In turkey we have a supreme military council every year, on august, called YAS, where promotions and dismissals. It is rumoured that these lot did this madness to not be dismissed, because that was planned. This is the most believable story to me.

A bigger, more weird stupidity is that, the parliament was on vacation, that is there were no parliamenters in the national assembly building when the coup started, they actually went there during the coup to defend the parliament. And since the beginning, in none of the coups, there were an assault of the parliament building.

But we must bear in mind that social media was crucial. People knew that sth. was going on very early, whereas in the past, they'd do the thing and then we'd know.

> The Turkish Air Force established air superiority over Istanbul but never shot down the president's plane.

He came istanbul after the airport was rather safe though.

> Most military units blatantly weren't involved. In the coup or even scrambled to defend against it.

It was the work of a junta within the army. In fact most other generals quickly ordered soldiers to retract. They didn't shoot the planes and the choppers down, but how could they? Those were flying over very populous cities, I guess in case they did attempt to take them down, there would be at least thousands of dead, because the jets were coming from a base only 30km away from the city of Ankara.

At the end of the day, 2 days into the aftermath, everything is too hazy to properly reason, I think.

"Saying the Turkish military is incompetent is really damning to the whole of NATO."

A determined invader could probably take Europe in 48 hours. The Cold War days of preparedness are gone; just witness the commitment of EU NATO members to ME conflicts; the lack of preparedness in Nice. The train has already begun derailing, one carriage at a time.