The inauguration ceremony for TUBITAK (Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) Centers of Excellence opening was attended by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and many high-ranking members. The TUBITAK SAGE’s new Centers of Excellence building saw many attendees present via remote conferencing.
President Erdogan said that TÜBİTAK SAGE (Defense Industries Research and Development Institute) Centers of Excellence would see many tests regarding environmental conditions, including weapons systems projects, would be indigenously tested in Turkey in international standards and the new research and development facilities established within SAGE would overtake the strategic mission of designing, programming and simulating domestic armament projects.
In the ceremony that took place in Kocaeli, TUBİTAK SAGE Institute President Gürcan Okumuş highlighted that:
“Since the day of its establishment, we, as TUBİTAK SAGE, has worked to develop innovative technologies for an independent and domestic production in our defense industry. For the last couple of years, Turkey has solidified its vision to develop its own platforms and gained the capability to design armament to be utilized in the aforementioned platforms. In accordance, TÜBİTAK SAGE has seen many projects in this goal came into fruition. In 2020, the number of projects that were developed by TUBİTAK SAGE and put into the inventory of Turkish Armed Forces has reached nine. These projects were finalized in the last 5 years in accordance with the orders of our defense industry, reaching up to 7 billion Turkish Lira in orders. With the support of our government, we’ve established new foundations to strengthen our R&D engineering with new centers and Europe’s biggest environmental tests center.”
Okumuş revealed upon President Erdogan’s question that TUBİTAK SAGE had around a thousand employees.
