[Rafale]

In 1998, I witnessed some tremendously great flying; thrilled to bits when Air Commodore (later Air Marshal) Harish Masand, Air Officer Commanding, Air Wing 2, Lohegaon (Pune), pulled off some amazing manoeuvres in his MiG-29, an air superiority fighter he considered the best combat platform in the IAF. Masand, arguably the best fighter pilot in the Service during his time in it (and a Vir Chakra winner to boot for his exploits in the 1971 War), issued a challenge to anybody to disprove him. His colleague, S.S. Ahluwalia (later Air Marshal), heading the Mirage 2000 base, Air Wing 40, at Maharajpur (Gwalior) thought his French plane was better but, in a mock air battle exercise to settle the issue, the French Mirage 2000 planes were routed! The prize — a flagon of Scotch whiskey lost by Ahluwalia, has yet to be delivered to Masand and No. 47 Squadron!

This episode came to mind as the predictable IAF-Dassault fed stories, are being flashed in the media, trumpeting the 4.5 generation Rafale as an aircraft India supposedly cannot now do without, and as a necessary step to making the IAF technologically unmatchable, and India an air power! May be a mock fight should first be staged to see if the Rafales can even survive close combat with the same generation and indigenous Tejas light combat aircraft (what to speak of the Chinese JC-10s & 20s)! To claim that the Rafale performed well in Sindoor — firing missiles from safe standoff range well inside Indian territory — a mission I suggested, tongue fairly in cheek in a post many months ago, that could be carried out just as efficiently by a properly outfitted Airbus 320, is not enough!

The IAF chief, Amanpreet Singh, can referee the Tejas Vs. Rafale “battle”!

Thanks to its colonial antecedents, the IAF, like its sister armed services, is accustomed to foreign weapons platforms, borrowed operational doctrines, and to fighting “by the (Western) book (on attritional fighting)” (as the Israeli General Moshe Dayan charged the Indian and Pakistani militaries with, barely hiding his contempt behind a screen of sarcasm!). As if to prove the point of the service’s technological backwardness, we had a recently retired Vice Chief of the Air Staff, Nagesh Kapoor, bemoaning the IAF’s order of battle falling behind in terms of the “generation” of combat aircraft because it hitched itself to the indigenous Tejas LCA!

This is typical of an armed service that has NO in-house expertise in designing and developing combat aircraft and support systems, and has relied since 1947 on advertisement brochures of foreign aviation firms peddling their wares and by their sales spiels to draft Air Staff Requirements and to shortlist this or that foreign warplane for acquisition. The obverse side of this technology consumerist, rather than technology creationist/innovationist, attitude is that the IAF is what it is — a fairly minor tactically able military service but strategically and technology-wise a dwarf — too low to the ground to see the direction in which technology and warfare are headed.

No surprise then to find the IAF chief, Aman Preet Singh, once again publicly pooh-poohing jointness, preaching gradualism, and reducing “theaterisation” to the trivial matter of correcting whatever is not working with the current system of the army, navy and air force operating in their little silos (“Humko kya cheez hai jo sahi nahi hai, usko theek karna hai”).

As regards the settled stepchild treatment of homegrown aircraft — HF-24, HF-71/72, now Tejas, the excuse, perfected by IAF over the years, is that it has to have a finished product ready for operational use from the get-go — the sort of demand no other air force makes off its industry. But it holds sway because the usually bamboozled defence ministry and Indian government run by generalist babus — public sanitation in one tenure, Panchayati Raj the next, and defence in the third — has no inherent competence or confidence to make judgement calls, or over-rule the chiefs of staff. It is a problem compounded by the fact that there has been no Prime Minister worth his salt to implement the arms self-sufficiency principle with an iron hand.

The iron hand requires a full and complete ban on arms imports, followed by the armed services’ headquarters given the charge of all service relevant indigenous programmes involving public sector and private sector consortia. To drive home the message that the government means business, and to make an example and set the tone, all the excuse-offering chiefs of staff should be cashiered, and successors selected on the basis of their commitment — in measurable terms — to realising the atmnirbharta goal.

If such drastic measures are not taken by the government, the armed services will continue happily to talk atmnirbharta and, in practice, opt for the most exorbitantly priced foreign options in the marfket, each deal configured in the preferred G2G (government to government) mode that only fan more and more corruption, and keep India and the Indian military slaves of foreign technology and, hence foreign powers. The existing procurement system is one in which everyone is winner except India, Indian security, and Indian taxpayers who end up footing the bill and subsidising Inefficiency & Corruption Inc.

Just how incompetent the Defence Ministry and the Defence Production Department within it is, can be gauged by their intention to have the country join one of the two multi-nation collaborative programmes to produce the 6th generation combat plane — the British-Italian-Japanese “Global Combat Air Programme” (GCAP) to produce something called the “Tempest”. (They are running out of fearsome names and are repeating them — there was the Hawker Tempest with the Royal Indian Air Force in the late 1940s). The other being, ah, yes, the French, who will add more bells and whistles to the Rafale platform as their idea of a 6th-gen fighter, the FCAS (Future Combat Aviation System). It is a project concept previously offered Germany and Spain as potential partners only for them to reject it out of hand not least because the French company, Dassault, was unwilling to part with the source codes representing its intellectual property rights for even the basic Rafale, and over differences about work-share.

So the Indian government, in its lack of domain knowledge is setting itself up to pay, firstly, Rs 64,000 crores for 114 Rafale F4 — these are just upfront costs, servicing and mainenance over the next 35 years will be another Rs 70,000 crores (at present value of Euro). Secondly, it will pay another larger tranche of monies for the F5, say, Rs 200,000 crores as follow-on to the F4 variant and, finally, hand over — how much, can only be imagined! — for joining the French the 6th generation FCAS. In short, India will be subsidising the development of France’s FCAS! If the Indian government hasn’t beggared itself and still has some spare change left — meaning millions of euros, those will have to be spooned to the French engine firm, Safran, to turn the promising Kaveri into a bad version of the dated Safran M88 turbofan jet engine that’s already 40 years old! This even as jet engines are rapidly moving towards new technology, as I mentioned in an earlier post — variable (or adaptive) cycle jet engines that are able to maximise power and minimize fuel consumption.

By the way, one of the reasons India could not make much leeway with the competing GCAP is, as a former British Aerospace official revealed to me, because the Japanese, with their frustrating experience of interacting with the tardy Indian defence officialdom (Shinmaywa US-2) and the Indian government generally (the Mumbai-Ahmedabad Shinkansen railway fiasco), did not want India as a partner mucking things up in a time-critical programme. With the GCAP taking itself off, the inevitable happened –France raised the price for India’s participation in its FCAS!

Add all this up and, at a minimum, we are talking of some Rs 530,000 crores for Rafale F4, F5 + Kaveri assistance, but NOT counting FCAS participation!

And this is the scale of expenditure and of hard currency outgo for MANNED COMBAT AIRCRAFT that ARE ALREADY EXTINCT, and currently NO MORE THAN DEAD AIRCRAFT FLYING!!

With such spendthrift mentality fuelling its decisions, Defence Ministry/Indian government, predictably, fell for the Indian Navy’s demand, other than the Rafale Marine aircraft for its aircraft carrier, for the satellite-guided Sea Guardian MQ-9B long range drones with 30 hour loiter time for day-night, all weather, surveillance. And agreed to hand over another nearly Rs 2,000 crores for just TWO of them. This is in addition to 31 MQ-9s already purchased from the American company, General Atomics, in December 2024, amounting to 29 MQ9s — 15 Sea Guardians for the navy, and 8 each of the Sky Guardians for the army and the air force. The 2024 G2G deal for 29 MQ9s cost $3.4 billion with an MRO (Maintenance, Repair & Operations) Centre thrown in.

Add all the cost figures up and imagine what the outcome would be were the hundreds of billions of dollars that will make foreign arms industries wealthier to be invested in India, in Indian defence industry, and in Indian weapons systems projects instead, and the military held accountable for the success of all these projects.

But, as the war in Ukraine and the war in the Hormuz Strait have shown, and the “88 hour war” (Sindoor) in 2025 proved, high priced manned platforms or even large drone systems, are a liability because they are so easily neutralised. IAF had its aircraft flying in Indian airspace felled by PAF A2A (air to air) guided munitions. This means that in a hostile environment, the MQ9s — don’t even think of Rafales and such manned craft — will be lucky to survive the first pass by attacking drones before being done in by drone swarms. The Exchange Ratio simply doesn’t work for the party armed with extraordinarily expensive Rafales and MQ9 type of drone systems. In 6 months of the Hormuz War, 45 MQ9 Reaper drones costing between $30 million and $50 million each, for instance, have been shot down for a total loss to America of $1.3 billion.

So think of an encounter: A drone costing Rs 50 lakhs hits up against an MQ9 –and , poof, just like that the latter worth Rs. 1000 crores right there, instantly goes up in flames, tumbles into the sea! It is such disproportionate losses inflicted by Iran on “exquisite” American weapons systems that have brought the US to its knees. Inordinately expensive Patriot-3 anti-missile systems, THAAD (Theatre high altitude air defence) and the like, with unit costs in tens of millions/hundreds of millions of dollars, being brought down by the Iranian Shahed 136 drones with simple tech and a $45,000 price tag.

The TWIN PRINCIPLES FOR FUTURE FORCE STRUCTURING, therefore, are clear (1) drones in all mediums that are, at once, MORE VERSATILE, LETHAL and SURVIVABLE THAN TRADITIONAL PLATFORMS — tanks, ships, submarines, aircraft, and (2) VERY LARGE NUMBERS OF SMALL, CHEAP, DRONES — NOT small numbers of large, high-priced drone systems, IS WHAT WILL BE DECISIVE in wars.

The trouble is the IAF’s spendthrift nature seems to have now infected the Indian navy in a big way!

[HDW 214 diesel-electric sub]

The Indian Navy, which I used to believe, was the best-officered among Indian military services, is going the way of the IAF as its recent procurement decisions suggest — the Rafale Marine for its aircraft carriers, the MQ9 drone, and $7.3 billion deal for six Thyssen-Krupp Marine Systems HDW 214 conventional submarines. A former defence attache in Berlin, Brigadier Sanjay Iyer, is quoted in a news report as saying the negotiations are at a stage where the defence ministry is wondering “whether the technology Germany is offering to hand over is extensive enough to justify the price”.

The issue is not whether the German tech offered is extensive enough, but whether it constitutes a set of technologies India does not have. It should, moreover, be evident to any halfwit that a country that can produce nuclear powered ballistic missile firing submarines (SSBNs) can rollout technologically simpler conventional subs without a hitch . And that all the country needs to do is to buy specific technologies, etc to fill the gaps. Are defence ministry officials in the procurement loop and in the price negotiation committee deliberately blind, and can’t see this basic reality beyond their noses?

The obvious is staring them in the face — the Indian engineering giant Larsen & Toubro that produces SSBNs, ALREADY POSSESSES in genre terms 70% to 80% of the technologies Thyssen is promising by way of tech transfer and production wherewithal in the HDW 214 deal. What L&T requires, as I have detailed in my books and previous posts on this Blog over the years, is just a submarine design plan and select technologies like optronic mast and certain stealth/silencing technologies. In other words, the bulk of the $7.3 billion is a giveaway to the German firm for technologies and production infrastructure the country does not need, BECAUSE IT ALREADY HAS THEM!!!!

India has them because, other than the SSBN (and hopefully, soon SSN — nuclear powered attack submarine) programme, two previous conventional submarine deals revolved around the transfer of exactly the same sorts of technology and production processes related to the German HDW 209 in the 1980s and the French Scorpene some 20 years ago.

The Indian Company, Larsen & Toubro, has been producing the titanium double-hulled SSBNs at the naval centre in Vishakhapatnam, Hazira, and other places, and integrating whole systems since the launch of the 1st boat in 2009. The first Arihant SSBN was commissioned in 2021, the 2nd — Arighaat in 2024, and the 3rd Aridhaman in April this year. This is a remarkable record of accelerated nuclear submarine production to rival the best in the world. SSBNs are far more difficult and complex systems to engineer and build than the diesel submarine Thyssen-Krupp Marine is peddling. But the German firm has the gall to promise technology in the 6th boat that will be capped at 60% (with only 45% tech package in the first boat), with all these vessels being assembled (screwdrivered) from imported kits by the useless DPSU Mazgaon Shipyard Ltd — MDL) and. more astonishing still, that the Defence Ministry is accepting such terms and conditions

Meaning 40% of the most critical technologies of the HDW 214 are in the “back box” category for the duration of the deal, NEVER to be transferred, and that India will have to pay for through its nose for the lifetime of these submarines! There’s a similar black box for the Scorpene technologies!

So, what’s new that can be learned by the navy and the Indian industry that was NOT learned from the “technology transfers” relating to the HDW 209 and the French Scorpene? If those tech transfer deals were duds — why so? Why did he navy and MDL not absorb and innovate the technologies transferred to-date? The fault seems to be with the Indian Navy and the defence public sector units, in this case the MDL, that despite the Defence Ministry signing the same kind of deals over and over again — each deal gouging the national treasury, there’s no actual accretion in the skillset and competence levels of the DPSU, or the Warship Directorate at the Naval HQ.

The fact though is that the one time MDL did not get the production contract for the SSBN, the private sector L&T made a grand success of it. There’s a lesson here the Indian government refuses to learn. In any case, L&T has developed stuningly high levels of aptitude in designing and building submarines, which needs to be put to use in the Project 75i programme.

This is the reason why I have been publicly advocating for years that India and the navy need ONLY buy, for around $500 million, the design of the HDW 214 from Thyssen, and for another $0.5 billion optronic mast and certain silencing/stealth technologies — that’s all. L&T has the competence to convert a design into an engineering plan and do everything else. And, the total bill will max out at, say, ONE BILLION DOLLARS, NOT $7.3 BILLION!!! The price negotiation committee should offer this as the baseline deal to Thyssen Krupp on a TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT BASIS. No budging.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the HDW 214 is a derated export version of the more advanced HDW 212 in service with the German Navy, i.e., there’s a falloff in performance of around 30% compared to the item the Germans use. That was the case with the french Scorpene as well.

So who’d want such a system? Well, the Indian Navy, apparently. Because it argues, the 214 has an AIP (Air Independent Propulsion) system. Except, the Germans do NOT have a finished AIP system fitted on to any submarine just yet. In fact, the German AIP is at the same development and testing stage as the L&T-DRDO developed AIP system that has been dry-tested. So, why pay for an uproven German AIP product and the platform equipped with it, and not trust the indigenously produced AIP-kitted diesel-electric submarine? To clinch their case for the imported 214, the navy raises the threat from, where else, what else! — the 6 AIP-equipped Hangor-class subs (ex-Chinese Yuan class Type 039 A/B) joining the Pakistan navy! Bring up Pakistan, and the idiot Indian Defence Ministry and government begin quivering in their chappals/boots, ready to sell the shirts off Indian backs! Talk of the elephant being always and every time spooked by a mouse! If this is not wasteful extravagance, I don’t know what is.

Indeed, the deals for the Rafale F4, F5s, FCAS, and the Thyssen HDW 214s, perhaps, reveal the military’s intention to beggar the nation — how else to explain such transactions where the country keeps ladling out hundreds of billions of dollars/euros at a time for the same technologies and manufacturing processes? What Defence Ministry babus, DPSU officials, and naval officers involved need to beware of, however, is that these rank bad deals are going to occasion investigations in the future, and they’ll be in the dock.

The Rafale F4, F5 and FCAS deals are particularly gratuitous buys because modern warfare is moving on from these obsolete manned aerial platforms.

[Ghatak long range Surveillance & Strike drone]

Autonomous and remote controlled weapons systems are the future of warfare. So the Indian military got for itself the frightfully costly Hellfire missile-armed MQ-9B HALE (high altitude long endurance) drones with 30-hour loiter time for surveillance and strike, in the Sea Guardian avatar for the navy and the Sky Guardian variant for the army and air force. The original 2020 deal was to lease 2 US contractor-operated MQ9s for the navy in 30 month packages, with 2 more on lease on the same terms signed recently for a total of nearly Rs 4,000 crore. A still larger deal signed in 2024 with the US company, General Atomics, was for 29 MQ-9s — 15 for the navy, and 8 each for the army and air force costing for $3.5 billion with an MRO (Maintenance, Repair, & Operations centre thrown in).

But why is the MQ-9 in such great demand with the Indian armed services? It is said because of the kind of sensors, payload, and weapons they can carry. OK. But in the first six months of the Hormuz War, Iranians with their Shahed 136 drone system priced at $45,000 shot down 45 of these MQ-9s each costing US$104.5 million (or Rs 1,000 crore). It is an exchange ratio that has denuded the US inventory of its “exquisite armaments” and virtually compelled the Trump Administration to throw in the towel. So, in a hostile engagement, which would you rather choose?

This leads us to the optimum solution for the three Services, per the force structuring principles adduced above: Jointly design new and more versatile variants of the Ghatak including propeller driven and battery powered versions for tactical line of sight, round the corner, and “over the hill” kills, and MALE (medium altitude long endurance) and HALE models for strategic roles, and to finance their speeded up tests and through to induction in service.

The jet-engine powered, all-composite, autonomous “flying wing” weighing a ton for long range strike and surveillance — the Ghatak, has already been tested by DRDO. The Russian TRDD-50MT, a small-sized 2-spool bypass turbofan jet engine, powers it. This is a tested engine with reliable mid-course/high altitude restarts able to keep to a transonic flight regime. But we have our own engine. What needs to be done urgently is to get the GTRE GTX-35VS Kaveri, also an afterburning, low-bypass twin-spool turbofan engine fitted onto the Ghatak fuselage, and get it into a parallel testing and operational mode — the industrial/military norm in China and the West, and the secret behind their ability to design and produce new weapons systems at a rapid clip.

For a fraction of the hundredsof billions in hard currency to be spent on the Rafale F4, F5 and the French FCAS, the country could have extremely large fleets of Indian satellite-guided drone systems with different geometries and missions for operation in all four mediums, including underwater, with a separate funding stream channelled into developing technologies the country is deficient in that the private sector can be tasked with. Such as single crystal blade tech for the Kaveri jet engine that a private sector consortia headed by Godrej Aerospace — with tremendous experience in developing Space tech, should be commissioned to develop. This is an infinitely better option for getting the Kaveri up to speed to power Tejas 1A, 2, and the AMCA than letting the French firm, Safran, fiddle with it and, as happened in the past, pocket substantial consultancy fees, deliver nothing, and make monkeys out of us.

The Ghatak family should have varieties of drones — from battery powered for “over the hill” kills, to propeller-driven, to jet engine powered types for short, medium and long range ops, and for single or multiple roles (strike, surveillance, targeting, terminal guidance for weapons, etc); the cheap ones in very vast numbers, including kamikaze, & equally high numbers of the high value ones. The production of such drones will involve an immense upscaling of industrial capacity of a kind not attempted before. For perspective, a couple of days back, Ukraine launched, in one action, 600 long range drones against deep Russian targets. That’s the operational scale to plan for to take on the Chinese PLA.

This drone project has to be in the technology mission mode, like the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme headed by Dr Abdul Kalam in the 1980s that produced the Agni family of missiles. It has to be accorded the highest priority, and put under military supervision with formal accountability.

If the work is properly distributed through the public sector and private sector consortia to MSMEs, the potential for skilled employment generation is enormous. It will mandate skilling programmes in various disciplines, and partially remedy the situation the “cockroaches” agitated about — their first round of protests leaving the BJP governments at the centre and in the states shaken and stirred.

Meanwhile, there are more than enough Su-30MKIs, MiG-29s, Mirage 2000s and our own Tejas to meet any conceivable contingencies with China (and Pakistan), and the Rafale’s absence will in no way be felt. Because the Rafale is redundant to need, the Modi government should reconsider buying this 4.5 generation aircraft — a frightful waste of the taxpayer’s money. It provides no capability and security commensurate with its humungous price tag — and excels in no role the Tejas cannot pull. This fact is why Prime Minister Modi needs to order the IAF to limit itself to the existing fleet and to augment its manned aircraft strength only with the Tejas 1A, 2 and the advanced medium combat aircraft.