As far as the Tank arguement goes the Indian Army think the Arjun is an absolute Dog

The reason they purchased the T-90 was because of this and that their neighbour had bought T-80Ds form Ukraine and was beginning the manufacture of the Khalid with the help of China.

hardly. the old guard of IA is unwilling to make the changeover in doctrine and logistics needed for transition from russian style tanks, now that the threat of abrams with pak army is no longer there.

there is tremendous division among the army itself on the treatment meted out to the arjun, which is widely acknowledged to be superior to the T-90 in a number of aspects.

are trying to find alternative uses for the 120 or so already on order such as using the chassis for a new SPG.

you are utterly confused between two completely different projects !
the SPG project was a completely different project for artillery developed using the arjun chasis that had nothing to do with the tank forces.

the current arjuns are going to frontline formations on the border with pakistan.

It is years behind schedule and way over budget and still doesn’t work!

wrong again. you are clearly unaware of the facts.
please read this : http://ajaishukla.blogspot.com/2008/06/arjun-tank-acquires-growing-fan-club.html
The journalist himself was a tank officer who retired as a Colenel from a T-72 unit.

I am not going into the details as you already mentioned but there are gaps and those gaps are growing……. 🙂 I can say, technologically in our favor but numerically in their favor.

of course there’s a gap. PLAAF is a force of a country of larger land mass and larger economy. that would be obvious.
but again you are making a mistake. AKA is correct, but the generous superiority of PRC is not in comparison to IAF and neither has AKA said so.
there are other fields (artillery for example, AD net for another) where the gap is considerable.

which is why I can’t agree to this . 🙂

In near future IAF will be no where near the PLAAF wrt to size

since it doesn’t match at all with what the current facts and a reasonable extrapolation into the future shows.

PLAAF has a much larger fleet of aircrafts many of those are 3rd generation though, still they have more 4th generation fighters than IAF. Above all Chinese are increasing the fighter fleet more rapidly than the IAF. Chinese probably spends more money than any other country except USA. I think the size difference will only increase between two.

Chinese weapons usually much cheaper than others. So they can buy large number of aircrafts for a particular amount of money. Again numerical advantage….

the ORBATs for IAF and PLAAF are there in the last page in quadroFX’s posts and mine. do check if they have a much larger 4 gen force than India.
# of aircraft induction too isn’t that bad for IAF (15 mki’s/year + direct russian production) it will only go up in the coming years with the MRCA and the LCA.

comparable gen build in India weapons aren’t too much costlier than chinese made ones, when you take the R&D investment into consideration.

In near future IAF will be no where near the PLAAF wrt to size

how so ?

……….
I don’t understand why all the Indian posters here seem to think the UK is particularly prone to doing its own development. We probably do less of our own development than most countries, in proportion to the size of our defence industry. Look at Italy, for example, which (with much smaller military industries) has sometimes seemed obsessed with developing everything it can, e.g. the not terribly good Ariete tank, when Leopard 2 could have been had for less money, or AMX, where the development cost spread across relatively few airframes made it stupidly expensive compared to higher-performance alternatives.

probably because we see UK posters complaining all the time but italy seems cool with what it gets ! :p
since I don’t understand italian I don’t know if italian military enthusiasts are similarly disappointed.

fair enough, but you’ll hit a point eventually where military spending will be over ridden by domestic expenditure on infrastructure, breads and circuses eventually trump defence.

can’t see how though. India’s defence spending as part of GDP is around 2.5% and this is without doubt a phase where the demands for bread money takes much higher precedence than the military. there is little chance that it will come down. the Indian economy is also very likely to increase at a fair clip, so even a stationary % figure of GDP will do quite nicely.

You mean throw a tender for a training aircraft let it last for 2 years, dis miss it and start all over again but this time take longer?

Or the classic, throw a tender for artillary not make any decisions in the mean while denying your army of key equipment and making a supplier go bust.

Or maybe the RAF should go the way of the MMRCA?

Sorry couldnt resist…

I guess you meant that they should think of buying soviet/russian designs?

okay I give up ! 😀

Uk can perhaps start making those little compromises (horizon class for example) that would allow it to share development costs with other nations in similar situations. I really don’t see why the requirements for UK would be so different from other western european nations to warrant a going it alone on most major projects. the nuclear subs for example, couldn’t those have been bought from the US ? a joint project would have made perfect sense.

and develop only those systems in-house that make economic sense on their own.