Anatolia
Registered Member
I agree with you. Greece absolutely needs to look within and reinvent its defence base .. but the real question is whether they can. The brains aren’t the issue. Greece has a highly educated population, strong engineering tradition, and plenty of people capable of building serious systems. Yet they still suffer heavy brain drain, and that’s where the feasibility collapses.I don’t think it will have much of an effect on Türkiye. If Greece feels safer that way, its make sense for them.
But Greece now needs to start producing its own weapons, ammunition, or at least contribute something to the systems it buys. Greece spending billions of euros and all that money is going abroad. If they invested even a small part of that huge arms procurement budget into their own defense industry they could manufacture in many areas. These dont even have to be expensive systems with long R&D cycles like radars, avionics, manned aircraft and helicopters or the costly systems used in land and naval platforms. They could simply produce the things the army buys the most and will continue to buy the most. In the defense industry. In my opinion they shouldn’t be that far behind Israel, the country they buy these weapons from. They could get support from so many countries, yet they dont.
If it wants to compete with Türkiye it has to produce. While even by producing it would be hard to catch up the mindset of buying weapons and competing against Türkiye only harms Greece. And it already is.
A country of 10 million, shrinking every year, simply doesn’t have the demographic depth to compete on wages, retain talent, and simultaneously build a defence‑industrial workforce. You either pay high wages to keep your best people from leaving for Germany, the UK, or the US .. or you rely on cheap labour to scale production. Greece can’t do either at scale. Türkiye can, because it has the population mass, the industrial base, and the labour pool to support long cycle defence manufacturing. That’s a structural advantage you can’t “policy” your way out of.
This is why, realistically, Greece ends up buying off the shelf. It’s not because they’re incapable .. it’s because the demographic and economic foundations don’t support a competitive defence industry. Reinvention sounds good, but without population, labour, and retention, it’s almost impossible to execute.





