'Turkey can become role model for DAPA'
Ann Young-su
As the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) is under fire for recent corruption in the defense industry, there are growing calls for the nation’s arms procurement agency to be made up of civilian specialists.
Currently, public officials account for the half of DAPA with the rest of them being military personnel. Given this, critics say the organization lacks specialty because the latter takes charge of all projects.
Defense watchers say that Turkey can become a role model for Korea’s arms procurement agency for its impressive performance in exports as well as specializing.
The output of the Turkish defense industry in 2013 was $5.08 billion, up 5.8 percent from the previous year, and its average annual growth rate from 2007 to 2013 reached 9 percent, according to the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade (KIET).
In addition, its amount of exports surpassed $1 billion in 2011 on its way to $1.57 billion, accounting for 31 percent of its defense industry’s total production. The gross output of Korea’s defense industry in 2013 was $11.4 billion, but its exports amounted to $1.38 billion, or 12.1 percent of production.
“The competitiveness of Turkey’s defense industry is attributed to the Under-secretariat for Defense Industries (SSM) that is made up of civilian experts,“ said Ann Young-su, the head of the Aerospace and Defense Industry Team at the Korea Institute for Industrial Economics and Trade (KIET).
Thirty three percent of the SSM’s workforce are engineers and 31 percent have a postgraduate degree or higher to develop specialization and raise transparency.
“It is the biggest problem at DAPA that military personnel take care of all businesses from research and development to management of defense contractors to fund management. They are operations specialists, not development ones,“ Ann said.
The most recent bribery case concerned the 3,500-ton Tongyeong _ the first Korean-made rescue and salvage ship _ and has hit the military and defense industries hard.
In September, a former Navy officer was indicted on charges of forging a document for the selection of a sonar system for the vessel. This occurred when he was in charge of selecting a supplier under DAPA.
The faulty parts rendered it incapable of playing a role in rescue operations in the deadly sinking of the Sewol ferry in April.
DAPA has been under heavy criticism after revelations that soldiers working for the agency were involved in several collusive cases while maintaining cozy relations with retired service personnel in private defense companies.
“The SSM is strictly controlled by the government and the civilian-led organization has little chance to see such bribery related with personal connections happen,“ Ann said.
Despite Korea’s long history of procurement of weapons from overseas, DAPA has often been placed in hot water for its failure to take advantage of richer offset packages.
However, the SSM stipulates that foreign defense companies which sell goods to Turkey should agree to return 70 percent of their contracts’ values to Turkey through local industry content and offsets.