Scott, did you want to jump in and say anything?

Scott 22:54

Just adding on to the bit about the institutional thing on the Chinese legacy of it, that sounds almost exactly like my understanding of the Chinese program. I just did a lengthy capstone paper about sort of the institutional incentives behind a sustained conventional ballistic missile program. And the Chinese one does emerge not only out of, it does emerge out of exports, like Jeffrey said.

And it's essentially sustained because the exports fail, more or less, because of normative MTR, blah, MTCR compliance. And the second artillery turns into the customer. And then you have the second artillery and the space industry, both as customers, like independent customers that are just funneling money into it. And then expanding their budgets with successes. So that just strikes me as obtaining these for export and domestic production just seems as particularly matching the Chinese arc if they create an independent rocket force.

If they don't, I think that's probably going to wither.

Aaron 24:05

You know, it makes the R&D into these programs easier to swallow on the budgetary side if they find viable export markets. Exactly.

Scott 24:14

Yeah, if they find viable export markets or if they have their own internal real heavy-hitting customer. The Second Artillery wasn't an independent service until it became the Rocket Forces in 2016. But even before then, it was, what do they call it, an independent branch treated like a service, I believe was what it was. So it was at the same budgetary meetings that the Navy and the Air Force and the ground forces were.

So instead of having an army general who has to lobby for his own funding and distribute that between, do you want tanks? Do you want R&D on artillery systems? Do you want missiles? You had someone who was always there fighting for the expansion of the missile forces. So putting that mission as an independent thing... Seems to have a positive, at least in the research I was doing, has a positive correlation with a very expansive, progressive, conventional missile program.

Jeffrey 25:15

Well, and to pick up on that, I mean, that is precisely what we found a couple weeks ago when we looked at Israel's interest in selling Jericho derivatives to Iran and Taiwan, and ultimately the reason they did sell them to South Korea, which is missile development programs are really expensive. And bureaucratically, it's hard to go to the central government to get those resources because you're competing with everyone else.

And if you can open up an independent source of revenue... You can then defray your costs. And so I think the Israelis were quite explicit with the United States when they were looking at making sales to Iran in saying that the advantage of selling what they called a poor man's lance, which was a cut down Jericho, and then eventually the Jericho was getting money to fund the development of the Jericho too.

So it wouldn't surprise me at all If you saw that same thing happening in in Turkey, where there was a kind of emphasis on getting this revenue stream going, and that revenue stream creates a kind of autonomy. And then as you say, right, you just like the second artillery, it starts being very, I think, bureaucratically weak. But over time, acquires that bureaucratic strength.

And part of that is money, but part of that also is showing that you have a real role to play in different scenarios.

Aaron 26:38

What's interesting about this relationship between China and Turkey, I mean, just joking, is where I think they signed the agreement for this, the bilateral agreement for this, was in 2009. Which was a time when there was a high-level diplomatic and military visit between the two countries. And what's really interesting about that is just a couple months later, I guess it was September or October 2010, they held a joint Air Force operation training exercise, which made news at the time because it was a NATO Air Force essentially holding a bilateral – Military exercise with China.

And so you can see that there are sort of the but I think are the linkages or the the, the, the, I guess the genesis of what became the Borica.

Jeffrey 27:40

Hey, Aaron, thank you for joining me, of course. Scott, thanks for jumping in. How are things going over on the Slack channel?

Scott 27:49

Slack channel's going great. We have a really vibrant community of people who really enjoy hanging out with each other, sharing documents. We've started a Google Drive where we're keeping all of our distributable academic articles that are open source, not protected by journal licensing, declassified documents, old maps, just a A whole bunch of neat, not only things that are interesting if you're sort of a hobbyist in this sort of thing, but genuine academic resources.

I believe we've got a couple folks who are working on putting together a collection of imagery analysis resources, like how to sort of get into it and how to, you know, methodologies stuff. So it's going real well. All that for a mere three bucks a month.

Jeffrey 28:41

So if you like the podcast, consider supporting us through our Patreon page. As Scott says, for $3 a month, you can have access to our Slack channel. If you don't want to do that, at least consider leaving us a review on iTunes. Positive reviews on iTunes are a good way to spread the word about the podcast. And even if you don't do any of those things, thank you for listening.