How do competing political projections, economic motives, and security rationales inform infrastructural policies? How do state actors project infrastructural imaginations into the future when the present is under duress? This article explores these questions by looking at infrastructural development in Turkey through multi-sited archival research and fieldwork. Based on evidence from the late Ottoman period to the early Cold War, it claims that infrastructures are ambivalent and can take on uncanny qualities, particularly in moments of crisis and liminal spaces. It also argues that state actors may seek to implement highly curated forms of infrastructural posturing rather than indiscriminately project infrastructural power across the national space, in recognition of the modern predicament that the infrastructures undergirding our daily lives can also unravel them. It mobilizes the term tactical development to delineate the Turkish response to this dilemma and its lasting consequences, particularly in borderland areas. Finally, the article focuses on the question of infrastructural ideology, demonstrating the importance of identifying how various actors distinguish between different infrastructures, weigh their utility against costs and risks, rank their benefits, and propagate beliefs about what infrastructure is ultimately good for. It argues that we must take the question of infrastructural ideology seriously to understand the making of infrastructural presents and their long-lasting legacies. Keywords: Infrastructure, borderlands, civil-military relations, planning, Turkey, Ottoman Empire