Posted on February 4, 2026
By Ragip Soylu in Ankara and Sean Mathews
Turkey and the United States have been holding talks since last year on cooperation in naval shipbuilding, as the US Navy seeks to expand its fleet amid growing competition with China, officials told Middle East Eye.
Ankara has emerged as a naval powerhouse in recent years. Its shipyards are capable of producing more than 30 ships simultaneously for the Turkish and Pakistani navies.
Turkish defence firms have also developed indigenous designs for a wide range of vessels under the Milgem project, Turkey’s national warship programme.
According to officials, US representatives explored whether Turkey could supply ship components, while discussions also floated the possibility of Ankara helping the US Navy build additional frigates.
The Trump administration wants to both revive US shipbuilding and enlarge the US Navy’s fleet. So far, it has leaned on Asian allies Japan and South Korea for know-how after decades of US underinvestment.
The prime example is South Korea’s Hanwha Group, which purchased Philly Shipyard in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in December 2024 for $100m.
The company wants to produce up to 20 ships a year, but the US’s efforts face headwinds elsewhere.
In December 2025, US Secretary of the Navy John Phelan announced that the Pentagon had cancelled the Constellation-class frigate programme that the Navy had entered into with Italian shipbuilder Fincantieri. The frigates, vessels designed for quick manoeuvrability, were supposed to be built at a shipyard in Wisconsin.
Turkey is unlikely to invest in US shipyards, and US law generally prohibits the Navy from building warships overseas. However, US President Donald Trump has signalled that his administration is exploring building vessels inside allied countries to address shortages.
“We used to build a ship a day. We don’t build ships anymore. We want to get that started. And maybe we’ll use allies also in terms of building ships. We might have to,” Trump said in January.
Shipbuilding to strengthen ties
A US official told MEE that the US’s early discussions with Turkey underscored the severity of its problem.
“The US shipbuilding industry is in a real crisis, and the Trump administration has talked with Turkey about meeting its needs,” the official said.
Any deeper defence cooperation with Turkey could face scrutiny in Congress, which slapped sanctions on Ankara over its 2019 purchase of the Russian S-400 air defence system as part of Caatsa (Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act).
Among advocates of closer cooperation with Turkey in the administration, shipbuilding is viewed as a way to strengthen ties while working around the sanctions, a former US official told MEE.
“The Department of Defence has already been looking for alternative production sites,” one US State Department official added.
“There is a serious mobilisation underway in the United States to build ships,” said Kubilay Yildirim, a Turkey-based defence industry expert. “They are pushing vessels through a kind of production bottleneck at a fixed output rate.”
Yildirim said America’s biggest challenge is increasing ship production while simultaneously developing new designs and addressing the overhaul and modernisation needs of an ageing fleet.
“For these processes, the US lacks sufficient manpower, shipyards and dry docks,” he said.
“Turkey can help in terms of production volume, timelines, risk sharing and workload distribution.”
Unlike in the US, Yildirim noted, Turkish shipyards are geographically concentrated around the cities of Pendik and Tuzla near Istanbul and across the water in the Yalova region, allowing them to adapt to new projects very quickly.
As part of the discussions, a delegation from the US Naval Sea Systems Command visited the Istanbul Naval Shipyard Command last week.
Commenting on the talks, a US spokesperson told MEE that Turkey is a longstanding and “deeply valued Nato ally”.
“The US and Turkish navies have a strong partnership at sea and are always looking for ways to expand that partnership,” the spokesperson said.
The US Department of Defence’s 2016 National Defence Strategy states that Washington would seek to leverage Nato partners through burden sharing, “while also working to expand transatlantic defence industrial cooperation and reduce defence trade barriers in order to maximise our collective ability to produce the forces required to achieve US and allied defence objectives”.
Innovative shipyards
A Turkish source familiar with the country’s shipyards said the Istanbul Naval Shipyard has spare capacity that could help the US build additional vessels.
Yildirim said Turkey has a sufficient number of welders and skilled personnel, access to multiple steel and component suppliers, and shipyards that are well accustomed to military shipbuilding projects.
Under the leadership of the Turkish defence company STM, multiple civilian and military shipyards have jointly bid on numerous programmes. In these arrangements, one yard may produce specific modules that are then transported to another yard’s dry dock, integrated there, fitted out and ultimately delivered to the relevant navy.
“There is a strong culture of collaborative work,” Yildirim said.
He added that the experience of the Pendik Naval Shipyard Command’s Design Project Office is particularly notable.
“They design the ship, build it on their own slipways, conduct testing and sea trials, implement necessary modifications, freeze the design, issue outfitting and work orders, and then distribute the workload to different civilian shipyards,” he said.
Yildirim also noted that Turkish shipyards are highly innovative, routinely automating parts of the production process, whereas many US yards still rely heavily on manual labour.
“These technologies are now beginning to mature, and Turkey is one of the countries where they are being developed and incubated,” he said.
