The Turkish government has transferred responsibility for preparing the promotion files of generals, admirals and eligible colonels from the General Staff to a secretariat operating within the Ministry of National Defense.
An amendment published in the Official Gazette on June 14 replaced numerous references to the General Staff and its Personnel Directorate in the Officer Evaluation Regulation with references to the Supreme Military Council Secretariat.
The change follows a new regulation governing the Supreme Military Council (YAŞ), that took effect on May 28. YAŞ considers senior military promotions, appointments, extensions of service and compulsory retirements.
Under the new structure, the secretariat operates under the Ministry of Defense undersecretary. The military branch commands will forward the personnel files of officers eligible for promotion, but the secretariat will manage the preparations for their consideration by the council.
Officers will be assessed using both their existing service-record scores and evaluation scores assigned by YAŞ members. The two scores will be combined to produce the qualification score considered during promotion deliberations.
The amendment removes the General Staff Personnel Directorate from several stages of that process. It would nevertheless be inaccurate to say that the General Staff has been excluded from every personnel decision: one amended provision expressly requires the Ministry of Defense to obtain the General Staff’s opinion before acting. The significant change is the loss of the General Staff’s former control over the preparation and administration of promotion files.
The transfer forms part of a much broader restructuring imposed after the 2016 coup attempt. An emergency decree issued in July 2016 placed the land, naval and air force commands under the defense minister and added several Cabinet ministers to YAŞ, giving political officials greater weight on the body responsible for shaping the senior command.
Civilian oversight of the armed forces is not inherently objectionable. The concern is that these changes are being introduced under emergency rule and are concentrating personnel authority in an executive whose account of the coup attempt remains disputed — and which has already used alleged Gülen movement associations to dismiss and prosecute military personnel on a mass scale.
A government-aligned media report claimed that the new secretariat was expected to consider non-staff colonels for promotion and to collect intelligence about candidates through channels not previously used by the General Staff Personnel Directorate. The report did not identify its sources or specify which institutions would supply that intelligence.
The regulations themselves do not give the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), authority to decide military promotions. Any claim that MİT will determine who becomes a general or admiral therefore goes beyond the published text.
What the regulations establish is narrower but still consequential: the General Staff no longer controls the files placed before YAŞ, and an executive-controlled ministry now administers a process that determines the future leadership of the Turkish Armed Forces. If undisclosed intelligence is also to be placed in those files, the government should explain its sources, establish a procedure for challenging inaccurate allegations and prevent untested claims of political or organizational affiliation from determining military careers.
