In 1999, the military was quick to respond to disaster. In 2023, Erdogan’s reforms left it hobbled and unprepared. Ozgur Ozkan analyzes in Foreign Policy on February 24, 2023.
In 1999, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake struck near Marmara, Turkey, causing close to 18,000 deaths and leaving tens of thousands more people injured, displaced, or sorting through the rubble of their collapsed city. The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) mobilized immediately, and within the first 48 hours, it deployed approximately 65,000 personnel to lead the search, rescue, evacuation, and sheltering efforts. Soldiers went beyond their active military duties to operate field hospitals, tent cities, and mobile kitchens to affected citizens, ultimately proving crucial to the country’s recovery from the disaster.
More than two decades later, another tragedy has struck Turkey as well as parts of northern Syria in one of the deadliest quakes in recent history. Yet this time, the TSK spent the most critical 48 hours following the disaster mostly watching. In that time window, only around 7,500 personnel were deployed—just over one-tenth of the response for the Marmara earthquake. As the death toll surpasses 41,000 people in total, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s heavy-handed disaster response has received extensive criticism from all segments of Turkish society, particularly for the TSK’s delayed and inadequate participation in recovery efforts.
In the 21st century, countries around the world have increasingly utilized their militaries to respond to epidemics and natural disasters with great success. Why, then, has an opposite trend emerged in Turkey?
The TSK’s slow and inefficient response was not due to its members’ lack of motivation or incompetence but rather the drastic institutional transformation that has taken place under Erdogan.
When Erdogan entered office as prime minister in 2003, the TSK enjoyed enormous power and prestige in Turkey’s political system. Although it stayed out of day-to-day domestic politics, it was the main force steering anything deemed a national security issue. At the time, however, the military was widely seen as an impediment to the country’s political liberalization and a threat by Islamists like Erdogan due to its staunchly secular worldview and intolerance toward political Islam.
Erdogan’s primary objectives were to tame and coup-proof the military, which was known for political interventions, as well as to prevail over his bureaucratic opponents. Initially as part of democratic reforms carried out for European Union membership, he radically reformed the TSK and, in doing so, gradually consolidated his control over the country’s most powerful institution, creating a highly centralized and partisan civil-military structure.
Since 2000, the TSK has been effectively cut in half by dismissals, the imprisonment of thousands of officers, and broader efforts to professionalize and slim down the military. Most significant—yet largely ignored—among these reforms was the new conscription lawof 2019, which shortened adult males’ mandatory military service obligation and expanded paid conscription exemptions.
Under Erdogan’s new military-bureaucratic structure, critical leadership positions are allocated based on political loyalty, often at the expense of merit. For example, senior leadership of the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), the government institution that holds the primary responsibility for disaster and emergency response, is dominated by bureaucrats with no expertise or experience in this area. Further, the general manager of disaster response, perhaps the most critical role for this particular issue, is still occupied by a political loyalist whose expertise and experience is in theology and religious affairs.
Through years of reform, the TSK has become a smaller, more professionalized force made up of full-time soldiers rather than conscripts. Although it is a politically more controllable force, it is not a more efficient one. While this structure has freed Erdogan from bureaucratic resistance and permitted him nearly unlimited freedom in the use of military force abroad in places like Syria and Libya, it has also decimated the TSK’s human capital and depths of experience as well as created important vulnerabilities in the army’s effectiveness in both combat and noncombat duties, especially those that require quick reactions, initiative-taking, and flexibility, such as natural disasters.
Broadly speaking, the main practical goal of Erdogan’s civil-military reforms has been to strip the TSK of its domestic responsibilities and turn it into a force focused only on external security. From 2007 to 2013 and later from 2016 to 2018, various legal and structural alterations toward this end have undermined the military’s responsibility and capacity to respond to natural disasters and other emergencies.
In 2009, for example, 15 regional commands for disaster preparedness—one of which was located very close to the recent earthquake’s epicenter—were abolished after the establishment of the AFAD, a group that reports directly to the prime minister’s office. Natural disaster and assistance exercises, periodically held at every unit level in the TSK since the early 2000s, were also terminated. The TSK’s field medic capabilities vanished after Erdogan jettisoned the medical command and military hospitals as part of post-2016 coup attempt reforms. In this short time, the Turkish army squandered the high-level preparedness and experience it had gained from the 1999 earthquake.
With few remaining domestic responsibilities, the TSK has been redirected to take on more outward-facing missions. In 2013, the army took over most responsibility for border security from the Gendarmerie, Turkey’s provincial law enforcement agency. For Erdogan, this move was advantageous for fending off a potential coup because it kept the soldiers occupied and far away from the capital. It has, however, spread Turkish troops thin and distracted them from their primary combat and peacetime duties.
This focus on border security also comes as Turkey increases its involvement in many other ongoing cross-border operations, stretching its reserves even thinner. Currently, service members are deployed abroad in countries varying from Syria and Iraq to Libya and Qatar, representing a majority of the army’s standing combat forces. Of the troops remaining within the country, the bulk of them are deployed to Turkey’s southern border, leaving a limited number of military units available to intervene in disaster zones.
Despite the overconcentration of Turkish troops in northern Syria and on the border, no units were moved to the neighboring disaster zone within the first 72 hours after the earthquake. This was mostly due to planning and coordination problems, but it could also have been influenced by Erdogan’s political calculus. Many critics believeErdogan is worried that such a move would boost the army’s public prestige and undermine his hard-earned monopoly on control. Research suggests an army that has cordial ties with its people is less manipulable and conducive to being used in domestic repression efforts. Thus, any enhanced popularity gained from disaster recovery efforts would bode ill for Erdogan’s authoritarian vision. He may be worried that a venerable military sympathetic to its people may not be fully compliant to—or even defy—his increasingly repressive regime.
Fortunately for Erdogan, the TSK has dropped in popularity in recent years, and social trust in the military has fallen from about 90 percent to around 60 percent in the last decade. The TSK is no longer Turkey’s most reliable state institution, and Erdogan seems content keeping it that way—even at the expense of the earthquake’s most vulnerable victims.
Erdogan has thus far been able to use propaganda to cover up the Turkish military’s mediocre performance in foreign interventionswhile compensating for any shortcomings with newfound drone technology. But he can no longer hide the structural weaknesses of Turkey’s military from public view when they are exposed within its own borders.
Despite being NATO’s second-largest army, the TSK under Erdogan has become an institution that struggles to carry out auxiliary but crucial tasks, including disaster response, when they are needed most. Erdogan’s paranoia and ruthless restructuring of Turkish institutions have neither prevented a coup attempt nor enhanced the Turkish army’s performance in combat. Rather, as the death toll rises and the extent of the quake’s destruction is further revealed, it’s clear that most state institutions have been undermined of their most basic purpose: keeping Turkish citizens safe. The people of Turkey have already paid the price of their president’s obsession with centralized power and partisan control; what remains to be seen is whether Erdogan will eventually pay it too in upcoming elections.
Ozgur Ozkan is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Before pursuing his doctoral studies, Ozkan served as an army officer in the Turkish Armed Forces and NATO.