English: Map showing the territories of the Ottoman Empire in 1914, including nominal and vassal territories. According to the information on the map in http://ottomanmilitary.devhub.com/ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The article by Pravda is overblown and Dr Alf is right to be skeptical.
The UK’s Tri Forces stand at 83,000 men and woman and the Army is facing recruiting difficulties, the Navy is a cipher of its former self, with aircraft carriers without aircraft, no coastal protection vessel and no maritime coastal protection vessels patrolling our coasts. These are all in Calais attempting to interdict people smugglers and illegal migrants.
We are unable to protect our shipping as we only have 17 escort vessels for all of it and none to protect our coastal power stations, food imports and the undersea cable through which electricity from France comes via their nuclear power station (we only have 1.1% spare generating capacity over peak demand).
Worse than that the RAF has no thermobaric bombs, insufficient drones and is so small that the plan is to scrap it and integrate it into the Army Air Corps.
We are not in a position to defend ourselves let alone properly man bases overseas unless we plan to use mercenary forces and outsource the whole endeavour.
Turkey, is trying to rebuild the Ottoman Empire and will doubtless use transfer payments from countries like Germany and Britain and cash from the Saudis to fund bases for Turkey in parts of the Middle East.
Dr Alf's Blog 