abrahavtUsual Prasun Sengupta crap. These are primarily SEAD UAVs not for targeting a few militants on a hilltop.
abrahavtFeels like the longer range would be better, but I guess India (congress in particular) can not do anything about the MTCR.
What does Congress have anything to do with MTCR? Russia is a signatory to MTCR and will not allow anything over 300kms.
abrahavtHypersonic Brahmos – pros and cons
Cons – with a range of 300 km, it still lacks the “range” of a 1000 Km class system
Not sure how they can make a Mach 6-7 system limited to 300 kms. Will cover that distance in no time at that speed.
abrahavtMRCA contest is a no way win win business, contractors asks themselves if its a deal or a robbery!
Is that why all the participants are spending large sums of money competing. I guess they are all spending money in the hopes of being robbed. With that kind of an attitude it is little wonder that the french have been unable to sell the Rafale. If it wasnt for all the nuke sub tech promised I doubt they would have had any hopes in Brazil.
abrahavtChinese designs to PAK are just basic nationalistic ramblings. It has not been proved to the international community that China gave Pakistan the bomb. Go see past ur nationalistic blinds.
When Libya gave up its nuclear ambitions and surrendered all their nuclear trapping they also surrendered detailed Chinese documents on a bomb design. On these documents were notes and translations in urdu. I suppose you think somebody in Libya or China inscribed those notes in urdu.
Do you expect the intelligence services to publish those documents so you can be convinced. The US has been aware of these Chinese transfers for a long time but have turned a blind eye since it was aimed at India and not at them and they needed Pakistan and China’s help to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Now that short sighted policy has come to bite them in the butt. It is too late to put the genie back in the bottle.
abrahavtyes 40 + 50 will be direct import from Russia and will be MKI-3 chances of this birds having Stealthy modification is also high. such as internal weapons bay which has been done to a mki airframe recently by Russia
Wonder if they are doing anything to hide the fans of the engine from radar.
abrahavtGiven the difficulty and time it took India (despite their extensive reactor design and building experience) to build and integrate a small reactor into the ATV nuclear sub, I wonder how Brazil will fare. I doubt that the French will give any reactor technology, so is the Brazilian Nuclear industry capable of creating a small reactor needed for a nuclear sub. The other question I have is regarding the small size of the proposed brazilian nuclear sub. They are proposing fitting a reactor into a scorpene based sub which is quite small by nuclear sub standards.
As for economic rankings the UN and most Govts use Purchasing Power Parity when looking at GDP. India with a PPP GDP of 3.3 Trillion ranks No. 4 in the world behind US, China and Japan. Brazil’s PPP GDP is around 2 Trillion and ranked no 9 in the world.
abrahavtAs per US law and terms of agreement you cannot modify US arms without explicit permission from the US. Very different from India building the Brahmos. The US and its taxpayers have nothing to do with the Brahmos. US taxpayers are not supplying weapons to Pakistan free of charge to fight India. They are trying to account for Indian sensitivity to the free arms supplied by the US to fight the war on terror being used against India instead.
abrahavtIncorrect. IAF’s “operational requirements” were modeled on a new Israeli product
I am really impressed that you are privy to how IAF’s “operational requirements” were modeled.
abrahavtWhy couldn’t it see the Tejas Mk. 2 to quick fruition and avoided the MRCA altogether ?
I wish it was that easy. Do you think they are just sitting around on their butt doing nothing? You really have no clue what it takes to design a plane and bring it to full operational status do you?
abrahavtBesides, an AKash needn’t be exactly at the spot of the installation to be defended from 30 kms away. A launch vehicle can be over a 100 kms away and moving from the installation, and many kms away from the battery level radar. The actual area defended can thus be hundreds of square kms.
The MR-SAM on the other hand does NOT have such an architecture, in that the launcher also has to have a “massive” surveillance-cum-tracking radar tagged with it, although a centralized C&C centre is also provided. Hence, it’s mobility will be severely restricted and in my view the area defendable by this MR-SAM will merely be equal, if not lesser than the Akash.
I think you need to do some reading up on the Barak-8 and MRSAM Architecture and capabilities.
We are not discussing DRDO’s LRSAM JV with MBDA. We are discussing corruption in :- rejecting Akash for an “on-paper” MRSAM, and rejecting a near-proven AAD for the same. This, of course other than the fact when the entire coterie of Israeli firms like IAI, Rafael and their agents are under CBI investigation for corruption and bribery.
Almost every company that deals with India is under investigation. Does that mean India should not deal with any company. Most of the DRDO projects would come to halt if that were the case.
I now agree that Spyder unfortunately stands confirmed (per domain-b.com).
However, the Spyder has vehemently been debated in the IAF with only a certain Air Marshal being “gung-ho” for it. Others were not in it’s favour
One person cannot ram decisions down everyone’s throat in the IAF no matter how big he may be. The Spyder was chosen because it is a very capable and state of the art missile. If DRDO had a missile of similar capabilities I doubt that the IAF would have picked the Spyder. Go read up on the sensors and capabilities of the Spyder. I am sure once the Maitri is a reality IAF will not feel the need to order Spyders any more.
abrahavtHow does the Selex Radar compare with the Elta 2052?
abrahavtYes IAI has a lot of clout in India due to all the help that they have rendered in the past. So if Saab figured that having IAI on board would give them a leg up over the competition would they not go for it? After all what they are keen to sell is the plane irrespective of the radar. I doubt whether they care if it is Selex or Elta.
abrahavthttp://trishulgroup.blogspot.com/
When all six participating M-MRCA manufacturers submitted their compliant technical and financial bids to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) in late April last year, everyone assumed that only these six would be eligible for bidding for the contract to supply close to 180 fourth-generation M-MRCAs to the Indian Air Force’s (IAF). What went totally unnoticed and was left unreported by India’s mainstream media was that a seventh independent bidder too had presented its detailed bid—this being SIBAT—the Foreign Defense Assistance and Defense Export Department of the Israel Ministry of Defence, and Israel’s counterpart of Russia’s Rosoboronexport State Corp, France’s Office Francais d’Exportation de Materiel Aeronautique (OFEMA), the United Kingdom’s Defence Export Services Organisation (DESO), and Pakistan’s Defence Export Promotion Organisation (DEPO). The consolidated bid from SIBAT had adopted a consortium approach just like what the other M-MRCA bidders had done. The prime contractor as per SIBAT’s submissions was Israel Aerospace Industries and included RAFAEL Advanced Defence Systems, Elbit Systems and RADA Electronics. On the other hand, the Boeing Integrated Defense Systems-led consortium included GE Aero Engines, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman; the Lockheed Martin-led consortium included Northrop Grumman and GE Aero Engines; the Eurofighter GmbH-led consortium included BAE Systems, EADS Military Aircraft and EADS Defence Electronics, Eurojet, DIEHL-BGT Defence, MBDA and Selex-Galileo; the Dassault Aviation-led consortium included the THALES Group, Snecma Moteurs, SAGEM and MBDA; while the Anglo-Swedish Gripen International-led consortium included GE Aero Engines, BAE Systems, and Saab AB, but was supplemented by the independent submission from SIBAT.
From the above-mentioned listing of the various consortiums it emerges that while the ones led by Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, Lockheed Martin, Dassault Aviation and Eurofighter GmbH had each presented a single, unified compliant bid, the submission by Gripen International, which was literally the most comprehensive and bulky of all the M-MRCA submissions, was in essence an intelligent packaging of two submissions—from Gripen International and SIBAT—all aimed at promoting a single product, the JAS-39 Gripen IN. In marketing terms, therefore, the combined Gripen International/SIBAT submission easily presented itself as the most formidable proposal since it offered, both financially and quantitatively, both direct and indirect offsets offers by aerospace OEMs that are extremely well-established in India and each of them have had a rich legacy of market predominance for the past two decades, these being BAE Systems, GE Aero Engines, Israel Aerospace Industries, RAFAEL Advanced Defence Systems and Elbit Systems.
While conventional wisdom would dictate that it was SIBAT that conceived of and articulated such a superlative marketing strategy, it was actually BAE Systems that came up with this ingenious packaging once it had become evident by mid-2007 that Lockheed Martin, wanting to have and eat the whole cake, flatly refused all overtures by SIBAT to be a significant industrial stakeholder in the F-16IN—the airframe with which Israel Aerospace Industries, RAFAEL Advanced Defence Systems and Elbit Systems were extremely familiar and had maximum hands-on experience. Soon after this initial disappointment, BAE Systems orchestrated the joint venture tie-ups between the Israeli OEMs and Gripen International, knowing fully well that in the ultimate analysis, it will be the direct and indirect military-industrial offsets and related ToT packages that will dictate the final choice of the M-MRCA. In addition, BAE Systems had correctly anticipated that the bulk of the realistically deliverable military-industrial offsets and related ToT packages would be offered not by Gripen International or GE Aero Engines, but by the Israeli OEMs that are already deeply involved in several on-going projects with guaranteed financial dividends, such as the Tejas LCA Mk2’s development phase, the An-32-100 upgrade project, the projected upgrades for the Jaguar IS and Su-30MKI, and the substantial projected participation in the tandem-seat Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) and Multi-Role Transport (MRT) projects.
Obviously highly enthused by what Gripen International had offered, the IAF’s Project Evaluation Team had by late last year adopted the JAS-39 Gripen IN’s offer as the ultimate yardstick and had begun drafting detailed supplementary queries for the other M-MRCA bidders of the kind that were not considered financially viable by them. Consequently, by last February an informal ‘cartel’ had reportedly emerged betweeen the US-based OEMs and their European counterparts that have since jointly demanded a ‘level playing field’ against the Gripen International/SIBAT joint venture. The Obama Administration has already communicated its extreme displeasure to Israel by giving it two stark choices: preserve, and not expand Israel’s predominance within India so that US-based OEMs could gain a firm foothold within India, or face the prospect of losing big-time. In other words, SIBAT is free to enhance its profile within India through participation in the Tejas LCA Mk2, FGFA and MRT projects and follow-on sales of AEW & C systems as long as it withdraws its supplementary bid for customising the JAS-39 into the Gripen IN. That SIBAT has since chosen the only available path is, however, not the end of the story and the coming weeks will most likely see the emergence of a compromise formula being worked out between 10 Downing Street and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue under which the following options will be examined:
· The revised offer of the F-16IN with US-origin mission sensors and Israel-origin weapon systems, and consequently the formation of a formal US-Israel ‘cartel’ to counter Eurofighter GmBH and Dassault Aviation.
· The option of creating a joint venture between US and Israeli OEMs for bidding for the IAF’s projected upgrade of 120 Jaguar IS interdictors, this being done to compensate SIBAT for withdrawing from the Gripen IN offer.
· Agreeing to a win-win option under which Gripen International and the two US-based M-MRCA OEMs would not present competing bids in countries that are expected to procure new-generation combat aircraft, albeit in far smaller numbers than what the IAF will be procuring, with these countries including Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Malaysia, The Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland.—Prasun K. Sengupta
abrahavtVery well stated. Not to mention the fact that MRSAM project will give us techs for the MF-STAR phased array radar, which Elta claims to be superior to the SPY-1 AEGIS radar.
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