Abstract:
In November 1911, Ottoman pilots dropped the first aerial bombs in the history of warfare during the Italo-Turkish War in Libya, making the Ottoman military the pioneer of a technology that would define the following century. That civilization`s successors cannot today independently manufacture the engine that would power a modern combat aircraft. This is not a statement about engineering talent. Pakistan produces approximately 25,000 engineers annually. Iran, under the most comprehensive Western sanctions regime applied to any country since the Second World War, developed the HESA Kowsar combat fighter aircraft with a reverse-engineered indigenous engine, the Bavar-373 long-range air defense system comparable to the S-300, the Fakour-90 air-to-air missile reverse-engineered from the American AIM-54 Phoenix, and a family of precision ballistic missiles and combat drones whose operational performance was confirmed against the most advanced air defense systems in the world during Operation Epic Fury. The Muslim world is not short of engineers. It is short of the four conditions that jet engine development requires simultaneously: seven to ten decades of continuous institutional investment in materials science and precision manufacturing, a state stable enough to sustain those investments across political transitions, an economy large enough to fund the required industrial ecosystem without foreign capital whose conditions include technology denial, and a population retained within the country rather than extracted through Western immigration systems designed to attract exactly the engineers such programs need. China took forty years of sustained effort, Soviet technology transfer, and the combined resources of its state to develop a marginally competitive jet engine. It succeeded because it had all four conditions. No Muslim-majority country has had all four simultaneously in the period since the colonial partition of the Ottoman territories established the political architecture that governs the Muslim world today. This article examines why, and names the structural forces that maintain the gap.
Main Article:
In November 1911, an Ottoman pilot dropped the first bomb ever released from an aircraft in the history of warfare. The target was a military position in Libya. The weapon was improvised. The aircraft was European-made. The act was unprecedented in human history, and it was performed by a pilot from a civilization whose empire stretched from the Balkans to the Arabian Peninsula, whose military institution was sophisticated enough to recognize and deploy a technology that no other military on earth had yet used in combat. The Ottoman Air Force, established on June 1, 1911, predated the British Royal Flying Corps by eleven months. It was not a primitive institution receiving technology from more advanced civilizations. It was itself the advancing edge.
That civilization no longer exists as a political unit. The states that emerged from its partition cannot today build the engine that would power the aircraft whose combat use those pilots pioneered. The question this article addresses is why that is the case, and whether it is the inevitable consequence of industrial complexity or the predictable outcome of specific political decisions made by specific actors over a specific period.
A modern jet engine operates at temperatures exceeding 1,500 degrees Celsius. At that temperature, steel melts. The turbine blades inside the engine must withstand that heat while spinning at tens of thousands of revolutions per minute under centrifugal forces that would tear apart any ordinary metal. The material solution, developed after decades of research in American, British, French, and Russian laboratories, is the single-crystal nickel superalloy turbine blade: a turbine blade grown as a single crystal of metal, with no grain boundaries where stress could accumulate and fracture the blade. The process for growing these crystals requires equipment, metallurgical knowledge, and manufacturing process control whose development took the world`s leading aerospace powers thirty to forty years each. The United States` most advanced engine, the Pratt and Whitney F135 powering the F-35, is the product of ninety years of continuous jet propulsion research beginning from Frank Whittle`s first patent in 1930. Britain`s Rolls-Royce, France`s Safran, and Russia`s United Engine Corporation each represent similar timescales of uninterrupted institutional commitment.(1)
China, the world`s second-largest economy with 1.4 billion people, unlimited state funding, and full control over its industrial priorities, began serious jet engine development in the 1950s after receiving Soviet technology transfers and still has not produced a reliably competitive engine matching the American F119 that powers the F-22. The WS-15 engine designed for the J-20 stealth fighter has been in development for over twenty years and continues to face reliability challenges that have delayed full operational deployment. China`s case is the most instructive available, because if the world`s most economically powerful communist state with the most sustained industrial ambition cannot easily solve this problem, it is not a problem of insufficient ambition or insufficient resources. It is a problem of genuine technical difficulty compounded by deliberate institutional denial.(2)
The denial is documented and legal. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations, ITAR, the American legal framework governing defense technology exports, places jet engine core technology on its control list. Any company anywhere in the world that incorporates American technology in its manufacturing processes, and virtually every advanced manufacturer does, requires American government approval before transferring that technology to other countries. This approval is routinely denied for jet engine technology to Muslim-majority countries and to any country that might develop the independent military capability such technology enables. The Wassenaar Arrangement coordinates these restrictions across forty-two member states, creating a multilateral technology denial regime in which the countries that possess jet engine technology have collectively agreed to ensure that other countries cannot easily acquire it. The arrangement was established in 1996 explicitly to control the export of conventional arms and dual-use goods and technologies. Jet engine technology is dual-use. Its civilian application powers airliners. Its military application determines whether a country can build its own combat aircraft or must purchase them from a supplier who controls what they can be used for.(3)
India`s experience confirms what the technology denial regime produces. India began the Kaveri engine program in 1989 with the specific objective of developing an indigenous turbofan engine for its Light Combat Aircraft. The program has continued for thirty-five years, received approximately one billion dollars in funding, employed thousands of Indian engineers, and has not produced a flight-ready engine for operational service. The Kaveri failed repeatedly to meet its thrust and temperature targets. India`s Gas Turbine Research Establishment eventually reached agreements with French engine manufacturer Safran to address specific technical gaps the program could not independently close. India produces the world`s most sophisticated software engineers. Its graduates fill Silicon Valley`s aerospace and technology companies. The Kaveri engine program suggests that producing outstanding engineers and producing an indigenous jet engine are not the same problem. One requires talent. The other requires talent, retained within the country, operating within a continuous institutional ecosystem, across timescales that outlast political disruptions.(4)
Pakistan`s Project AZM is the Muslim world`s most recent direct encounter with this reality. The Pakistan Air Force launched Project AZM in 2017 with the stated objective of developing a fifth-generation indigenous fighter aircraft. At its peak, the program employed approximately 300 to 400 personnel. The Turkish Aerospace Industries program developing the KAAN, whose technical ambition is comparable, employs between 6,000 and 7,000 people. Pakistan was invited to join the KAAN program from its inception in 2010 as a full partner. It declined, choosing instead to pursue an independent program with a fraction of the human resources, no domestic engine, no domestic radar, no domestic stealth materials research program, and an economy under IMF supervision whose debt obligations consumed resources that a sustained industrial program would have required. Project AZM never advanced beyond feasibility assessment. Its successor, Project PFX, has more realistic immediate goals. Pakistan`s fifth-generation ambitions now depend on eventually joining the KAAN program and potentially acquiring China`s J-35 stealth fighter. The country that had a nuclear weapon before it had a functioning car manufacturing industry at industrial scale is now building its air power strategy around purchasing other countries` fifth-generation fighters with Saudi money.(5)
The brain drain is the mechanism that maintains the gap between the Muslim world`s demonstrated engineering talent and its industrial output. Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia maintain points-based immigration systems whose criteria are designed to attract the highest-qualified graduates from developing countries. A Pakistani aerospace engineer trained at a top university in Islamabad faces a structural choice whose individual logic is rational and whose collective consequence is devastating: a salary of approximately $8,000 to $12,000 per year in Pakistan or $120,000 to $180,000 per year in Canada. The individual who chooses Canada is making a reasonable economic decision. The 25,000 engineers Pakistan produces annually who are making that decision collectively are removing from Pakistan exactly the human capital that any industrial program of the complexity that jet engine development requires needs to accumulate and retain over decades. The countries that maintain technology denial regimes are simultaneously the countries that attract Pakistan`s engineers. The mechanism by which the gap is maintained operates on both ends simultaneously: the technology cannot come in, and the people who might eventually produce it independently are leaving.(6)
Iran is the exception that proves the rule, and it proves it precisely because the exception required conditions that no other Muslim-majority country has experienced in the same combination.
Under the most comprehensive Western sanctions regime applied to any country since the Second World War, the Islamic Republic of Iran developed the HESA Kowsar, a domestically produced combat fighter aircraft with an indigenous engine derived from the F-5 airframe but rebuilt with Iranian avionics, systems, and propulsion. It developed the Bavar-373, a long-range surface-to-air missile defense system confirmed as operational in 2019 and comparable in stated capability to the Russian S-400 it was designed to substitute for after American sanctions blocked the S-300 purchase. It developed the Fakour-90 air-to-air missile, a reverse-engineered version of the American AIM-54 Phoenix whose operational integration with the F-14 airframe was confirmed by Iranian sources. It developed the Shahed family of combat drones, the Karrar jet-powered combat drone, and a family of precision ballistic missiles whose terminal guidance accuracy was confirmed against American radar installations at ranges exceeding 1,000 kilometers during Operation Epic Fury. It maintained, through reverse engineering, cannibalization of grounded airframes, and clandestine procurement networks, a fleet of American aircraft that the United States assumed would become unserviceable within years of the 1979 embargo, and that remained operational 47 years later.(7)
How did Iran do what Pakistan and Egypt and Turkey have not done? The answer is not technical. It is structural. Iran had no choice. The sanctions that removed every external supply option simultaneously removed the political alternative of purchasing foreign systems. When you cannot buy a replacement, you build it or you have nothing. Pakistan has always had the choice of purchasing American F-16s, Chinese J-10Cs, or another country`s system when its domestic program falters. That choice is the obstacle to indigenous development, not the alternative to it. Every purchase of a foreign system is a decision not to develop the institutional capacity that would eventually make foreign purchases unnecessary. The dependency is self-reinforcing: you purchase because you cannot build, and you cannot build because you keep purchasing rather than building the ecosystem that would eventually allow building.(8)
The Ottoman Empire that pioneered aerial warfare in 1911 was operating within a political framework that connected its resources, its institutions, and its population in a single governance structure. The engineers who maintained its aircraft and the pilots who flew them and the administrators who funded the program were all operating within the same political and economic framework. The partition of that framework into thirty-seven successor states, each individually too small to fund a jet engine program, each individually dependent on external security guarantees from the same powers that maintain the technology denial regime, each individually experiencing the brain drain that removes its most capable engineers, was not an accident. It was the design. The Concert of Europe managed its colonial territories in the 19th century by ensuring no colonial population could develop the industrial capacity to challenge European industrial supremacy. The nation-state system installed after 1918 institutionalized that management in a form whose consequences the Muslim world is still experiencing a century later.
The engineer who cannot build an engine is not the problem. The structure that ensures he never has the sustained institutional conditions to do so is.
References:
(1) Defence Guru, "Why India Is Unable to Make Jet Engines Yet," February 7, 2025, confirming single-crystal turbine blade requirements and temperature parameters; Wikipedia, "Jet engine," updated 2026, confirming historical development timelines.
(2) Quora, "Why can`t China, Germany, and Japan build aircraft jet engines?" confirming WS-6 political disruption and UK Spey license; Wikipedia, "Shenyang WS-15," updated 2026, confirming ongoing reliability challenges.
(3) Defence Guru, op. cit., confirming ITAR and Wassenaar Arrangement restrictions; Wikipedia, "Wassenaar Arrangement," updated 2026, confirming 42-member technology control regime established 1996.
(4) Defence Guru, op. cit., confirming Kaveri engine program 35 years and $1 billion without producing flight-ready engine; Wikipedia, "Kaveri engine," updated 2026.
(5) Defence Uncut / Quwa, "Why Pakistan`s Project AZM Fighter Failed," July 5, 2025, confirming 300-400 personnel versus KAAN`s 6,000-7,000; Eurasian Times, "After Stealth J-35A From China, Pakistan Discusses Acquiring 5th-Gen KAAN Fighters," January 10, 2025.
(6) Defence Guru, op. cit., confirming brain drain dynamic; Wikipedia, "Pakistani diaspora," updated 2026.
(7) Military Watch Magazine, "Muslim Fighters: When Islamic Countries Have Attempted to Develop Advanced Combat Jets," October 24, 2020, confirming Kowsar indigenous engine and Iranian defense programs; Wikipedia, "Bavar-373," updated 2026, confirming operational status; Wikipedia, "Fakour-90," updated 2026; Fikr Institute, "The Floor of Their Power," May 2026.
(8) Fikr Institute, "Lightning Restored: Türkiye`s Journey from the World`s First Aerial Bombardment to the KAAN," May 2026; Fikr Institute, "The Subsidy Was Not Development," May 2026.