# INVESTIGATION: NATO Ankara Summit — Behind the Billions Announced, Who's Really Winning the Contracts?

> On June 25, 2026, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte stood before the Atlantic Council in Washington and announced something remarkable: the Ankara summit scheduled for July 7-8, 2026 would see the signing of new defense contracts worth tens of billions of dollars. The words thems

- Author: Maxime Marquette
- Publisher: MadMax (https://mad-max.co)
- Section: Investigation
- Published: 2026-06-27
- Canonical URL: https://mad-max.co/en/article/sommet-otan-ankara-derriere-les-milliards-annonces-qui-decroche-vraiment-les-con

## Introduction: Tens of Billions of Dollars and a Summit That Promises to Be Historic

### Rutte's announcement at the Atlantic Council

On **June 25, 2026**, **NATO Secretary General** Mark Rutte stood before the **Atlantic Council** in Washington and announced something remarkable: the Ankara summit scheduled for **July 7-8, 2026** would see the signing of **new defense contracts worth tens of billions of dollars**. The words themselves were not surprising — NATO summits always produce spending announcements. What was surprising was the scale, the precision, and the context: a military **alliance** in the midst of an existential debate about its own relevance, attempting to demonstrate that its members can spend not only their words, but their money.

The backdrop to this announcement is a target that has fundamentally shifted the political terrain of the **alliance**: **5% of GDP in defense spending by 2035**. This figure, which would have seemed fantastical **five years** ago, is now the official objective. For comparison, the legendary 2% threshold — long considered unattainable by most allies — has become the floor, not the ceiling. The Ankara summit is supposed to translate this ambition into concrete contracts, concrete manufacturers, and concrete deliveries. The question that no official communiqué will answer: who, exactly, receives the billions?

### Three contract categories at the heart of the negotiations

According to analyses published before the summit, three categories of contracts dominate the negotiations. First, **deep strike capabilities** — long-range precision rocket systems like the **HIMARS** or its competitors. Second, **air defense systems (ADF)** — the most contested and most expensive market, where American manufacturers have historically dominated but are increasingly facing competition. Third, **autonomous systems** — drones, loitering munitions, and automated surveillance systems where new entrants hold significant technological advantages.

These three categories define billions in contracts over the next decade. And in each, the dynamic is shifting. American manufacturers — **Lockheed Martin, Raytheon**, Northrop Grumman — remain dominant, but their dominance is being challenged by a competitor that few Western defense analysts had included in their models **five years** ago: **South Korea**, and more specifically **Hanwha Aerospace**. The Ankara summit may well be remembered as the moment when the global **defense industry** power balance officially shifted.

*What strikes me about this announcement is not the figures themselves — NATO summits regularly produce impressive spending numbers. What strikes me is what Rutte chose to emphasize: not the capability commitments, but the contracts. The billions. The signed agreements. This is a political calculation — show the skeptics that the alliance doesn't only talk, it buys. Whether this translates into actual deliveries on the ground, at the pace European defense genuinely needs, is a different question entirely.*

## The American Military-Industrial Complex: The Natural Heir

### Lockheed, **Raytheon**, Northrop: structural dominance

Let's start with the obvious: the **American military-industrial** complex remains the largest and most capable defense supplier in the world. **Lockheed Martin** manufactures the F-35, the **HIMARS**, the **Patriot** missile system. **Raytheon** produces the SM-6, the Stinger, countless components of Western air defense architecture. **Northrop Grumman** dominates electronic systems and long-range bombers. These companies have decades of production experience, established supply chains, and relationships with NATO **procurement** offices that no competitor can replicate overnight.

At the Ankara summit, American manufacturers are expected to sign contracts worth several billion dollars — in air defense, in advanced missiles, and in logistical support for already-deployed systems. These contracts are essentially guaranteed: alliance members who have already acquired American systems need spare parts, maintenance, upgrades. The installed base of American systems in Europe creates a structural demand that doesn't depend on competition. It's a **captive market**, and Lockheed and Raytheon know it perfectly.

### Delivery delays: the structural vulnerability of American dominance

But American dominance has a well-documented vulnerability: **delivery times**. The United States has a defense **industrial** base that was sized for a post-Cold War world of limited, small-scale conflicts. The war in Ukraine has revealed this limitation brutally. When European allies ordered HIMARS systems from **Lockheed Martin**, they were quoted delivery times of **four to five years**. When **Poland** signed a major arms deal with Lockheed for F-35s and HIMARS, parts of that contract stretched to the late 2020s for delivery.

In the security context of 2026 — with a war ongoing in Ukraine, with the **Baltic** states calculating their vulnerability in hours and days, not years — a five-year **delivery time** is not an acceptable answer. This gap between the strategic urgency of NATO members' needs and the pace of American industrial production is the opening through which **South Korea** has inserted itself. Not by diplomatic maneuvering. Not by underselling. But by delivering.

*The American **defense industry**'s production capacity problem is not new — it was documented long before Ukraine. What Ukraine changed is the political cost of acknowledging this gap. When an ally needs artillery ammunition today and is told it will arrive in four years, that ally must find another supplier. **South Korea** had the supply chain, the capacity, and the will to be that supplier. The result is a structural shift in the NATO market that no amount of political goodwill toward American industry can reverse without genuine industrial investment.*

## Fragmented Europe: Rutte's Challenge

### Seventeen nations, seventeen **procurement** systems

One of the structural obstacles to European defense investment is the **fragmentation of procurement systems**. NATO has **32 members**, each with its own defense ministry, its own procurement agency, its own national industrial preferences, and its own political priorities. Coordination between these systems is slow, expensive, and often inefficient. When NATO collectively decides to invest in a new capability, the actual implementation passes through dozens of national bureaucracies that each optimize for different constraints.

This fragmentation is one of the main arguments **Rutte** has used to justify his push for a **"defense industrial revolution"**. His message: allies can no longer afford the luxury of each building their own national version of the same system. They must pool procurement, harmonize standards, and build industrial cooperation that produces economies of scale comparable to those that make American manufacturers so efficient. It's an excellent idea. It's also one that NATO has been discussing for thirty years without managing to implement it at scale.

### The political obstacles to pooled procurement

The political obstacles to **pooled procurement** are real and deep. Each country has domestic industries — defense companies that employ workers, generate exports, and produce political support for incumbents. A French government that signs a collective European contract with a German manufacturer instead of supporting **Thales** or **MBDA** pays a domestic political price. A Polish government that buys Korean tanks instead of developing a domestic tank industry faces criticism for failing to use defense spending to build national industrial capacity.

These tensions are not trivial. They reflect legitimate interests — building national defense industrial capacity is genuinely important for long-term strategic autonomy. But they also explain why the Ankara summit, despite Rutte's ambitious rhetoric, will produce a patchwork of bilateral contracts rather than a coherent multinational procurement architecture. The billions will be spent. They will be spent in ways that reflect national political calculations as much as collective alliance needs.

*Rutte's challenge at Ankara is fundamentally a political one, not a logistical one. The money is there — when countries decide to spend 3%, 4%, 5% of GDP on defense, the budget is no longer the problem. The problem is who gets the contracts, who builds the factories, who employs the workers. Defense procurement is industrial policy in uniform. And industrial policy decisions are among the most politically charged any government can make. I don't expect Ankara to solve this. But I hope it at least names the problem honestly.*

## South Korea: The Outsider Winning Contracts

### Thirty NATO ambassadors in Seoul

In **April 2026**, something unusual happened at **Hanwha Aerospace's** facilities in South Korea: **30 NATO ambassadors** — representing virtually the entire alliance — made an official visit to tour the production lines. They saw tanks rolling off the lines. Howitzers assembled and tested. Rocket systems prepared for shipment to Europe. They watched delivery timelines confirmed in months, not years. And they returned to their capitals with something they lacked before the visit: concrete, visual evidence that South Korea could deliver what European armies urgently need.

This visit was not spontaneous. It was the culmination of years of **Korean defense diplomacy** — a systematic effort by Seoul to position South Korea not just as an arms seller, but as a **trusted defense partner** for NATO allies. The **Carnegie Endowment** for International Peace documented this transition in a February 2026 analysis: South Korea was moving from being an arms exporter to a long-term strategic partner, with defense cooperation agreements, **technology transfer** clauses, and local production partnerships that American manufacturers rarely offer.

### **Norway**: $2 billion in 72 hours

The most striking illustration of this new dynamic: **Norway's decision** to order the **K239 Chunmoo** multiple rocket launch system from **Hanwha Aerospace** for approximately **$2 billion**. According to **Army Recognition**, this contract was finalized in **72 hours** of negotiations — after **Norway** had been in extended discussions with **Lockheed Martin** about the HIMARS system and could not obtain acceptable delivery commitments. The **Chunmoo** offers comparable capabilities to the HIMARS. The **delivery time** was dramatically shorter. And the contract was signed before Norwegian officials had time to organize a second round of meetings.

Norway is not an isolated case. **Poland** has a framework deal with South Korea worth approximately **$22 billion** — covering **K2** tanks, **K9** howitzers, and **FA-50** light fighters. **Finland** has contracted for **112 K9** howitzers for €546 million. **Estonia** has ordered **6 Chunmoo** MLRS for €300 million. **Poland** has signed an additional deal worth **5.6 trillion won** for guided missiles for the Chunmoo system. When you add up these contracts, **total K-Defense sales in Europe now exceed $10 billion**. This is no longer a niche market. This is a structural shift.

*The Norwegian contract in **72 hours** tells a story that no defense industry white paper could convey more efficiently. Norway needed a system. It had a budget. It had a timeline. Lockheed couldn't commit to delivery. Hanwha could. The contract was signed in three days. This is what happens when the gap between strategic urgency and industrial capacity becomes too large to bridge with diplomatic goodwill. NATO's oldest allies are now buying Korean, and the speed at which it happened should be a wake-up call for American defense industry planners.*

## Hanwha and the European Market: An Impressive Expansion

### A production model built for speed

What explains Hanwha's ability to deliver where American manufacturers cannot? The answer lies in **industrial structure**. South Korea built its defense industrial base under the permanent threat of North Korea — a threat that required the ability to scale production rapidly, maintain stocks of finished systems, and sustain manufacturing capacity at a high level of readiness even in peacetime. This is not the same model as American defense procurement, which is optimized for cost efficiency and profit margins over a long production horizon.

The result is a concrete difference that any buyer can observe: **Hanwha Aerospace promises delivery in approximately two years** for the Chunmoo and K9 systems. Comparable American systems routinely quote four to five years. In a security environment where European allies are recalculating their defense needs annually in light of Russian aggression, **two years** versus five years is not a marginal difference — it's the difference between a credible deterrence capability and a promise on paper.

### Technology transfer as a competitive advantage

South Korean manufacturers have also differentiated themselves on an issue that matters enormously to European buyers: **technology transfer**. American defense exports are heavily constrained by **ITAR regulations** — the International Traffic in Arms Regulations — which severely limit the ability of foreign buyers to modify, reproduce, or independently service American military systems. These restrictions serve legitimate US national security interests, but they create real operational constraints for NATO allies who want to build domestic defense industrial capacity.

Korean manufacturers have offered more flexible **technology transfer** arrangements. Poland's deal includes provisions for **local production of certain components** on Polish soil. **Finland** and **Estonia** have negotiated maintenance and support arrangements that build domestic expertise. This approach — selling not just a product but a capability-building partnership — resonates with European governments that are trying to develop their own defense industrial bases, not just fill procurement shortfalls with imported systems.

*The **ITAR** question is one of those structural issues that rarely makes headlines but shapes enormous industrial and strategic decisions. American allies want to build defense industries, not just buy American. When **ITAR** restricts what they can do with the systems they purchase, some of them will choose a supplier who offers more operational freedom — even if the American system is technically superior in some dimensions. South Korea's more flexible approach to technology transfer is not just a sales tactic. It reflects a fundamentally different conception of what a defense partnership should look like.*

## Tensions with American Manufacturers

### Washington's discomfort with the Korean competition

The rise of South Korean defense exports in Europe has not gone unnoticed in **Washington**. American defense industry lobbyists have raised concerns — privately, and occasionally publicly — about the competitive pressure from Korean manufacturers. The argument: the ITAR restrictions that disadvantage American manufacturers in international markets are a national security necessity, but they create an unlevel playing field when competing against suppliers who don't operate under equivalent constraints.

There is a legitimate policy tension here. The United States has an interest in maintaining the technological lead of its defense industry and preventing the proliferation of advanced weapons technologies. But it also has an interest in ensuring that its NATO allies are adequately armed — and increasingly, that means accepting that some of those arms will come from non-American sources. Managing this tension is one of the undiscussed agenda items at Ankara, even if it won't appear in any official communiqué.

### Competitive pressure and alliance politics

Beyond the industrial dynamics, there are alliance political implications. When Norway chooses Chunmoo over HIMARS, it is implicitly making a judgment about relative value for money and delivery reliability. When Poland signs a $22 billion framework with South Korea, it is saying something about its confidence in Korean reliability as a defense partner. These decisions have consequences for the political economy of the alliance — they shift industrial dependencies, create new supply chain relationships, and alter the landscape of what future procurement decisions look like.

For **Lockheed Martin** and its competitors, the message from recent European contracts is clear: delivery commitments matter as much as technical specifications. An alliance in which Korean manufacturers are winning major contracts on the basis of superior delivery timelines is an alliance that is sending a signal to American industry about what it needs to change. Whether American industry will respond with the necessary industrial investment is one of the key uncertainties heading into the Ankara summit.

*The competition between Hanwha and Lockheed in the European market is, in a sense, the most honest conversation NATO is currently having about its own industrial priorities. It bypasses the diplomatic language and the summit communiqués and asks a blunt question: who can actually deliver the weapons European armies need, when they need them? The answer, increasingly, is not solely American. And that reality — uncomfortable as it may be for Washington — is actually good for NATO's overall readiness.*

## The Ankara Announcement: Deep Strategy Versus Symbolic Parade

### Separating substance from theater

Every major NATO summit produces announcements that mix genuine strategic commitments with political theater. The challenge for observers is distinguishing between the two. At Ankara, several categories of announcements are likely to fall on different points of this spectrum. The contracts that are actually ready to be signed — for systems in advanced negotiation, with terms agreed and financing arranged — represent genuine commitments that will produce deliveries. The "pledges" and "frameworks" and "letters of intent" that fill NATO summit communiqués are often aspirational documents that reflect political intention more than operational commitment.

According to reporting by **UNN** and **Fakti.bg**, the Ankara summit is expected to include the formal announcement of a **€70 billion package for Ukraine** — a figure referenced in Ukrainian media based on diplomatic sources. This would be a significant commitment, though the details of what it covers, over what timeline, and with what accountability mechanisms will determine whether it translates into actual military capacity on the ground. The gap between announced and delivered is one of the persistent failures of international pledging conferences, from climate summits to defense meetings.

### Turkey as host: a signal beyond logistics

The choice of **Ankara** as the summit venue is itself a strategic communication. **Turkey** is NATO's most complicated member — a country that has purchased Russian S-400 air defense systems, maintained trade relations with Russia despite the Ukraine war, and used its veto power within the alliance as leverage in bilateral negotiations with other members. Hosting the summit at **Beştepe** sends a signal that Turkey is, at this moment, choosing to position itself as a central actor in the alliance rather than its awkward outlier.

Turkey's interest in the summit is not purely symbolic. **Turkish defense industry** — particularly **Baykar** (maker of the **TB2** drone) and **ASELSAN** (electronics and defense systems) — stands to benefit from increased NATO defense spending. The **TB2** has proven its value in Ukraine, in Libya, in Nagorno-Karabakh. A NATO that is dramatically increasing its drone procurement budgets is a market where Turkey wants to compete. Hosting the summit creates diplomatic goodwill and visibility that no advertising campaign could replicate.

***Erdoğan**'s Turkey hosting a NATO summit is one of those diplomatic paradoxes that make the alliance permanently interesting and occasionally frustrating to analyze. Turkey controls the **Bosphorus** and **Dardanelles** — the strategic chokepoints linking the **Black Sea** to the Mediterranean. It has NATO's second-largest army. It has proven defense technology that alliance members actually want to buy. And it bought Russian air defense systems and maintained business with Moscow during the Ukraine war. Holding all of this in mind simultaneously is the minimum required to understand what Ankara actually means for the alliance.*

## Rutte's "Defense Industrial Revolution": Rhetoric or Reality?

### The ambition and its structural limits

**Rutte** has spoken repeatedly about a **"defense industrial revolution"** — a fundamental transformation of how NATO allies produce, procure, and maintain military equipment. The concept is compelling: instead of a fragmented landscape of national procurement systems, a coordinated alliance-wide approach that produces scale, **interoperability**, and cost efficiency. The vision is of a NATO that can produce the systems it needs at the speed geopolitical reality demands.

But the structural limits of this ambition are significant. Defense procurement is one of the most politically sensitive areas of government spending — it touches on national industrial policy, employment, technological **sovereignty**, and strategic autonomy in ways that make **pooled procurement** politically expensive for national governments to agree to. The history of European defense cooperation is littered with promising initiatives that produced impressive frameworks and delivered mediocre results because each participating nation protected its own industrial interests at every implementation stage.

### What would genuine industrial change look like?

Genuine defense industrial revolution would require several things that are currently absent. It would require **common procurement standards** across the alliance — so that a howitzer shell produced in Poland works in a Finnish K9. It would require **pooled production facilities** — factories financed collectively and producing for multiple alliance members simultaneously. It would require **flexible ITAR-equivalent arrangements** — or alternatively, a major US policy shift allowing allies more operational freedom with American systems.

It would also require European governments to be willing to tell their domestic defense industries that sometimes the best supplier is Korean or Turkish or Polish, not French or German. This is politically difficult but not impossible — the sheer scale of defense spending increases creates enough market for both national champions and the best-in-class suppliers from partner countries. The Ankara summit could begin to lay the groundwork for this conversation. Whether it will remains to be seen.

*Rutte's "defense industrial revolution" language is ambitious and necessary. What I watch for is the gap between summit rhetoric and procurement reality eighteen months later. NATO summits have a reliable pattern: bold language in the communiqué, committees formed to study implementation, preliminary frameworks agreed, and then the slow friction of national interests reasserting themselves in the procurement offices. I hope Ankara breaks this pattern. But I won't declare it broken until the contracts are delivered.*

## Air Defense Contracts: The Most Contested Market

### The gap Europe cannot afford to leave open

**Air defense** is the category where European vulnerability is most acute and most visible. Ukraine's experience has demonstrated, in real time, the extraordinary cost of insufficient air defense coverage: cities struck, infrastructure destroyed, civilian casualties that adequate intercept capacity could have prevented. European NATO members watching this lesson are urgently seeking to expand their own air defense systems — and the market for these systems is enormous.

The current air defense landscape in NATO Europe is dominated by American systems — the **Patriot** remains the gold standard for theater-level defense. But **Patriot** is expensive, has long delivery timelines, and is produced at a pace that cannot meet the sudden surge in European demand. Alternative systems — Germany's **IRIS-T**, France and Italy's **SAMP/T (Aster)**, Israel's **Arrow** — exist but lack the production capacity to fill the gap at the speed European security requirements demand.

### South Korea's entry into air defense

South Korea is developing its own air defense systems — built on decades of experience defending against North Korean missile threats — and several of these are beginning to attract attention from NATO procurement offices. The **Cheongung (KM-SAM)** medium-range air defense system has been deployed by South Korea and exported to a small number of partners. More importantly, Hanwha's integration of air defense capabilities with its existing rocket artillery platforms creates potential for cost-effective, interoperable systems that align with NATO's layered defense concept.

The air defense market at Ankara will likely see American manufacturers maintain their dominant position — the Patriot system upgrades and related contract extensions represent a reliable revenue stream. But the margins of the market, the contracts for shorter-range and medium-range systems, the procurement decisions by smaller NATO members — these are increasingly open to competition. And in competitive procurement, delivery timelines and technology transfer terms are proving to be as decisive as technical specifications.

*Europe's air defense gap is not a new problem — it was identified in NATO assessments years before Ukraine. What Ukraine changed is the political will to fund solutions. The billions now available for air defense procurement will be spent somewhere. The question is whether they are spent in a coordinated way that creates genuine layered coverage, or dispersed in a patchwork of national purchases that produces overlap in some areas and gaps in others. Coordination here is genuinely a matter of life and death, and I worry that political interests will again prevent the systematic approach the situation demands.*

## Turkey as Host: The Geopolitical Interest of the Ankara Choice

### The **Bosphorus**, **Baykar**, and the politics of positioning

Beyond the summit theater, Turkey's hosting of the Ankara meeting reflects a calculated strategic positioning. **President Erdoğan** is using the summit to signal Turkey's continued centrality to the alliance at a moment when its relationship with other members has been strained by the S-400 purchase, its Ukraine war posture, and its use of membership leverage in accession negotiations. Hosting the summit in Ankara — in the presidential complex at Beştepe — sends a message of ownership, of being at the center rather than the periphery of the alliance's most important moment.

Turkey's control of the **Bosphorus and Dardanelles** gives it permanent structural leverage within NATO. No maritime access to the **Black Sea** is possible without Turkish agreement. In a war that is partly a naval conflict over Black Sea access and Ukrainian port operations, this leverage is not theoretical. Turkey has used the Montreux Convention to block Russian warship passage while also maintaining trade and diplomatic channels with Moscow — a tightrope act that has frustrated allies but cannot be ignored.

### Turkish defense industry ambitions

The Ankara summit also serves Turkish defense industry ambitions. **Baykar's TB2 and TB3 drones** have established credibility in real combat conditions. The TB2's performance in Ukraine transformed **Baykar** from a relatively unknown company to a defense industry name recognized in procurement offices across NATO. **ASELSAN**'s electronic warfare and communications systems are increasingly competitive. Turkey wants NATO's defense spending surge to include Turkish industry — and hosting the summit is the most visible possible advertisement for Turkish capabilities.

The NATO members attending the Ankara summit will be briefed on Turkish capabilities, hosted in Turkish facilities, and made aware of Turkish industrial ambitions. This is soft power deployed at the highest diplomatic level. Whether it translates into contracts will depend on competitive procurement processes, but the awareness campaigns that feed those processes are shaped by moments like this summit. Turkey is playing a long game, and Ankara is one of its best moves.

*Turkey's positioning at Ankara illustrates one of the fundamental tensions of the alliance: NATO needs Turkey for its geography, its military capability, and its industrial base. Turkey needs NATO for its security guarantee and the legitimacy that membership provides. Neither can easily walk away from the other, which means both must manage a relationship full of genuine disagreements and mutual frustration. Ankara is the stage on which both sides perform their commitment to the alliance — while each pursues its own interests in the wings. That's not hypocrisy. That's how alliances work.*

## What the Summit Will Not Say

### The questions that won't appear in the communiqué

Every NATO summit communiqué is also defined by what it omits. The Ankara document will not address the **ITAR question** directly — the political sensitivity around openly acknowledging that US export control rules disadvantage American manufacturers in their own alliance is too high. It will not explicitly acknowledge that South Korean manufacturers are winning contracts that American companies are losing. It will not address the structural fragmentation problem in European defense procurement with the directness that problem requires.

It will likely not include honest assessment of the **gap between pledged and delivered** in previous summit commitments. The history of NATO spending pledges includes many announcements that were quietly revised downward in subsequent budget cycles when domestic political pressures reasserted themselves. Without accountability mechanisms built into the commitments — with specific procurement timelines, delivery benchmarks, and public reporting requirements — the Ankara billions risk joining a long list of impressive-sounding commitments that produced less than they promised.

### The industrial accountability gap

Perhaps most importantly, the summit will not address the **industrial accountability gap** — the absence of any systematic mechanism for tracking whether announced defense contracts are actually fulfilled, at the promised timeline and cost, with the promised capability specifications. This gap is not unique to NATO — it exists in defense procurement systems worldwide. But at the scale of commitments being announced at Ankara, the absence of accountability mechanisms is a significant governance failure.

Building such mechanisms would require alliance members to accept external scrutiny of their national procurement processes — something most defense ministries resist. But without accountability, the summit announcements remain political theater as much as strategic commitment. The difference between the two is delivery — and delivery is what has separated Hanwha from Lockheed in recent European procurement decisions.

*The accountability gap in NATO defense commitments has been the alliance's dirty secret for decades. Countries announce spending targets, miss them, announce them again, miss them again, and the alliance continues to function because American power underwrites the gaps. The 5% target is ambitious and potentially transformative. But I'll be watching the fine print of what Ankara actually produces versus what it announces — and whether anyone in the room will be held to account when the two diverge.*

## Ukraine as Client and as Market Test

### The €70 billion package: scale and accountability

Ukraine's role at Ankara is both symbolic and concrete. Symbolically, the summit's scale of ambition is inseparable from the ongoing war — the billions being pledged reflect, at least in part, the alliance's collective judgment about the cost of allowing Russia to win. Concretely, the reported **€70 billion package for Ukraine** — if the figures circulating in Ukrainian diplomatic media prove accurate — would represent one of the largest single-summit defense commitments in NATO history.

The details of such a package matter enormously. Is the €70 billion in new commitments, or does it include previously pledged amounts repackaged for the summit announcement? What is the timeline for disbursement? Which systems are covered, and from which manufacturers? How does the package interact with existing bilateral commitments from alliance members? These questions will determine whether the announcement represents genuine acceleration of Ukraine's military capacity or a political exercise in large-number theatrics.

### Ukraine as test of delivery mechanisms

Ukraine is also, in a very real sense, a live market test for the systems competing at Ankara. The K9 howitzers supplied to Ukraine have performed. The TB2 drones performed in the early phases of the war. HIMARS has been decisive in certain phases of the conflict. This real-world performance data is influencing procurement decisions — alliance members are observing what works under combat conditions and adjusting their procurement accordingly. In this sense, Ukraine is not just a recipient of NATO military support. It is also a testing ground whose lessons are reshaping European defense procurement.

The relationship between Ukraine's battlefield experience and NATO procurement decisions runs through Ankara in ways that are rarely made explicit. When Poland doubled down on Korean artillery after observing its performance in Ukraine, that decision was informed by combat data. When several NATO members accelerated Patriot procurement after observing Russian missile attacks on Ukrainian cities, that too was data-driven. The summit formalizes these trends — but the real decisions have been made on battlefields, not in conference rooms.

*Ukraine as a client at Ankara is one of those diplomatic situations that requires careful navigation. Ukraine is not a NATO member — it is a partner fighting a war that most alliance members believe serves their collective security interests. The €70 billion package, if real, reflects this judgment. But Ukraine is also a sovereign state with its own preferences about what systems it receives, from which suppliers, with what strings attached. How those preferences are respected at Ankara — or not — will say something important about what kind of partnership the alliance is actually offering.*

## Small NATO Nations: The Buyers Changing the Market Balance

### **Estonia**, Latvia, Lithuania: urgency as procurement driver

The procurement decisions of NATO's smaller members deserve more attention than they typically receive. **Estonia**, with its **6 Chunmoo MLRS for €300 million**, is a striking example. Estonia has a GDP of approximately €35 billion — its Chunmoo contract represents nearly 1% of annual GDP in a single procurement. The **Baltic** states are spending at rates, as a percentage of GDP, that would make most larger alliance members uncomfortable. And they are choosing suppliers based on a single criterion that overrides all others: delivery speed.

The pattern across the Baltic states, **Finland**, and other front-line or near-front-line allies is consistent: **urgency drives procurement toward suppliers who can deliver quickly**. This is reshaping market share across the alliance in ways that will persist long after the immediate security crisis passes — systems purchased now will require decades of maintenance, upgrades, and compatible munitions procurement. Estonia's Chunmoo fleet creates a 20-year relationship with Hanwha that is far more durable than any single contract announcement.

### The multiplier effect of small country choices

Small country procurement decisions have a multiplier effect beyond their immediate contract value. When Estonia buys Chunmoo, it produces data — operational data, maintenance data, **interoperability** data — that informs larger allies' procurement decisions. When Finland's 112 K9 howitzers perform well in Nordic conditions, that performance record is available to Sweden, Norway, and Denmark as they make their own decisions. The small countries are, in aggregate, a collective market intelligence network that shapes the procurement environment for the entire alliance.

This dynamic is one of the underappreciated advantages of an alliance with 32 members at vastly different scales. The front-line states are running live procurement experiments, with real urgency and real consequences, that generate information the entire alliance benefits from. Ankara should be, among other things, a moment for sharing this information systematically — for taking the procurement lessons of the Baltic states and applying them to the alliance's broader industrial planning.

*When I look at the procurement decisions of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland, I see countries that are behaving with a clarity of purpose that larger allies would do well to emulate. They are spending what they need to spend, buying what they need to buy, from whoever can deliver fastest, because they have correctly calculated their risk. The political debates about procurement preferences, national industries, and alliance solidarity that consume energy in Paris, Berlin, and Rome are luxuries that Tallinn and Helsinki cannot afford. Their urgency should shame the complacency it exposes.*

## Technology Transfers: The Real Currency of the Ankara Summit

### Industrial **sovereignty** versus procurement efficiency

The deepest tension running through the Ankara summit is the one between **procurement efficiency** — buy the best system from the best supplier at the best price — and **industrial sovereignty** — build domestic defense industrial capacity that reduces long-term strategic dependence on foreign suppliers. This tension is not resolvable in a single summit. But the deals made at Ankara will define, for decades, which suppliers European defense industries are integrated with — and therefore, which type of dependence they choose.

The South Korean model — offering technology transfer, local production clauses, and maintenance partnerships alongside hardware sales — is designed precisely to address the industrial sovereignty concern. Poland is not simply buying tanks. It is building a tank production capability with Korean technology. Finland is not simply buying howitzers. It is building maintenance and potentially production capacity for artillery systems. This distinction matters enormously for the long-term strategic picture — it is the difference between a client relationship and a partnership.

### ITAR reform: the conversation NATO won't have at Ankara

The most important conversation that will not happen at Ankara is the one about **ITAR reform**. The US export control regime, designed to protect American military technology from adversaries, has become a structural barrier to alliance interoperability and to American competitiveness in allied procurement markets. Several NATO allies have explicitly cited ITAR restrictions as a reason for choosing non-American suppliers — not because American technology is inferior, but because the operational constraints imposed by ITAR create real costs and dependencies that Korean or European alternatives avoid.

Reforming ITAR to provide allied governments with more operational freedom over systems they have purchased would require political will in Washington that does not currently exist. The domestic political economy of US defense policy makes such reform difficult — defense industry lobbies benefit from ITAR restrictions as competitive moats, and intelligence agencies have legitimate concerns about technology proliferation. But the cost of the current policy — in alliance cohesion, in American market share, in the pace of allied rearming — is significant and growing. Ankara will not address it. But someone needs to.

*Technology transfer is where the real geopolitics of defense procurement happens — not in the headlines about contract values, but in the footnotes about what allies are allowed to do with the systems they buy. South Korea's willingness to include local production and maintenance provisions is not just a sales tactic. It reflects a different conception of what security partnership means. America's ITAR-constrained export policy reflects a legitimate but increasingly costly approach to protecting technological advantage. The question is whether the cost — in alliance readiness and American market share — has become too high. I think it has. But that debate needs to happen in Washington, not in Ankara.*

## Conclusion: Who's Really Winning the Ankara Contracts?

### The answer the communiqué won't give

So who is really winning the contracts at Ankara? The honest answer is: **multiple parties, for different reasons, in different market segments**. American manufacturers will maintain their dominant position in the largest, most established procurement categories — Patriot upgrades, F-35 maintenance, strategic systems. They will do so partly on merit and partly on the basis of an installed base that creates structural demand. But their share of new procurement is declining, and the trend is clear.

South Korea, and **Hanwha Aerospace** in particular, is winning in the categories where delivery speed and technology transfer terms matter most — artillery systems, rocket artillery, and increasingly light armor. The $10 billion in European contracts already signed is a floor, not a ceiling. The Ankara summit will add to this figure. And each new contract creates the maintenance, upgrade, and ammunition supply relationships that make Hanwha a permanent presence in European defense procurement for decades.

### What Ankara really decides

But beyond the specific contracts, what Ankara really decides is a question about the **character of NATO's defense industrial future**. Is the alliance building toward genuine pooled procurement and shared industrial capacity? Or is it assembling a patchwork of bilateral deals that produces impressive aggregate numbers while preserving the fragmentation that has always limited alliance efficiency? Rutte's "defense industrial revolution" language sets a high bar. The contracts signed at Ankara will begin to reveal whether the bar can actually be met.

The most consequential outcome of Ankara may not be any single contract announcement. It may be whether the summit manages to establish, for the first time, genuine accountability mechanisms for the commitments being made — mechanisms that will allow, in **two years** and five years, an honest assessment of whether the billions announced became the capabilities promised. If it does that, the summit will have achieved something more durable than any individual contract. If it does not, it will have been a very expensive, very well-attended press conference.

*I'll be watching Ankara with the sober attention it deserves. The stakes are real. The money is real. The security environment that gives the summit its urgency is real. But so is the gap between announcement and delivery that has characterized NATO defense commitments for a generation. Who wins the Ankara contracts is a question that matters. Whether what is contracted is what is delivered, when it was promised, to the specification agreed — that is the question that actually determines whether the summit changes anything. I hope, for the sake of European security, that the answer is yes. History counsels caution.*

**By Maxime Marquette, columnist**

## Columnist's transparency note

### Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a **columnist and analyst**. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. **I claim analytical clarity**, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

### Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between **verified facts and interpretive analysis**. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under **Sources**, never here.

**Primary source families** used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

**Secondary source families**: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under **Sources**.

### Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a **critical, contextual synthesis** based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

## Sources

### Primary sources

- [The Straits Times — NATO's Rutte says billions in new defense contracts will be announced at summit — June 26, 2026](https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/natos-rutte-says-billions-in-new-defense-contracts-will-be-announced-at-summit)

- [Army Recognition — Norway orders Chunmoo rocket launchers from South Korea to boost NATO long-range fires — April 2026](https://www.armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2026/norway-orders-chunmoo-rocket-launchers-from-south-korea-to-boost-nato-long-range-fires)

- [UNN — At the summit in Ankara, NATO members promise to conclude billion-dollar agreements on arms supplies and aid to Ukraine — June 25, 2026](https://unn.ua/en/news/at-the-summit-in-ankara-nato-members-promise-to-conclude-billion-dollar-agreements-on-arms-supplies-and-aid-to-ukraine)

### Secondary sources

- [Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — Are Long-Term NATO–South Korea Defense Ties Possible? Transitioning from an Arms Exporter to a Trusted Defense Partner — February 18, 2026](https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/02/are-long-term-nato-south-korea-defense-ties-possible-transitioning-from-an-arms-exporter-to-a-trusted-defense-partner)

- [Hanwha Aerospace — Hanwha Aerospace presents future security vision to NATO delegation — April 16, 2026](https://www.hanwha.com/newsroom/news/press-releases/hanwha-aerospace-presents-future-security-vision-to-nato-delegation.do)

- [Reuters — Norway orders $2 billion artillery system from South Korea's Hanwha Aerospace — January 29, 2026](https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/norway-orders-2-billion-artillery-system-south-koreas-hanwha-aerospace-2026-01-29/)

- [Fakti.bg — NATO signs contracts worth tens of billions of dollars at Ankara summit — June 26, 2026](https://fakti.bg/en/world/1063544-nato-signs-contracts-worth-tens-of-billions-of-dollars-at-ankara-summit)

-

---

Source: Maxime Marquette, MadMax. When citing, name the author and link https://mad-max.co/en/article/sommet-otan-ankara-derriere-les-milliards-annonces-qui-decroche-vraiment-les-con