Not Surprising
The BBC reports that India chooses European fighters over US rivals
India has shortlisted two European fighters and ruled out two US rivals for a key $11bn military contract.
The Indian defence ministry picked the pan-European Eurofighter and France-based Dessault’s Rafale ahead of jets made by Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
The US ambassador in India said the US was “deeply disappointed” by the news.
So, Zero goes to India and negotiates with them, just like he negotiates with the Republicants, i.e. he gave them everything they wanted before anything was decided.
The Indian Air Force and their defense¹ ministry have been observing the Typhoon and the Rafale in service with Britain and France. They looked at the reliability, and hard cost-of-ownership figures, as well as the incentives that would go along with the purchase. They know about working with everyone in the arms market, and have decided that the two European fighters are in line with their goals and budgets.
The nuclear deals that might have helped the US manufacturers are already done, so they have no real value any more. Obama really doesn’t have a basic understanding of the principles of negotiations. US military hardware is expensive, and you need a “sweetener” to sell it, but you provide the added incentive after the sale.
1 – UK v. US spelling difference, like “colour” and “color”.
7 comments
There’s also the unstated issue that Pakistan is armed with U.S. fighters and India is worried that the Pakis might have learned things about them that could be used against Indian versions of those U.S. fighters.
In addition, while the F16 and F/A 18E/F are cheaper to both buy and to maintain than the Rafael and Typhoon, both are from a prior generation of fighters than the Rafael/Typhoon also (well, the Superbug is actually sort of newer than that, but was basically just the original F17 prototype that lost the fly-off against the F-16 back in the 1970’s scaled up), and India could have decided they could afford the more expensive Rafael/Typhoon if they gave better capabilities (note — I’m not sure they do, but they’re newer, and newer is “better”, right?). The U.S. has a bad habit of crippling export variants of their fighters also, and India may have decided that the risk of the U.S. withholding critical subsystems needed to make their F-16’s superior to Pakistan’s F-16’s wasn’t worth taking.
In other words, it was a lot more than Zero that ended up ruling out the F-16 and F-18. There was some sound (and some not-so-sound) technological and geopolitical reasons too. Both are good fighters, and equipped with the latest greatest warfighting gear, are the equal of any fighter anywhere while being cheaper and easier to maintain than anything more advanced than a MiG-21, but with Pakistan sitting right there as a potential adversary already armed with F-16’s… well. If you’re India, you have to wonder whether *your* F-16’s are better than *their* F-16’s, and whether the U.S. is gonna give you the “good stuff” to make sure of that. While there’s no such worry with the Europeans.
BTW, same thing is what did in the Su-35. India was a participant in the Su-35 program, but China is a potential adversary and China is going in big for the Su-35 program too. Plus there’s been issues with access to maintenance parts and support costs for their Sukhoi fighters, not to mention difficulties fitting modern war-fighting gear to the things for a reasonable cost. In the end I suspect India worried that Sukhoi might withhold the “good stuff” from them too if the Chinese continue making big purchases of Su-35’s and put pressure on the Russians.
So from a geopolitical point of view, looking to Europe for fighters instead of the U.S. or Russia makes a lot of sense for India. Short of reclaiming every last F-16 that Pakistan has and melting them down for scrap, the U.S. had not a chance in this competition, same deal with Russia and the Su-35’s (substitute China for Pakistan in prior statement). The only real contest was between the various European contenders. Interesting to see that the Gripen lost *this* one too… the Gripen makes a lot of sense for Scandinavia and for less advanced nations, it’s cheap, capable of operating out of rough airports, and easy to maintain, but its relatively short range and light payload isn’t going to make a nation with bigger ambitions like India happy with it.
– Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin
Another problem with the Sukhois is the ability to actually deliver them within a reasonable time period, given the number of sales that have been made. Russia has major infrastructure problems that makes ramping up production a non-trivial operation. They have all kinds of resources, but they can’t get them from where they are to where they are wanted.
I saw a lot of Drakens and a few Viggens in the Baltic, but the Gripen was after my time. The Swedes base a lot of their aircraft in caves and use roads instead of established runways. You can see the markers if you drive along the coastal roads, so the planes need to meet strict limits on size. They are also fairly simple to maintain, but they don’t need to be long range. I can see why the Indians would pass on them. Even with refueling capability, you would need an external tank.
Yes, the export versions of US aircraft are missing major components, and you have to build or buy them in the “aftermarket”, which is fine for car audio, but not so fine for aircraft avionics.
They can sit back a watch what the Typhoon and Rafale can do over Libya. The Rafale is the cheaper of the two, but most of the specifications are similar, so it would depend on the role envisioned for them.
The single engined F-16 and Gripen were probably at a disadvantage from the start. Plane drivers like two engines, and most of the senior air force decision-makers started out as pilots. I’m hearing that complaint about the F-35.
Zero’s mistake was giving away the farm before a decision was made. It probably wouldn’t have been enough to seal the deal, but now those things are no longer available for the next deal.
I’m not certain why they made the decision now, as they have a “fly off” in progress in the Med. The should just send officers over to observe and see how things go on the Libyan “test range” over the course of a month or so.
So far beyond that F-15 Strike Eagle failure early on, there have been two F-16 failures. At least one sounds like they “ate” birds on the final approach.
India’s Su-30 program was a bit of a nightmare, so you can understand why they did not want to repeat that experience with the Su-35. The Russians promise to deliver, but don’t deliver, and then you have to very expensively reverse-engineer critical parts and machine them yourself because the Russians can’t provide maintenance parts in a timely manner, and all in all it’s not been a good experience for them.
Being able to use roads as runways decidedly kept down the size of the Gripen, and in general it’s an inexpensive easy-to-maintain fighter with many of the same strengths as the old F-5 but without the limitations artificially imposed by the F-5’s status as an “export fighter”. I don’t “get” why nations like Venezuela or Brazil would want to buy something big and expensive when the reality is that they’re never going to fight a shooting war against a major power with these fighter jets, they’re going to use them to take on smugglers and pirates and such, and they lack the expertise and facilities to keep one of the big expensive fighters fed and maintained. The Gripen was designed to have a 10 minute turnaround done by four men in a truck by the side of a road, including refueling (presumably that’s a fuel truck with some additional equipment). That’s a helluva lot closer to conditions in places like Venezuela than the sophisticated facilities needed to turn around a big fighter. But that’s not what India’s looking for, they need something with better range.
The two engines vs. one engine deal tends to not worry Air Force fighter pilots much since they get to punch out and play POW for the rest of the war if their engine dies, but it decidedly worries Navy pilots, who tend to not like being lost at sea miles from shore if their bird dies in mid-air. India’s lusting after an aircraft carrier, so I suspect they’re going to end up with the Rafale, because that’s what the French are flying off the deck of the Chuckles. The Rafale is expensive and a bit of a maintenance hog (when was there ever a French machine that wasn’t?), but so’s the Su-30 that India is currently flying, so…
Regarding the F-16’s single-engine design, that and its small size (relatively speaking) are what makes it such a good dogfighter. Mass is the enemy of a dogfighter. One larger engine is lighter than two smaller engines producing the same thrust. It also turned out that its simple robust frame made it good as a strike fighter too, something utterly unexpected when it was originally designed as a dogfighter. Having only one engine was also a conscious decision to reduce maintenance costs, since it’s easier to build in 360 degree access to a single engine as vs. two engines and there’s only half the rebuild parts needed when the engine reaches rebuild time. All in all, the F-16 has proven to be a surprisingly good fighter, with a fundamental “goodness” to its design that surprised even its original designers, who were looking at designing a small simple easy-to-maintain dogfighter to take on the MiG-21 (which had a pretty decent kill ratio against the F-4 Phantom given the low number of hours that NVAF pilots had in Vietnam) and had no idea that almost forty years later their concept would still be going strong in the real world. It’s just one of those classic designs that occasionally emerge from the ether where it’s just hard to improve on it, like the M1911A and the Kawasaki KLR-650 and …
But if you want an advantage over Pakistan, flying the same fighters with pilots trained by the same trainers is *not* the way to do it! You can bet that the Yurpeens train their pilots in how to take on and defeat F-16’s. You can bet that the American trainers don’t train their pilots in how to take on and defeat F-16’s. Nuh-uh, not happenin’ :).
BTW, you want to know who’s whining about the F-35 having only one engine, it’s the U.S. Navy. They’d much prefer getting more F18E/F Superhornets, the Superbugs have two engines, are designed to be cheap and easy to maintain, it was designed from the start to be a carrier fighter thus has a simple robust and sturdy frame to handle the stresses of launch and arrest, and lug an impressive load up into the air and haul it for long distances. They don’t have good specs on things like speed and maneuverability, but the Navy doesn’t care — they want an inexpensive bomb and missile truck, not a sports car. If the Navy could figure out some way to drop out of the F-35 program they’d do it in a heartbeat… alas, too many Congressmen have their fingers dipped in that pork pie for that to happen.
And it’s way late and bedtime, so g’nite :).
If they want training against Falcons, they should buy the Hornets, because the Navy uses the F-16 as their aggressor aircraft at dog-fighting school in Nevada.
The MiG-21 could be maintained at a full-service gas station. Those were tough suckers to knock down. The Swedes use Reservists for their air defense, and the fuel trucks were more apt to Fina on the side than the three crowns. My understanding was the fuel tanks in the caves were elevated for gravity feed to avoid having electrical lines marking the caves.
Hell, they are having enough problems getting the relatively simple Air Force version of the F-35 working that the Naval version will be years in the future, and the replacement for the Harrier may never appear. It’s a total mess. The three versions won’t really share enough parts in common to save any money on spares. They should just scrap the whole thing and build better versions of the older aircraft.
It’s just another military project that has become local pork, with no concern for the needs of the military.
Yeppers, the only reason the Mig-21 is being phased out world-wide is because there’s no space in that tiny nose cone for the big radars needed for the modern weapons. But it was — and still is, for that matter — one heckuva dogfighter. It gave the Phantoms fits in Vietnam despite being flown by people who barely knew which way to move the stick to make it get into the air. The few times that the Soviet trainers took the stick and flew it against the F-4 Phantom, the result was a 100% kill ratio — for the Soviets.
Regarding the Navy adversary training, they’re using the F-16 to emulate typical Soviet-era fighters that the Navy might encounter in, say, bombing Libya, so they’re not training against the full capabilities of the F-16, they’re training against the capabilities of the F-16 that overlap with the capabilities of the MiG 21 or MiG 29 or whatever they’re training against that day. In those few cases where fly-offs have been held F-16 vs. F-18, the F-16 generally eats the F-18’s lunch (which, remember, is why the Air Force adopted the F-16 in the first place — in the flyoffs against the F-17, the pre-navalized version of the F-18, it proved to be a better fighter). If I were India looking at fighters to take on Pakistan’s F-16’s, the F-18 is *not* what I’d want.
Regarding updated/upgraded/revised versions of older fighters, that’s what the F18E/F is, after all. The SuperBugs started arriving on U.S. carriers in the late 90’s, slowly supplanting the F-14 Tomcats until the last cats were retired in 2006. The Superbug is a bomb and missile truck. It’s cheap, robust, easy to maintain, hauls a big payload a long distance, and is exactly what the Navy wants for the next twenty years, which of course is why the navalized F-35 is such a hard sell for the Navy. Of course, by the time the navalized F-35 is actually available the Superbug will be getting ready to be retired anyhow :twisted:, so maybe the Navy doesn’t have to worry, heh.
As far as the Air Force goes, the F-15 was a heavy expensive design and the reality is that the few times the F-15 and F-16 were put against each other in adversary fly-offs, the F-16 generally came out on top due to its superior maneuverability. The F-15 is faster in a straight line, but F-16’s generally took advantage of terrain to do like the MiG-21’s in Vietnam — i.e., pop up from seemingly nowhere, outmaneuver the F-15, and “down” it. This fact embarrassed the Air Force greatly, they were always scared someone was going to ask, “Why are we funding all these F-15’s for you when much cheaper F-16’s eat their lunch in combat simulations?” which is probably why they only held a couple of these flyoffs before discontinuing them in embarrassment. The same issues, BTW, apply for the F-22. It’s been proposed to do a flyoff of the F-16 against the F-22. The Air Force refuses to do so, afraid that the F-16 will eat the F-22’s lunch.
Regarding the F-16, the F-16’s in production today have updated engines, avionics, and warfighting gear. The airframe has a fundamental “goodness” that has needed no changes to adapt to the modern combat environment. It’s not a stealthy aircraft (though, as a fairly small fighter by modern standards, it doesn’t have a huge radar signature), but it’s also significantly cheaper and easier to maintain than stealthy fighters that get their stealth from coatings and composites. The reality is that stealth is only important during the early days of a conflict, before air defenses are totally degraded, and we have no (zero) need for the stealthy F-35, the F-22’s can perform the stealth role and then buy bunches more of cheap serviceable F-16’s to handle the day-to-day bomb truck and fighter roles. But that’s not sexy, so the Air Force (which fought against the F-16 from day one because a small cheap simple dogfighter just isn’t sexy and they wanted more of their big multi-engine Cadillac fighters) is completely against the notion…
Leave the “stealth” to the B-2 so it can minimally justify its existence, and use stand-off weapons for the dangerous bits, just like we did in Libya.
The F-16, A-10, Harriers, and F/A-18s are doing the job, so why are we spending all this money? The “Swiss Army knife” approach has never made sense to me, because it just adds layers of complexity to something that is already difficult to deal with outside of a depot.
They’ve done the same thing to cars. I used to be able to fix my car, but these days most of the things that go wrong require a computer to diagnose and replacement modules. There is no more cleaning and setting the points on your car with a matchbook [my ’67 MGB on I-5 near Santa Maria]. Now it’s a towing fee and a module. The system is great when it works but a PITA when something goes wrong.
It wasn’t official, but they did an informal flyoff in Asia between an F-22 and F-16 flying out of Korea, and the Falcon locked-on the Raptor. It will be a long time before pilots can “wear” an F-22 like they “wear” F-16s today. There is a reason the Thunderbirds still fly F-16s.
BTW, the local wing that will be training F-35 jocks, just retrieved some F-16s to keep their flying status current while they are waiting for flyable F-35s. The program isn’t too far behind. 😉
Bryan, the current ignition and fuel systems are far more reliable than the old ones were, and are simpler to repair in most cases. For my Jeep, the only critical items that’ll make it absolutely stop is the crankshaft position sensor and the ECU. Toss a spare CPS and ECU into my toolbox along with a OBD II scanner ($40 from Amazon.com, plus downloading the scan codes for my Jeep off the Internet into my smart phone so I have them always available), and I’m assured of being able to always at least limp home. For anything else that fails — sensors or injectors or whatever — it’ll throw a code but it’ll limp home or to the nearest dealership to get the part and replace it right there.
Granted, I took the time to learn my Jeep’s systems inside and out and stock the parts needed to fix the ignition if it goes bad — if I’m miles from civilization, the last thing I want is to be stranded out there ’cause of a bad ECU or CPS! — but so it goes. About the only good thing you can say about the old analog stuff is that it degraded slowly, rather than being digital (work, no work). Even that wasn’t always true, sometimes analog stuff *does* fail dramatically — just ask anybody whose mechanical fuel pump diaphragm disintegrated.
F22, F15, doesn’t really make a difference — the F15’s were at end of airframe life and needed replacing, the replacement would have been expensive, it made sense to buy the F22 to replace it. But there’s no need for the F35. The F16 and F18E/F will fill the F35’s role for as long as the B-52 will fill the heavy bomber role — i.e., at least until 2040. It’s just pure pork, and despite the hype over “supercruise”, weapons load and maneuverability, not speed, is what wins most combat encounters. There’s no indication that the F35 is going to be any better there than the F16… just stealthier, which is not going to make much difference in actual combat situations because maintaining the coatings to retain that stealth capability simply isn’t going to happen in a fast-turnaround combat environment.
But hey, it’s new and improved, so… sigh!