The Turkish Army or Turkish Land Forces (Turkish: Türk Kara Kuvvetleri) is the main branch of the Turkish Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. The modern history of the army began with its formation after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Significant events since the foundation of the Army include combat in the Korean War and in the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and acting as a NATO bulwark along Cold War frontiers through 1992. Today, in terms of personnel, the Turkish Army is the second-largest standing army in NATO with 402,000 active troops.(325,000 conscripts and 77,000 professionals)
The army holds the preeminent place within the armed forces. It is customary for the Chief of the General Staff of the Republic of Turkey to have been the Commander of the Turkish Land Forces prior to his appointment as Turkey's senior ranking officer. Alongside the other two armed services, the Turkish Army has frequently intervened in Turkish politics, which has now been regulated to an extent with the reform of the National Security Council. The current commander of the Turkish Land Forces is General Hayri Kıvrıkoğlu.
Famous quotes containing the words turkish and/or army:
“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)