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India Turns Down American Fighter Jets, Buys From France
An anonymous reader writes "While America had offered the F-16, F-18 and now the stealth F-35 fighter, India picked for its new multi-role attack jet a low cost, older French plane. Why? For one, it's cheaper, and two, if American/Indian relations go bad, can they get the parts and equipment to keep the planes in the air? It seems prudence beat out the latest in technology."
US planes like this are very expensive from the US.
Back in the 1950's, Canada tried to develop its own plane called "The Arrow". Apparently, the program was squashed in parliament by the CIA paying off key representatives. This sort of technology costs billions and takes years to develop as well as keeping an industrial infrastructure in place to keep it going.
Isreal developed its "Lion" prototype, but the US offered to give Isreal US's top of the line state of the art planes to keep them from pursuing that line.
Maybe over the course of several decades, other countries would develop sufficiently advanced air breathing technology and then where would the US be.
Indeed! There are (admittedly very simplified) models of combat that indicate that the power of a fighting force is proportional to the square of its number of members.
This is something that I stumbled across when developing simple ODE models of Starcraft combat, and later discovered is known as Lanchester's Square Law. The idea is simple: Suppose you have two opposing groups of identical combat units, with x and y members, respectively. If you assume that all units concentrate fire on the weakest enemy, then the rate at which enemy units is depleted is proportional to the number of units you have, and vice versa. In symbols,
dx/dt = -y
dy/dt = -x
It turns out that the quantity D = x^2 - y^2 is conserved by this system (to verify this, just differentiate D with respect to time, use the product rule, and substitute in from the ODEs). What this means is that the fighting power of a fighting force is proportional to its square, and when the smaller force is eliminated, the larger force will have lost as much fighting power as the smaller force had, in order to defeat it.
You can modify the equations to include constants that reflect unequal kill rates, but you will find that the equivalent conserved quantities still depend quadratically on the number of units, but only linearly on the kill rate coefficients. The conclusion to be drawn is that, given a choice between a unit that's twice as effective, and twice as many units, you should choose to have twice as many units.
All this is predicated on the accuracy of the mathematical model, of course, and that model, I freely admit, is a rather drastic simplification. However, its aesthetics are appealing, and I think it may have a grain of truth. If it does, than Rafales or Super Hornets may indeed be the better choice than F-35s.
To my knowledge Australia is still going to buy the F-35, they just bought 24 F/A-18E as well. I think this is particularly dumb, Australia should have gone either with Eurofighter or Sukhoi, at least with the interim order to keep America on its toes. But the Australian government does not like to keep America on its toes, it believes in showing unwavering solidarity and declaring to the United States that Australia can and will accept any crap that it is sold. They did make a serious inquiry about the F-22, which would have been a useful plane, but when it was rebuffed on national security grounds, Australia did not make an indignant show about being only sold the US' second best fighter.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
But India's relationship w/ the US has been pretty good. The only strains were when Bush, after 9/11, decided that Pakistan was an ally, rather than an enemy, and this understandably teed India off. Also, since 1991, one of India's closest defense allies has been Israel - India happens to be Israel's biggest customer for defense equipment.
I think India is buying from France, aside from cost reasons, to make US understand that there is a price tag involved if it continues to support & supply Pakistan. If the US were to cut all the billions of aid it gives Pakistan, there could be an improvement. Also note that if India were to buy more expensive equipment over something less expensive, politicians would scream 'corruption'. In the 80s, that's precisely what happened w/ the Swedish company Bofors, and even though there was no wrongdoing on the government's part, the perception of wrongdoing was what led to the defeat of the government in the 1989 elections. Yeah, there have been many corruption scandals since, but no government in its right mind would want to jeopardize its very existence over the country's security.
someone in the india ministry of defense should google "french military victories"
Thanks for the recommendation. I found this, which was interesting:
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7061&IBLOCK_ID=35
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
The real story is India gets the rights to produce the French Rafale. France will transfer their technologies to India so they can build the airplanes themsellves. There is no way the US State Department will allow that transfer of stealth technology to India. This has been the sticky point with India.
The Rafales has a radar cross section of 0.72m2, its not designed to be a stealth fighter.
The F22 is around the size of a marble, the F35 the size of a golf ball
Try beach ball. To quote The Sydney Morning Herald after the stealth capabilities of the F-35 were downgraded from the original plan:
A crucial aspect of the fighter's "stealth capability" - radio frequency signatures - has been downgraded from "very low observable" to "low observable", according to the US Defence Department website.
Peter Goon, a former RAAF flight test engineer, said that would mean the difference between it appearing as a "marble and a beach ball" on enemy radar. The problem with the fighter, Dr Jensen says, is that it can be relatively easily detected from the rear.
(and can carry 3000lb of bombs in internal bays)
Which makes it a light bomber. It's really more of a ground strike aircraft than a fighter, multi-purpose or not. And that is basically what the US wants its allies to have to help fight its wars - you can't subdue Iran with Flankers; they are far more useful for actual defense than offense, and the US is all about attacking others.
In keeping with the aircraft theme...
What about the Il-2/10 Stormovik ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormovik )? That damn thing helped to decide the battle of Kursk (claims of a squadron of Il-2s to have blown away about 70 tanks in 20 minutes). The idea and performance of the Stormoviks and the adaptations of the P-47, A-1 Skyraiders, and the venerated "Spooky" gunship during Viet Nam led to our modern equivalent, the A-10 Warthog.
The thing is, the Air Force didn't like a "low and slow" ugly POS in their arsenal - they wanted big, fast, and expensive Eagles and Falcons. The Gulf War would show everyone what that big ugly bastard could do. Anyone remember the footage of an A-10 landing with one wing blown off?
Now, when you take a military that doesn't bat an eyelash over dropping $40-60 million on a fighter, and have that industry try to convince other countries to pony up the dough, you get this.
How do we compete? Back when the F-22/23/35s were being developed, Northrup had already put together an updated version of the F-5E "Freedom Fighter", they called the F-20 Tigershark. They updated the avionics, threw in the same engine as the Falcon, lightened things up with carbon fiber, and streamlined a few things. The result? Well, when some guy named Chuck "Fsck the sound barrier" Yeager climbed out of his test flight, he had an ear-to-ear grin. It was cheap (~$12M), fast (2 minutes to operational altitude), and used standard parts that allowed for front-line field-swaps. The kind of thing some country like India might want, wouldn't you say?
I'm seeing the same mentality in cars. I don't need GPS, ABS, WiFi, Bluetooth, heated seats, backup camera, or even a cigarette lighter. I just want a car that gets me there, for little cost. Like India, I can't seem to find any...
India got the deal of the century - if you read the fine print, France is only selling India 18 fighters - India gets the CAD files and source code and will build the remaining 108 themselves - presumably for the cost of labor and materials. That means instead of paying $90 million for each jet, they're looking at final production costs of $5-20 million each. Who knows how the Rafale's technology will fuel their own defense industry over the next 20-30 years? It's a win-win-win for India, and France gets to stop propping up a failing industry for a few more years.
This sort of "buy some, build the rest" deal is rapidly becoming the standard for large BRIC contracts with the west.
moox. for a new generation.