You can never go wrong under-estimating the Indian Air Force and the Indian government’s strategic foresight. They prove this again and again until now when attaching the adjective ‘strategic’ to any defence-related decision they take, is to stray into oxymoron territory.
Why? Well, consider just the following two cases.
Three weeks back we learnt from defence minister Rajnath Singh that the French jet engine maker, Safran (earlier Snecma) would help India design and develop its own jet engine — no, not by building on the Kaveri 35VS engine that produced 81 kiloNewtons (kN) of thrust in a dry test — which, incidentally, is some 9kN more than the 73kN thrust developed by the engines on the Rafales flying with the IAF currently. And, notwithstanding some Rupees 20 BILLION the country has sunk into the Kaveri project, including setting up the impressive jet engine facility at the GTRE (Gas Turbine Research Establishment), Bengaluru. But rather by forking over $10 BILLION to Safran for passing off the Snecma M88-4 engine with some tinkering, as some new fangled power plant for the Tejas 1A and Mk2.
Except, the M88 is a design product of the 1970s, that is, it is an over 50 year OLD jet engine!
The defence minister very proudly declared that the indigenous twin-engined advanced medium combat aircraft (AMCA) would be powered by this engine. Sure its power is going to be increased to 120kN but on the same old design. In other words, by the time the AMCA — a supposedly 5th generation aircraft is airborne realistically no earlier than 2040, the engine it will be outfitted with will already be 70+ years old!!!
Why is soooooooo wrong a decision not obvious to the Defence Ministry and Government of India?!!!
Well, if the old turbofan technology is what the IAF and defence ministry were satisfied with, then why did they turn down the joint proposal by the Indian industrial giants — Larsen & Toubro and Godrej Aerospace to develop the Kaveri Derivative Engine (KDE) with 75 kN thrust for the Tejas 1A and a 98kN version for the Tejas Mk-2, predicated on their accessing all Kaveri source codes, testing data, and design and structural knowledge? The KDE proposes to incorporate, moreover, the afterburner tech developed by Godrej in collaboration with Brahmos Aerospace and a prototype is here, meaning it would be an ALL INDIAN jet engine from start to finish, or isn’t that what the Modi government wants? It will void relying on the American GE 404 and GE414 engines whose flow is susceptible to America’s geopolitical interests of the moment. Consider that between 2021 when the contract was signed for the GE 404 and now, exactly one or two engines have been delivered, along with no end of excuses! Indeed, Godrej AS have already delivered two fully operational 48kN dry thrust turbofan engines for the longrange Ghatak drone (unamanned combat aerial vehicle), displaying its tech mastery plus its promise that it can scale up its capability to manufacture 98kN jet engines to power the Tejas Mk2. In any case, KDE is the way to go for India to become a jet engine maker.
For a government that incessantly crows about atmnirbharta, NOT trusting Indian private sector companies in the military tech sector is incomprehensible, while TRUSTING GE and Safran, whose interest is in stringing India along, not in making it self suffcient. In this regard, there are two reasons why the choice of Safran as partner is mighty suspicious. It had a consultancy-collaboration contract to help get the Kaveri over the hump with the help of Snecma M88 engine technolgies. And this was part of the 2015 offsets deal! (So we know how offsets are treated by foreign companies. In fact, I know of many of these firms including the cost of “seminars”, trips for Indian military personnel, etc as part of the offsets!!) Except that contract collapsed two years later because GTRE accused Snecma of reneging on the transfer of critical technology that was promised and contracted for! So, the latest deal with Safran is a double payment — it pocketed its part of the contract for the 36 Rafale in 2016, and now gets another $10 billion to transfer the technology it was supposed to in 2016 but did not!
This leads to the second factor — France’s utmost reluctance to part with technology. French defence companies, recently publicly upbraided the German submarine Thyssen Krupp Marine company for offering the source codes for its HDW 214 submarine for the Indian navy’s Project 75i — another boondoggle (we will get to it another time)! They were upset that Thyssen would set a precedent, and they too’d be compelled to do the same thing in the future. But here the Indian government came to the rescue of French, German, and every other Western supplier. The Free Trade Agreement the Piyush Goel-led commerce ministry negotiated with the UK and is negotiating with the EU and the US, permits Western supplier firms to deny transfer of source codes for their wares!
To get back to the M88. It is OLD tech. The latest advances in jet engine design and technology — the Variable Cycle Engine (VCE) that will soon be equipping modern combat aircraft is in its final stages of development in many leading countries. The VCE is distinguished by the fact that its turbofans rotate at different speeds enabling the optimising of fuel efficiency and thrust in subsonic, transonic and supersonic flight modes. The M88 and other engines of that generation and their variants had to be designed to optimise either thrust or fuel efficiency, they could not have both. With VCE you do.
Two foreign companies were in the running for the engine deal — Rolls Royce of the UK, and Safran. The curious thing is that Rolls Royce, it is said, promised the VCE but over a longer time span because it is still under development. France-Safran has no such underway project, and is into extending the life of the basic M88 design as much as possible, and which design improvements now will be subsidised by the Indian taxpayer with the $10 billion payout! Safran originally offered only 50% tech transfer but matched Rolls Royce after the latter offered 100% tech transfer with source codes, et al. On the source codes, despite Indian government pressure, Dassault did not relent on transferring Rafale source codes. Hence integrating Indian missiles and other armaments on the Rafale aircraft, is impossible. Dassault is angling for separate contracts to integrate specific Indian weapons! There go more billions of dollars into Dassault account! Why because no one in the Indian defence ministry had the wit to include transfer of source codes in the original contract.
Sure, Britain is an American hanger-on trying to humour Trump by doing things like having King Charles entertain him soon at the Windsor Castle to massage his ego just so he reduces the tariffs on British exports! And yes the bad experience, for instance, with the British Sea King anti-submarine warfare helicopters with the Indian Navy may have influenced the decision to go with Safran. Sea Kings were instantly grounded when the US imposed sanctions on India for the 1998 nuclear tests, because the rotary aircraft had American Pratt & Whitney engines. But the record shows that France is no more trustworthy.
Recall that in the 1982 Falklands War, the Argentine Navy operated the Super Etendard armed with the anti-ship AS 39 Exocet cruise missile. After the Argentines sank the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Sheffield (on May 4) as also several landing ships not long after the establishment of the British naval blackade on April 30, London asked Paris for the performance parameters and other design details of the Exocet, which the French promptly handed over. It helped the British to neutralise the Exocet — there were no further sinkings of RN ships. The point is there is no guarantee of what France may do by way of informing adversary nations about their hardware in Indian employ. Not, of course, that the Indian military has any secrets — just about every weapon system used by the armed services has a Western or Russian pedigree. And weapons platforms wholly of Indian design, like the Tejas light combat aircraft, are actively disfavoured by the services. And lest there be any misunderstanding, the Tejas LCA was imposed on the IAF by the Modi government.
But having done the right thing by the Tejas, the government went ahead and torpedoed the plane’s chances by handing the full production contract over to the defence public sector unit HAL — supposedly a “navratan”! This wretched DPSU like its kindred Mazgaon Dockyard, Avadi Heavy Vehicles, etc., guzzles money and survives only because the Department of Defence Production in the Defence Ministry thinks it is its remit to keep these DPSUs afloat. In all the years since their inception thay have not done anything remotely innovative by way of technology. Unless you count screwdrivering weapons platforms from knocked down kits innovation!
The more obvious solution would have been to have DRDO transfer the Tejas source codes, etc to L&T and Godrej Aerospace for them to set up additional Tejas production lines of their own, as I have been advocating in these posts, thereby augmenting the HAL production rate of 16 aircraft per year. With the second HAL assembly line that rate would go up to 32 aircraft annually. But the IAF requirement already contracted for is 180 Tejas 1A and Mk2 aircraft. At a 32 aircraft production clip, it will take HAL 6 some years — and that is a theoretical minimum. In reality, HAL delivered just TWO this past year because, well, of GE’s delay in sending the F404 engines! Precisely the reason why the Defence ministry should still choose the indigenous KDE option.
Additional L&T and Godrej production lines for Tejas and for the 73kN KDE power plant would have made the Tejas enterprise entirely independent of foreign engines and potentially a huge revenue generator if these private firms were also tasked,simultaneously, to sell Tejas abroad, find an international market for it. And this is the option NOT selected by the Defence Ministry.
The Defence Secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh at a media event last week explained why the IAF and the other two services bank on imported hardware. “There is always a tradeoff between what you can buy of the shelf and what you develop over time in terms of what the forces need immediately. We have trid to provide them”, he said, ” the flexibility through the emergency procuremenrt process….There is a tradeoff in the short term, but in the long run, the intent is to go fully indigenous in all of these capabilities.”
This immediate need-indigenous capability tradeoff as I pointed out in my 2015 book Why India is not a great power (yet), is not convincing, and is actually the reason why India remains an arms dependency and will continue to do so into the future. This is because a small number of Rafale aircraft, say, bought to meet urgent needs becomes the wedge in the door for the IAF to get more of the same foreign aircraft at the expense of the indigenous, also 4.5 generation Tejas aircraft. The Tejas programme was put through the meat grinder to realise a perfect aircraft without kinks, in the hope that it would simply die! The funding for the imports as a consequence is assured, not so for the home grown item which is made to jump through unending hoops. Does anybody care to remember that the Tejas was found unacceptable by the IAF because weapons had not been integrated into it, delaying its induction by 4-5 years. BUT, the IAF was happy to fly the Mirage 2000 without any weapons for several years before they were outfiited with them! Because IAF had not contracted for the weapons! Or, did but did not get them with the platforms as contracted.
And, does anybody ask about the deficiences of the imported plane? So, how did Rafale fare in Sindoor, pray? The Spectra electronic warfare suite at the heart of this supposedly advanced high-tech combat aircraft and constituting — by rule of thumb — some 20% of the price of the plane, proved a DUD. Spectra is described by Wikipedia as a system incorporating “radar warning, laser warning, and missile appoach warning for threat detection plus a phased array radar jammer and a decoy dispenser for threat countering”. OK. So, what happened? None of these do-dahs worked! Its radars and sensors could not pick up the Pakistani Saab 2000 Eriye Airborne Warning and Control System surveilling the Indian skies and specifically tracking the Rafale once it came into its view as target of interest. And the Spectra had even less clue about the Pakistan Air Force JC-10 loitering in passive mode before closing in for weapon release, leave alone about the PL15E air-to-air missile it fired, resulting in the targeted Rafale getting downed in Aklia village outside Bhatinda. And, the country is supposed to pay tens of billions of Euros for 114 more such lemons?!!!
In the IAF and the Indian Navy brass, the French defence industry has found a bunch of connivers who are making a perennial sucker out of India. (On the navy and 75i, another time.) Then again, with Mirage-Rafale-Scorpene buys requiring repeated trips to Paris and its allurements catered for as part of the offsets, no one will object to buying these pieces of hardware, especially as the Indian government is complicit. It behaves as if it has all the money in the world to waste, except when it comes letting the Indian private sector in, when every paisa gets counted. The fear among many military personnel and defence civilians is that this easy channel of corruption — Paris trips being only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, would be eliminated.
India paid some Rs 59,000 crores for 36 Rafales, or Rs 1,640 cr per aircraft in 2015, and Rs 62,000 crores for 26 Rafale Marine, or Rs 2,385 cr for each aircraft to adorn an Indian deck, for a total of Rupees one lakh twenty-one thousand crores, so far for 62 aircraft. Notice the inverse relationship between the cost of aircraft and their price. How much will the 114 more Rafales cost? Who knows! Dassault can quote any damned price they want, and the supplicant Indian government will pay it, with dozens of guaranteed trips to, oh yes, Paris by the Price Negotiation Committee! Another among the routine Third World country scams that go unnoticed! That’s the price the country pays for NOT DESIGNING and making its own weapons systems, even when it is perfectly capable of doing so, if only Modi and Rajnath Singh looked beyond the DPSUs.
The fact, specifically, is that the IAF is a foreign aircraft junkie and has been since its birth, doing whatever it can to get its next fix of non-performing junk of flying metal. The reason this is allowed is that the Defence Ministry and PMO act like indulgent parents of a dope addict — who, they think, can do no wrong. Except in real life, the defence ministry-PMO are bereft of domain expertise and very nearly oblivious to developments in warfare generally, and air warfare in particular, and choose to leave it to the “professionals” to do right by the country. But all the Vayu Bhavan brass seem to do is make self-serving decisions.
Security Wise 
Not a single person in the country would have b*lls to question this ridiculous decision. Another equally ridiculous idea was to torpedo the N-LCA in favor of the MiG and Rafale. The N-LCA if fielded in sufficient numbers would’ve been an extremely potent platform.
Regards,
Gururag Kalanidhi https://in.linkedin.com/in/gururagkalanidhi +91-9003273184 [image: 01 copy.jpg] https://in.linkedin.com/in/gururagkalanidhi
Why are we treating Indian Pvt players will full scrutiny and suspicion and giving red carpet for foren maal?
The logic just fails for Indian defense, I am sorry but forget about competing with China, the defense hardware they displayed we would not even reach in next 20 yrs. We should learn from PAK too, how to take mfg of Turkish drones and even Chinese jets in PAK even without any ecosystem like India. Our both big neighbours have been much smarter at using funds.
I think Mr Trump and Europe needs to humiliate our PM more to grow some spine and support Indian pvt defense industry.
Email from Smita Purushottam, former ambassador to Swizerland
Mon, Sep 15 at 8:43 PM
This is atrocious, on every front…apparently the US trade delegation lands tomorrow, god only knows what concessions we are ready to hand over to them!
Smita
dhando daanav
pradhan moorkh
@BharatKarnad It’s sad that this has befallen on India and it’s sad that this blog post of yours has been posted on Engineers’ Day in India, today, Monday, September 15, 2025, especially when all these need engineering and instead of working with Indian engineering companies like Godrej AeroSpace and Larsen & Toubro mentioned in this blog post of yours, the Government of India is working with rapacious foreign companies!
@BharatKarnad In this blog post of yours, you’ve referred to what Wikipedia says about the Dassault Aviation’s Rafale’s Spectra electronic warfare suite.
Yet, in the past, in one of my comments on one of your blog posts, I said what was said in Wikipedia about it, you kind of questioned me for relying on Wikipedia!
So, now why are you now saying in this blog post of yours what Wikipedia says about the Dassault Aviation’s Rafale’s Spectra electronic warfare suite?!
Wikipedia is a compilation and by way of reference. For Spectra you can go to the Thales website — there it is ballyhooed even more. If one does not believe either source, the question has still to be answered –how come the EW suite on Rafale failed to work?
@BharatKarnad
professor karnad what about the laser megajoule?
there were reports that indian government might talk to France on giving us the access to megajoule when the 36 rafale deal was signed so that we can correct our dud S1 device
Access to the megajoule is the pie in the sky France has dangled before Delhi for years
@BharatKarnad
“And, not withstanding some $20 BILLION the country has sunk into the Kaveri project”
genuinely asking professor from where does the 20 billion figure come what is your source regarding this
according to neutral sources we have spent some 3000crores only
NucGen@ — Sorry, my bad. It is RUPEES 20 billion. Text corrected. Thanks much.
what do you have to say about Lockheed Martin developing UAP or UFO technology. This is now publicly debated in the US congress with many whistle-blowers coming out of the closet and revealing some amazing technology stuff.
Haven’t kept up with that, and don’t know what to make of it.
Contrast everything you wrote here about the Indian approach to defence procurement/production with how China goes about this. Its self-sufficience and world-dominating technology ought to be worthy of respect and emulation.
About France, I already noted before that I was on an Air France flight from Paris to Delhi. The plane was full of defence personnel and bureaucrats returning from a junket organised by Thales. Say everything in my opinion.
If I were a defense lobbyist, I would earmark a lot of money just to make sure such articles do not reach PMO at any cost.
If we wanna do good in defense, we need to change the curriculum of microwave engineering in our universities, which is too outdated. That’s the base of all high tech defence equipments
-6G, Terahertz comm, high frequency microelectronics
Dear Prof Karnad,
First of all, thank you for providing such exhaustive and deep insight into strategic affairs and realpolitik through your blogs, books, and podcasts. Accidentally discovered this blog few months ago, (7/5 – 10/5).
Many a times, you have mentioned real politik and atmanirbhar bharat and how to achieve atmanirbharta and considering you being an expert and known in strategic circles and might have also interacted with defense officials as well, I have few questions –
Best Regards
“isn’t a great sense of achievement a worthy goal to pursue”. Apparently not.
if this contract goes through it would spell end to tejas aircraft programme
Got this from the 2010-11 CAG report on the KEDP you can view here:
What this reads like to me is France has been tanking our engine program since its very inception.
What’s to say Safran won’t just make us run in circles? The 10 years timeline that they have given – who is going to make sure they follow up?
I remember we had made a similar deal for FGFA with Russia, which, a few years later was junked because of “High Costs”. I can see the same things happening here. I think unless private sector is given the ownership and responsibility and ToT, Kaveri might not make it.
@BharatKarnad
professor karnad a little bit offtopic but please
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-18/saudi-arabia-and-pakistan-deepen-ties-with-mutual-defense-pact
this is a bloomberg article
recently MBS and Shehbaz Sharif met in Riyadh
The ‘Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement’ signed between Saudi Arabia and nuclear-armed Pakistan on Wednesday has raised eyebrows over its wording. “Any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both,” the agreement states, without naming any country
now does this mean that saudi arabia will have a kind of psychological nuclear umbrella shared with Pakistan
and does this mean that if india attacks pakistan saudi arabia will too pick up a fight with us
No arab i repeat no arab will ever die for Pakistan if ever Pakistan were to get attacked in future.
would like to know your views on this development and is saudi arabia too responsible for the nuclear weaponization of Pakistan?
Your observation re: Arabs seems right. But this agreement seems a formal acknowledgement of what was known, but only as rumour, that Riyadh financed Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear missiles from China with a lien on their use, if and when necessary
No private sector company can survive the funding, requirement and procurement procedures of GOI and the military. They’ll die a slow and painful death. And if there is no public sector to pick up the pieces and carry on, the entire human capital will be lost, without which we can not indigenize.
Moreover, Indian private sector has never invested in deeptech ,at best they do the low-tech tinkering, or try to pass off foreign systems as Indian. Automotive sector is the best example of lala business mindset, despite no public sector interference they haven’t indigenized it completely and just do the screwdivergiri.
The only solution is to give DRDO same independence as Atomic Energy Commission of India. Two man loop of PM and DRDO director with no intereference from babus or military; unlimited budget to catch up with the West and China; and private sector which can automate the mass production of new inventions from DRDO.
Except, DRDO lacks the get-go “culture” to do it.
Trim the fat(quota); pensioned off the administrators; do away with the paperwork; keep the military out with their “marvel comic tier QRs”; retained the best scientists and add fresh and dynamic ones with goal-oriented (as opposed to procedure-oriented) approach; rope in all the universities and labs.
Only the government funded dynamic instititution with zero oversight from babus, politicians and judiciary will help us keep up with the West and China. There is no magic private sector bullet. No shareholder would want to burn through billions in R&D only to come empty handed, definitely not the lalas. No amount of private sector efficiency will solve the problem of metallurgy of turbofan engine, these are scientific problems and require sustained R&D.
“…and require sustained R&D” which they are incapable of. Try to shake off your -ves against Godrej Aerospace, L&T, et al. These are not Lala orgs.
PSUs built the entire Kaveri tech stack, including KDE, with just $400 million, Godrej is merely a production partner. China has spent $42 billion in R&D in the last decade to acquire the turbofan technology. Which private company is going to burn $42 billion in R&D with zero profit?
At best, a Public-Private partnership, without lalas(Adani, Ambani etc), would work.
@Professor Karnad- Could you please shed some light on why the following clash with China isn’t talked about much in the mainstream media, books and political debates?
https://www.indiatoday.in/history-of-it/story/india-china-battle-nathu-la-cho-la-1967-clashes-sikkim-1962-war-pla-army-paltan-film-jp-dutta-explained-history-2788854-2025-09-19
Not sure why. But it featured the great General Sagat Singh who put a scare into the PLA. And he was singularly responsible — not the others whi have been given credit — for the 1971 victory in East Pakistan
M Vidyadagar ex director of CAIR DRDO had shared this rwcently about current state of DRDO projects he is comparing with when Kalam was at the helm. Sharing it here since it relates to LCA.
Today funding is reactive, in fits and starts, and totally devoid of any strategic planning. Modi’s attack dogs have been instructed to bad-mouth DRDO, and to bad-mouth Indian STEM personnel overall. To those engaged in such bad-mouthing, I have only this to say:
“Hey pal, we’re all you’ve got! If you think that neutering DRDO and gift-wrapping all of defence procurement (and handing it over to a private company) is the way to go, you will *constantly* be on the treadmill of importing. Invest in indigenous R&D, and spend as needed.”
“If you want better scientists, pay them better, and treat them better! If you think you can achieve world-class systems by spending peanuts, while all money gets diverted to freebies, you are thoroughly mistaken!”
Professor,
Did Rajendra singh , RSS chief being a nuclear physicist and professor have an influence on 1998 nuclear tests ?
Haven’t heard of this person until you brought it up.
So, is the deal finalised, or is there any hope left? Why don’t you do anything? You have the contacts; you are well known. Try to convince the people who have some influence and try to stop this.
This clearly looks like we are pouring tons of money down the drain, with the pressure mounting and the challenges India is facing. And with Modi repeating Swadeshi again and again, including in today’s 5 PM speech, you need to book a meeting with him and go all out on him