MILDEN

The boat that ends the German license — MILDEN ("National Submarine") is Turkey's first indigenously designed attack submarine: a ~2,700-tonne, methanol-reformer AIP boat whose first weld was laid at Gölcük Naval Shipyard on 2 January 2025 and whose lead unit was named Atılay — after the first submarine ever built in Turkey — that December. Every current Turkish submarine is a German design built under license; the Atılay class is built to make that sentence past tense. Nothing has been launched, nothing tested at sea: this is a sovereignty program in the block-assembly stage, with delivery promised for the first half of the 2030s.

Overview

MİLDEN (Milli Denizaltı) is the underwater apex of Turkey's naval-sovereignty pyramid — announced the same day, 2 January 2025, as first steel for the MUGEM aircraft carrier and TF-2000 destroyer, and by the Navy's own framing the program that puts Turkey "among the ten countries in the world capable of designing and constructing their own submarines." The design (all figures Turkish official claims) is a ~2,700-tonne surfaced, 80-plus-meter diesel-electric attack boat — substantially larger than the ~1,850-tonne German-designed Reis class (Type 214TN) it follows — with an indigenous air-independent propulsion system of six PEM fuel-cell modules fed by a methanol reformer plus lithium-ion batteries, a crew of an estimated 40–50 through automation, and greater diving depth and weapons load than anything Turkey now operates. Armament is the national catalog: eight 533 mm tubes for Roketsan's Akya heavyweight torpedo, the sub-launched Atmaca anti-ship missile and, later, the Gezgin land-attack cruise missile, under an Aselsan sonar suite and Havelsan combat-management architecture, with a non-penetrating optronic mast in place of a periscope. The strategic purpose is explicit: the six Reis-class boats building at Gölcük under HDW/TKMS license were declared Turkey's last submarine imports, and MILDEN — plus the nuclear-powered boat the Navy openly names as the step after it — is what comes next. The discipline this entry keeps: it is a program of welds, ceremonies and claims, with the S-80's decade of sovereign-submarine pain as the standing cautionary tale.

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