The 36th North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders’ summit opened in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Tuesday, July 7, with the alliance’s first Defense Industry Forum ever embedded inside a summit programme. The one-day forum, held on the margins of the two-day summit, produced a cluster of multinational procurement announcements totalling several tens of billions of U.S. dollars, all of them framed by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte as building blocks of a pledge made a year earlier to lift allied defence spending toward five percent of gross domestic product by 2035.
Speaking in his opening remarks, Rutte argued that there could be “no strong defence without a strong defence industry”, and called on member governments and Western defence contractors to accelerate procurement, deepen cooperation and expand production capacity across the transatlantic supply chain. He was joined by NATO Deputy Secretary General Radmila Šekerinska, who chaired several of the plenary sessions on integrated air and missile defence, strike capabilities, and space and surveillance.
The forum’s headline announcement was a new counter-drone programme branded “NATO Drone Edge”. Under the initiative, member states have committed to invest more than forty billion U.S. dollars over the next five years in systems designed to detect, identify and neutralise unmanned aerial vehicles. Rutte said the effort was a direct response to what he described as the drone becoming a defining feature of modern warfare, referring to combat experience in Ukraine and the Middle East. Allies also pledged to train five times as many drone operators by the end of 2027, and to build up a NATO-wide capacity to field unmanned platforms at scale.
Three major joint procurement packages accompanied the counter-drone effort. Denmark, Finland, Germany and Norway will together buy up to five MQ-4C Triton high-altitude, long-endurance maritime surveillance drones from a U.S. manufacturer, giving the alliance a common capability for wide-area ocean patrol. Eleven allies signed a letter of intent to procure up to ten Saab-built GlobalEye airborne early warning and control aircraft, intended to replace fourteen ageing E-3A Sentry aircraft that have been in NATO service for close to five decades. A tenth Airbus A330 multi-role tanker transport was also delivered into the alliance’s shared refuelling and transport fleet.
On the industrial side, Rutte unveiled a Front Door platform aimed at simplifying access to alliance contracts for private defence companies, and a 2.8-billion-dollar industrial cooperation package under which U.S. manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin, will partner with European firms to co-produce U.S.-designed weapons on European soil. As part of the same push, Lockheed Martin and Rheinmetall signed a memorandum of understanding at the forum to jointly produce the Army Tactical Missile System in Germany, the first time the short-range ballistic missile will be assembled outside the United States. A separate NATO Engine initiative was launched to knit military and civilian production lines more tightly together, and Rutte issued a public call for banks and investment funds to increase capital flows into the defence sector.
Türkiye, in its role as host, used the forum to profile its own expanding defence industry and announced plans to contribute two domestically produced observation satellites to NATO’s space surveillance architecture. Several allies, including Türkiye, launched additional joint procurement initiatives to enlarge NATO’s strategic transport and aerial refuelling fleets. According to alliance materials, more than one hundred defence company executives took part in the forum, which NATO officials described as the largest industry gathering ever held on the sidelines of a summit.
The forum coincided with a bilateral meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the first visit by a sitting U.S. president to Türkiye since 2015. Speaking to reporters during the on-camera portion of the meeting, Trump said Washington would lift sanctions imposed on Ankara under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, telling Erdogan that “we don’t want to sanction friends.” Those sanctions were introduced in December 2020 after Türkiye received the first components of the Russian-made S-400 air defence system in 2019, a step that also led to the country’s removal from the F-35 fifth-generation fighter programme.
Trump added that he would “certainly consider” restoring F-35 sales to Türkiye and that he was coordinating a final decision with the U.S. Secretary of State and Defence Secretary. Erdogan, standing beside him, said the F-35 question was not a new item on the bilateral agenda and that Türkiye had previously received commitments from Washington on aircraft deliveries. Analysts noted that although the U.S. administration can move to terminate CAATSA sanctions administratively, the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act still bars the transfer of F-35 aircraft to Türkiye unless Ankara no longer possesses the S-400 system and Washington certifies to Congress that the system has been removed. Any such move would also trigger a congressional review period.
The prospect of F-35 sales to Türkiye drew criticism from Israel. In a broadcast interview aired ahead of the summit, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced opposition to the sale of the aircraft and of compatible U.S.-made engines to Ankara, arguing that such a transfer would alter the regional military balance.
Reaction inside Türkiye was mixed. On Tuesday, anti-NATO rallies were held in Ankara, where students, socialist groups and lawmakers gathered to oppose what they described as the alliance’s expanding defence budgets. Larger demonstrations had taken place over the preceding weekend, with protesters in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir arguing that pressure to prioritise military spending was diverting resources from public services.
Analysts also flagged unresolved structural obstacles behind the day’s announcements. Ozgur Eksi, an Ankara-based defence and security expert quoted by Xinhua, told the news agency that balancing national defence industries against collective security would require overcoming long-standing competition among allies protecting their domestic firms. Foreign policy analyst Serkan Demirtas argued that while there was broad agreement that production needed to expand, reaching consensus on production roles, cost-sharing arrangements and how industrial benefits are distributed remains the harder task. Countries with well-established defence sectors, including Türkiye, are seeking a larger role in the alliance’s industrial architecture, while some traditional producers remain cautious about opening procurement and technology-sharing arrangements.
The summit continues on Wednesday, when leaders are expected to address continued support for Ukraine, coordination on burden-sharing between the United States and European allies, and the practical steps each capital will submit to demonstrate progress toward the five-percent-of-GDP defence spending target. Rutte has said each government must present a “clear, specific and credible” plan for reaching that ceiling by 2035, of which 3.5 percent is to be spent on core military capability and the remaining share on broader security-related investment.
For now, the Ankara summit’s opening day marks a shift in tone within the alliance. Where previous editions were dominated by strategic communiqués, this year’s forum was designed to translate those political commitments into signed procurement contracts, industrial partnerships and financing calls — a signal, in the words of alliance officials, that NATO is moving from a discussion phase to an ordering phase against the backdrop of continued fighting in Eastern Europe and unresolved tensions in the Middle East.
