VnomadA penetrating observation from Hopsalot, since obviously there are no more efficient ways of bombing targets than to put a handful of very expensive jets on 50000 ton ships full of seasick Marines.
What do you suppose the 50,000 ton ship should be used for, if an amphibious capability is not an immediate requirement, and a full scale air war is on in East Asia? More productive to have it docked at San Diego?
VN – The US Navy needs to be made aware of the fact that DDGs and CGs provide impenetrable air defense and that there is consequently no need for defensive CAP, NIFC-CA and AHE. They must have forgotten how well a similar attack-over-defense philosophy worked for the IJN at Midway.
Ánd just how is LHD without fighters more ‘defensible’ than one without a fighter component (i.e one capable of CAP & cooperative engagement)? AEW&C support can come through USAF, USN and allied assets, if not through a variant of the V-22 (or CH-53).
Vnomadhow? dassault and eurofighter gave a pricelist of their proposal. dassaults was, according to reports, a good 25% lower.
That’s never been confirmed. According to other sources, the difference in cost was about Rs 25 crore or $5 mil (at the prevailing exchange rate). Which I admit rises to fair sum ($650 mil) when multiplied over 126 aircraft. The Rafale would certainly have had a significantly lower life-cycle cost, though with the oil prices crashes that stat may not be as lopsided today as it once was. Of course none of this makes the inclusion of the L2 bid viable at this stage.
After choosing Dassault, they start negociating technical items (until now) and, obviously, the conditions change from the initial proposal. As a result, if Dassault has to change parts of its proposal it obviously has an impact on price. For example, Dassault said they’d put an assembly chain with Reliance (an example along many), but GoI says “no, it has to be HAL”… a condition has changed and that may push Dassault to reevaluate the price as setting up an assembly line in HAL may be different than Reliance. From memory, the technical things that were negotiated are counted by thousands, and each time something newis negociated, it has an impact on overall price.
Agree with the general principle, but in this specific case its highly unlikely that manufacturing by Reliance would have been cheaper than at HAL, given the total lack any experience or (relevant) engineering competence whatsoever. The choice of Reliance was most likely driven by a need to skirt offset requirements and domestication criteria.
VnomadIf you have high-value targets and denied airspace, under any remotely likely A2/AD scenario you will also face ASCMs (and probably submarines) that will put the LHA/LHD on the sea floor, absent AEW and CAP provided by a carrier group.
Nothing stops the LHD from operating with a proper escort. The USN is aiming to operate 75 AB-class destroyers which along with the Tico/Zumwalts is enough to provide a four-ship escort for each capital ship in the USN fleet. Not to mention that the LHD still has plenty of value while operating in support of a regular (Nimitz/Ford) carrier group.
Also, if you read the most recent DOT&E report, you will discover the status of practical work on transforming an LHA/LHD into a mini-carrier with >8 F-35s. To wit, it has not started. And how often have the Marines done “Harrier carrier” in the past 40 years?
The Marines were never required to do in the past, and its not an urgent requirement. For now, the USN’s dominance in the Pacific (and everywhere else) is uncontested, a situation that’s unlikely to change within the next decade. But over the long term the threat from the PLAAF & PLAN is very very real. The USN has never in the last 40 years faced an enemy that could face it in a straight fight on the high seas but with PLAN gearing up to field five carriers and 40+ destroyers, supported by 1000+ land based stealth fighters, the same may not apply to the next 40 years.
VnomadChina have more than 200 flankers with Al-31 engines and 300+ J-10 fighters with the same engine and they fly for longer time in China than in India and they didn’t report to have such problems. Using bad quality of fuel and lubricants bring to a lot of issues, which India would not have if they use proper fuel and lubricants. This is not a problem of an engine itself.
According to some of our Chinese friends (Tphuang I think) the Chinese have most definitely been having issues with the AL-31 which has been burning through its service life well before its expiry date. I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if they faced in-flight failures as well.
Keep in mind, same IAF personnel also operate aircraft of Western origin (read: Mirage 2000) without facing any unusual serviceability issues.
VnomadIf you need stealth and supersonic capability the likelihood is the opposition have kit that makes STOVL capability pointless, so why is it needed?”
So that in crunch time, there exists an option of generating upto 10 small(ish) carriers to supplement the fleet of Nimitz/Ford class carriers (assuming conventional amphibious capability is not an immediate priority).
Vnomader, the Sao Paulo operates a squadron of A-4s, so, obviously, a squadron of anything flying after 1980 should bring a better capability. Had India bought the Clemenceau, armed it with Hornets or Rafales (buying it in 1997 would mean it probably would enter service around year 2000, with the time to clean it up, restore and put in all the equipment needed), the picture is much less favorable to Kuznetsov class carriers which, for taking off needs over 2/3rds of the deck to be empty. not very practical, not to speak if you need to launch aircraft while recovering others. With CATOBAR carrier, you can always keep launching with the front catapult(s), keeping a higher sortie rate
The Hornet/SH wasn’t available to India at the time (same for the E-2), while the Rafale wasn’t affordable for India (and Brazil).
VnomadBrazil bought the Foch, And Clemenceau was scrapped… they could’ve bought it easily and ince put in condition it would’ve brought India much more capabilities than any STOBAR carrier, not to speak abour STOVL ones…
And it was just an old small CATOBAR carrier
Until the Sea Gripen enters the picture around 2025(?), the Vikramaditya will remain a far far more capable ship than the Sao Paulo.
VnomadThe UK MoD didn’t refuse the AMRAAM transfer. How many times must this be repeated? You can’t ‘refuse’ something you can’t do! If India wanted AMRAAM, it had to get permission from the USA, not the UK. It would have been simpler to approach the USA directly, rather than enter into three-way negotiations for part of the UK’s stock. This has been said more times than I can count. Why don’t you get it? Operators of AMRAAM & other first-line US weapons can’t just hand them over. They need permission from the USA, & the recipient also has to get US authority to receive them. India had to negotiate with the USA in any case – & this was explained at the time – so why try to add a needless complication & additional cost by involving the UK? Simpler all round for us to keep the AMRAAMs & India to buy missiles separately. For India to cite it as a reason for not buying SHAR FA2s was insane.
Re-export of AMRAAMs would have required the UK MoD to seek US approval. So what? It would have come through (the missile was already being offered via the SV/SH). And no, it would not have been better to approach the US directly because new-build US-supplied AMRAAMs would have been rendered useless when the aircraft retired, as opposed to older ‘depreciated’ units from the RN’s stocks that would have been cheaper to acquire and therefore easier to write off.
The reason for the Blue Vixen refusal has never been clear. There was something said, IIRC, about the cost of modification to make export permissible being too much, but any more details were withheld. I do recall them being put forward as suitable for fitting into the Elta upgrade programme for the existing Indian SHARs. Again, it would have been easier, & cheaper, given that it committed to upgrading more Harriers than it actually had flying by the time they were due for upgrade, to have simply extended the upgrades. There was no need to upgrade them all, if they were’t all needed, nor train lots more pilots.
So a Captor-E with ToT was available but a second hand Blue Vixen wasn’t because of export ‘modifications? It was a nonsensical decision whichever way you look at it.
And, of course, the IN bought some of the ex-RN Harriers anyway, for parts. BTW, after all those years of operations, how much overseas support does the IN need for SHARs? Was it really incapable of buying a lot of SHARs without radars, cannibalising some (as it did!) & putting as many as it could operate without having to spend a lot (at least, those for which it had crews & for which it’d already paid for upgrades) into use, without major problems negotiating support contracts for a few extra aircraft of a type which it already had, & which it was capable of breaking down to support its existing fleet by itself?
Bought them anyway for the only thing they were worth i.e. spares (same as the USMC). Bottom-line as my previous post made amply clear was that ex-RN Sea Harriers wouldn’t have served long enough to justify the expense of an upgrade. Period.
VnomadI highly doubt it can last more than a day in European or Asian war.
And everybody knows that a missile’s value is calculated by how long it lasts in a war.
:stupid:
VnomadYour argument is that the IN made the wrong decisions. That doesn’t exactly counter my case, which is that the IN made the wrong decisions. 😀 You’re arguing that a wrong decision was right, on the assumption that other wrong decisions taken earlier were right.
Your case was – Yes, but there was at least some logic, however perverted … while the IN’s rejection of ex-RN SHARs lacked any sense at all.
While the fact is, the logic behind rejecting the ex-RN Harriers was perfectly valid. Made a lot more sense than the RN’s decision to retire the aircraft in the first place, or the UK MoD’s to refuse the Blue Vixen/AMRAAM transfer (while pitching for an EF sale with ToT).
You can’t add the time taken to negotiate the transfer (which could have been much quicker, if desired by India: look at the speed of the sale of ex-RAF Harriers to the USMC) to the time taken to do the upgrades. They’d have fitted into the existing upgrade programe, at the end. Indeed, since the IN had ordered (& committed to paying for) more conversions than it had surviving SHARs to upgrade, some of them should have been doable within the original schedule, & almost free. What’s not to like? Very cheap airframes, newer than those already in service, & with upgrades already paid for!
The USMC was buying spares and scrap, unlike the Indian Navy which would have to negotiate new support contracts with the OEM. And then it would have had to negotiate a fresh contract with Elta/Rafael/HAL.
1. How many paid for LUSH upgrade kits did the IN have available? Two? Three at most. Definitely not sixteen of them. And we don’t know how much of that non-utilized upgrade cost was transferred to the OEM (the amount was paid to HAL).
2. The last LUSH Harriers were delivered in 2010. They’ll serve on deck for only four years or so (excluding the time the Viraat is unavailable or in refit), and a significant part of the upgrade kit will have to be condemned with the retiring aircraft. Assuming they’d have been slotted in at the end, how long would the ex-RN Harriers have served on the Viraat? Three years? Maybe less. Certainly not worth training a new lot of pilots for VSTOL operations, and would only increase the value being written off with the existing Harriers.
VnomadThe IN had worked with DCNS since the late 80’s and had a design for CATOBAR light fleet carrier in the Clemenceau/Foch ballpark by the start of the 90’s Nicolas. Someone over there knew what needed to happen but allowed STOBAR to go ahead anyway.
There was no CATOBAR option available to India in the same timeline and at a price competitive with what was offered for the Gorshkov refurbishment. Period. (Of course by the time the true nature of the Gorshkov deal was known/revealed, it was too late to pull out.) To compound that there were no aircraft that India could have competitively acquired for CATOBAR operations at the time. The Rafale had just entered service and was very pricey while (relatively) cold relations with the US put the SH out of contention. Flogging the Viraat further would be something the IN would have wanted desperately to avoid, with the ship already over 40 years old (far past its design life) and proportionately temperamental.
VnomadDon’t forget that 10 years ago India rejected ex-RN Sea Harriers when they were offered, on the astonishing grounds that they didn’t include the radars & AAMs, at exactly the same time as India’s existing Sea Harriers were being upgraded with Israeli radars & AAMs which could easily have been fitted to the ex-RN SHARs, giving India common radars & missiles across the fleet.
Those ex-RN SHARs would have kept the IN SHAR fleet viable longer.
The Sea Harrier wasn’t expected to end up serving till 2015. The Vikramaditya was projected to enter service by 2008 with the Vikrant retiring around 2010. It would have taken an year or so to negotiate and transfer the ex-RN Harriers, and plenty of more time for the Elta upgrades to be carried out. In the end they would have served for less than three years, if that, assuming the Gorshkov deal had gone as per plan. A more apropos question would be regarding the necessity of the IN’s LUSH program given the timelines involved. (Indian Navy Harrier Upgrade “Imprudent”)
Vnomad:confused:
elaborate
Commonality with their AF variants (not with each other).
VnomadNot being able to share engines in the same type of plane is almost the exact defination of logistics….
And just how would you share a common engine pool among carriers at sea? FYI each carrier will be equipped with its own spares incl. engines. In any case, the issues facing the MiG-29K had nothing to do with the availability of spare engines.
Essentially flying three different planes off three different ships is absurd, and probably historically unheard of.
Its happened plenty of times. USN-USMC task forces for a start. 1 carrier plus 1 LHD. Three fighter types; Hornet, SH, Harrier II.
VnomadYes, but the naval variants are unique.
The Tejas Mk2 and Rafale have/will have a high degree of commonality, though the MiG-29K & MiG-29UPG still have certain differences IIRC.
To give you an example, the engine problems with the MIG-29K that are now effecting its availability (and restricting the carrier to operating near the coast) cannot be helped due to the IAF operating the standard MIG-29….
That’s an absurd example seeing as it has nothing to do with logistics. If the IN had three carriers with all three equipped with a full complement of MiG-29Ks (and only MiG-29Ks), the issues with the aircraft would remain unchanged.
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