Well I think the RN were probably thinking more along the lines of a kebab box, but the vertical element is probably true for both.

Given the budgetary pressure at the moment, no-one is looking beyond the F35 and Crowsnest, but at some point they will want to do more with the deckspace and I think the UK will have moved beyond planning for a heavyweight UCAV such as might come out of FCAS.

What ever happened to the “Novel Air Concept” I wonder?

Look up CarterCopters CC-221. The proof of concept PAV seems to fly pretty well. Interesting to see if it scales up. Perfect fit for the ESTOL support requirement.

I think 212/214s were considered a while back then finance become a stumbling block, no the money is there I think PN wants to go for Chinese boats as there is a nuclear element to this deal. You would certainly know better then me, but feel the French and Germans may be reluctant to give Pakistan boats it can use for nukes (unsure if a nation needs assistance from the manufacturer to do this, think the Israelis managed with help on the Dolphins).

Chinese boats certainly make sense from this point of view. Deterrence patrols in the sub continental setting are certainly something new. I am not sure they would require the long endurance of UK/US/Russian SSNs, and certainly they would have to remain within the Indian Ocean or Arabian Sea if using cruise missiles. Here surely ambiguity is the game. Pakistan would possibly always try to keep a sub based in the fiendly waters of an ally like Oman. I’m not sure.

If finance was the stumbling block with the Germans Mountain, as you suggest, I dont think its difficult to see how the Chinese boats came into the picture and it wont be anything to do with nuclear jitters on the European builders part. For that the French have already provided Pakistan with boats capable of delivering a nuclear strike. Acquire a few dozen US Mk67’s and swap out the 150kg conventional rapid-expanding part with something altogether more ‘flashy’ and set four going with timers on the warhead, from the tubes of an Agosta90B, into the shallows in Mumbai harbour….another does the same in Chennai….the first cruises up the coast and posts a similar package into the yards at Cochin. Simplicity itself…with huge effect for relatively little outlay. This concept has been around a very, very long time…so anyone supplying a submarine to a nuclear weapons state is doing so in the knowledge that their platform could be so utilised.

Then we come back to the original premise of a cruise missile integration. Its not a terribly complex job of adding LACM capability to a submarine…its giving away nothing secret to say that fire control for the, now retired, UK S-class boats TLAM fit largely consisted of a newly embarked laptop with a line into the boats fire control system. There was a bit more to it of course….but not a shockingly large amount. The indigenous LACM in Pakistan is one of quite familiar dimension if memory serves….just under 21″ in diameter and about 20ft in length. NATO standard torp tube is about 2ft longer than that. The pieces are all there for nuclear LACM capability in the Agosta’s if one was so sought.

Deterrence is not just the ability to make a couple of big bangs by itself Mountain. Deterrence is the ability to sway the oppositions decision making in your favour by implicit threat of force that he can do nothing to counter. If he can find your subs ambiguity works against you…he has to kill your sub at the rush as its a possible WMD threat….whether it is carrying instant sunshine or not. You’re then back to needing covert deterrence patrol and a boat capable of running such a patrol….IF you want to mount a deterrence policy. You can of course have a nuclear strike platform without it being a deterrent…just make sure not to confuse the two!.

BlackArcher

The IN hadn’t purchased ANYTHING from the US in the ’90s, and the service wasn’t going to hinge its future carrier capability on a hunch that relations would improve so much over the next decade.

Yet negotiations for the said USN 15000ton LPD were underway, what, the year after the Gorshkov deal was actually signed?. The early to mid 90’s are irrelevant in the context of the discussion anyway. So we’re starting the timescale for this in 1998….by 2001 the MMRCA requirement goes out with a US element and in 2004 India starts looking for an amphibious transport and settles on a US LPD. Its not really the litany of dismissal that the good Admiral suggests is it?.

the IN needed a carrier capability and the STOBAR was a far superior option to the limited capability brought by STOVL fighters and the IN rightly decided to go with it.

Wrong. This is the part that its hard to get those only interested in individual aircraft performance to understand. In strategic terms STOBAR offered very little more than STOVL….and we see the proof of that today. Sure the STOBAR plane might fly a little further, faster and carry a bit more payload, but, the force multipliers still arent there in the fleet. Principally AEW/ISTAR, but, also COD for fast turnaround logistics which can be crucial for keeping a fleet in manoeuver as opposed to being tied to cumbersome UNREP schedules. The IN requirement is for sea control….this means that wide area maritime surveillance and freedom of manoeuvre are absolute core requirements. STOBAR does not deliver those core requirements any more than STOVL did.

STOBAR’s ‘far superiority’ over STOVL isnt enough superiority to make a difference….hence the need for the IN to look at CATOBAR now…..again…..some 20yrs after IN/DCN did the design work on the basic carrier they did need!.

You’ve got your facts mixed up.The original MRCA RFI didn’t feature the F/A-18 C/D nor the Super Hornet and it was specifically for the IAF, not the IN.

The information I had was that the Boeing design was in there from the kickoff, but, I’ll happily defer to better knowledge on that one. In reality its an unimportant point….whether it was IN or IAF is irrelevant….whether it was Hornet or Falcon is irrelevant….the fact is that India had considered and WAS looking at a US design in the timeframe indicated for a long lead project. Unless someone in Indian MoD got the RFI list from a quick flick through a Janes book it shows that the consideration process leading to the 2001 RFI request included US technology. That alone torpedoes the excuse that US gear could and would not be entertained. It was entertained and wilfully so.

A support deal for a few steam catapults, by comparison to a bloody great ship or a 100+ unit fighter order, would’ve represented a very small logistical vulnerability and one that proper spares management/inventory and local support development could have mitigated pretty much entirely. After all, if memory serves, steam cat technology wasnt new to the IN. You accept that the financial conditions the IN found, in the early 90’s after they’d worked up the CATOBAR design with DCN, precluded taking that forward….and you can only feel for them in that situation. That they knew what that goal was and still accepted the hobbled nonsense that is STOBAR, still now, defies belief….except for the context of a political decision foisted on the IN that they were told to make the best of. That, to me, is also the only explanation of how they got their materiel investigation of Gorshkov so thoroughly screwed-up as well. Off-the-record they very likely didnt…a service so good at keeping hulls operational knows about proper maintenance schedules and documentation. Nothing about Gorshkov should have passed that kind of inspection regime!.

What RFI? The IN’s Chief never mentioned anything about any interest in the Hornet and in fact clearly mentioned that the fact that the US was the only supplier for cats meant that the IN didn’t consider it a viable option. US India relations matured much later, and big ticket items purchased from the US didn’t include offensive items till much later.

MMRCA. The IN chief made his comments about STOBAR after STOBAR had been locked in. He was hardly going to say ‘this is a dead end technology and we’ll have to scrap it as soon as we wish to develop a full sea control capability’. I think any reading of the Admirals piece without keeping that context in mind is a touch naieve perhaps.

The simple fact is that this ‘nasty unreliable Americans and their embargos’ was not an obstruction officially to anything India had in long term planning. Hence MMRCA RFI’s, hence negotiation for a 15000ton full load Austin Class LPD a few years later, hence later purchase of P-8, Harpoon etc, etc. Its just an excuse and the Admirals piece is a fob off to justify the modest state IN naval air is in now when many billions have been spent, effectively, to arrive back at square one…the need to grow in to CATOBAR and proper sea control Fleet Carrier deployment. Something that its well known the IN knew 20yrs ago.

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.

Again thats a largely moot point nomad. Its not a case of deploying CATOBAR ‘at that time’ it would have been a case of sensibly programmed spend. IAF scoped its MMRCA requirement and had put out the RFI in 2001 if memory serves?. The list of likely candidates was one that had Rafale in it for obvious reasons even if, IIRC, the 2000 was favoured initially. Making the long term naval fighter determination a factor at that point…advised by the IAF options and scoped in the same timeframe to match a longer term CATOBAR carrier design/build cycle was an entirely feasible and practical option.

There would have been no way that India could’ve fielded CATOBAR in the same time it ‘theoretically’ could have fielded STOBAR/MiG…that isnt contended…the point is though that it didnt need to and, much like the SHAR/MiG comparison thats a meaningless metric. STOVL could have been extended to retain adequate capability beyond what actually happened…as Swerve alludes to. It could have done so at minimal expense…certainly compared to what STOBAR was going to cost.

The simple illustration is that, the way this transpired, the IN has just deployed an old STOBAR carrier with at most a couple of dozen MiG-29’s and a Kamov AEW det. They could have deployed a new CATOBAR carrier with a couple of dozen Rafale-M and an E-2 detachment. I know which offers more capability and which offers the better platform for their naval aviation to evolve from. I’ll leave it there as I’ve said all this before too many times and this is a Rafale thread!

Mountain is exactly correct here.

Rii’s comment:

Certainly the latter acquisition is open to criticism, but it would have been a brave man indeed to turn down the Russian offer in the context of the recent retirement of INS Vikrant, the obsolescence and impending retirement of INS Viraat, and the immaturity of the nation’s own carrier development program

This is wrong in every salient manner. STOBAR is a solution in search of a question. It always has been. It found such a question, briefly, in Sergei Gorshkov’s concept of creating a bubble of high altitude protected airspace in the mid Atlantic…..a la Kuznetsov. Apart from the nuanced flirtation with calling its replacement carrier an ‘Air Defence Ship (ADS)’ the IN havent had such a narrow scope in mind for its naval aviation. It was clear 15yrs ago that the ultimate solution for the IN wouldnt be STOBAR….it was also a fairly solid bet that the ultimate goal was going to be Rafale-M. It doesnt take a brave man to point out that selecting a dead end technology was going in the wrong direction and wasting resources….it takes a professional officer to do his job.

In the context of the IN’s operations between 1994-2014 no threat existed that STOVL-based naval aviation was insufficient to cope with. In 2000 looking forwards it was a fairly safe prediction that this would be the case which the intervening years have borne out. The LCA’s naval variant is the merest of sideshows and a justification for nothing and, as far as I have been able to tell, the crossover between IAF and IN MiG-29’s has similarly been inconsequential. There were a number of STOVL carriers coming available in the timeframe….hell even the Gorshkov itself in its original configuration might have been a goer…they would at least have not been in such a position to rip India off on the rebuild!. There was no viable, logical, supporting argument for MiG-29K or the Russian carrier then and it just looks worse from today’s perspective.

The money that has been sunk, uselessly, into STOBAR should, from day 1, have been pushed into developing a CATOBAR medium fleet carrier and its irrelevent if that would have taken til now to put such a ship in the water. STOVL has been stretched to cover the actual shortfall in delivering STOBAR…..it would have been equally viable to stretch it to cover the longer-term development of the IN’s proper carrier solution. Now, because of STOBAR, that proper solution is still a little more than a drawing-board exercise. It was clear 15 years ago that going the route they chose would hold back IN naval aviation by a generation…now it looks like it may actually hold it back by 2!.

Clearly the MiGs single-engine out flight characteristics are far superior to that of Harrier, Etendard, A4, A7, F8 etc, etc!.

I think the phrase ‘crippled’ in the original piece might be a bit sensationalist. On ops such concerns would evaporate, under peacetime regs it means risk management. In reality having a diversion field ashore and healthier reserve fuel than would otherwise be possible. Unfortunate but not really a show stopper.