March 3, 2015
The awareness was there. So was the ambition to make cyber security the country’s “fifth force.” Events in a span of less than two years have shown that Turkey is still too far away from building reliable defenses against cyber threats.Only a couple of months after a Turkish colonel publicly pledged to build the country’s “fifth [military] force,” Turkey proved to be too vulnerable to security threats from an unknown enemy.
In January 2014, the embarrassing news over the Turkish gendarmerie’s search of trucks carrying a generous cargo of weapons and ammunition bound for Syria, and accompanied by intelligence officers, fell into the public domain. After much wrangling between different state agencies, a court ruled for a complete media blackout on the incident. The gendarmerie officers who searched the trucks now stand in court for espionage.