“Artifacts have politics” (Winner 1986). This political charge gives artifacts a role in regulating the social space, enabling certain types of interactions while disabling others either through the artifact’s material instrumentality (Cowan 1983, Winner 1986, Wajcman 1991, Latour 1992) or its role as a communicative symbol. As a representation, an artifact can act as the physical manifestations of a social or political accomplishment. Power relations are entailed in all representational practices (Hall 1985). “Any given representation is itself a social relation, linked to the group understandings, status hierarchies, resistances, and conflicts that exist in other spheres of the culture in which it circulates” (Greenblatt, 1991, p. 6). As conceptualized in Bourdieu’s notions of ‘symbolic goods’ (1985) and ‘symbolic power’ (1991), representations are not only products but producers, reifying unconscious modes of domination on conscious subjects and thereby decisively altering the very forces that brought them into being. Departing from this literature, this presentation traces the power relations in Turkey’s efforts for defense-industrial indigenization under the AKP government. Since the late Ottoman Empire, the military-bureaucracy has viewed itself as a "great modernizing force—the vanguard of society— imbued with organizational capacity and the technology of the West” (Cook, 2007: 15). This ‘modernizing mission’ was the grundnorm that legitimized the military-bureaucracy’s claim to political autonomy—"only those with the type of specialized skills [required for high modernism]—that is to say themselves—had a mandate to exercise political power” (Cook, 2007: 15). The centerpiece of this modernizing mission was rapid industrialization and its artifacts—like Arcelik refrigerators and domestically-assembled Anadol automobiles (Bozdogan and Akcan 2012)—served as the physical manifestation of the successes of the Kemalist regime’s industrialization campaign (106). Ilkin (1993) and Gole (1993) also documented how the businessmen and engineers driving this effort were incorporated into the elite structure. AKP government’s ambitious plans for defense-industrial indigenization are an appropriation of the ‘modernizing mission’ that the Kemalist establishment legitimized itself by. Since the Ottoman times, building an indigenous and self-sufficient defense industry has been the primary object of the Turkish modernization (Agoston 2008). By appropriating this discourse, the AKP government is delegitimizing a status quo that systematically excluded it from the political realm since 1923, expanding the country’s material power in a way that reinforces the government’s aspirations for regional power, creating new sources of patronage for to appease the elites, and building a populist discourse that sustains its political appeal.