A bit of unsolicited advice for the defence minister; he can close down the Indian Air Force’s (IAF) directorate of air staff requirements at Air Headquarters as also the Aircraft and Systems Testing Establishment in Bangalore. The former decides IAF’s operational requirements in terms of equipment and the latter, with its trained flight test aircrew and technical officers, evaluates aircraft and other equipment that come for trials before induction into the IAF. These are costly set-ups but are a waste, for there are armchair “experts” who know better and have reached such heights of competence that they are suggesting sacking of the Air Chief for a supposed shortfall of professional acumen (not having a Plan B, in case the Rafale contract does not take place)! Bharat Karnad’s “Terminate the Rafale Deal” (TNIE, March 06, 2014) is another fable from the quiver of an aviation non professional; in normal course these views would have been ignored, but having been carried to lakhs of Indians by this esteemed newspaper, the facts need to be set straight.
Air defence is in safe hands and the IAF’s deterrence posture is adequate to ward off any misadventures; what is also true, however, is that depleting squadron strength, which is the cutting edge of any Air Force, needs to be addressed pretty soon. The IAF, after a thorough evaluation, found that only the Rafale and Eurofighter met the operational requirements of a Medium Multi Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA); the evaluation of the commercial bids found the French Rafale, made by Marcel Dassault, to be cheaper.
Fingers are now being raised on the selection by IAF flight test experts (super specialists in medical terms) questioning the “fighting quality of the aircraft”. The selection process is explicitly enumerated in the Defence Procurement Procedure and was followed to the T. Six aircraft from five countries were put through a rigorous evaluation in the Indian environment over a period of two years and the evaluation report submitted to the government; that not a squeak against the evaluation was heard is testimony to the professionalism of the valuation. But now, as the government’s decision is near (as one hopes it is), the doubting Thomases have got into their usual game of introducing red herrings—ever wondered why these things happen whenever a big project of any wing of the armed forces is nearing fruition?
Questions have also been raised on the integrity and professional competence of the Price Negotiation Committees (PNC) of the ministry of defence (MoD) for their supposed inability to demand our monies’ worth from Marcel Dassault. If they are incompetent, then this trait would be true for a Rafale contract as well as for a Sukhoi or any buy of the services, in which case we are doomed as a nation! That contract discussions have taken this long attests to the fact that the MoD is ensuring that India gets its due. A techno-financial angle has been introduced in the debate stating that it would be better to acquire more numbers of cheaper Su-30s and Tejas Mk2s for the same monies as the 126 Rafales. This only speaks volumes of the professional ignorance of the analyst.
A nation evaluates its threats and from that flows the capability required by the services to counter them. There is no aircraft that can alone perform all the tasks (how one wishes it was so) that come the Air Force’s way and from that flows selection of different role-based acquisitions. The Su-30 is an air dominance fighter while the Rafale is a medium multi-role aircraft; one can only complement the other and not be a replacement for it. The capabilities of the two are vastly different. While both have similar external carriage capacity, the flight range of the Rafale is almost three times that of the Su-30 (with similar external load and without air-to-air refueling). The Rafale has the active electronically scanned array radar while the Su-30 has one of older technology. The survivability of the Rafale is much better due its state-of-the-art electronic warfare suite. The Sukhoi requires two aircrews while the Rafale is a single-pilot aircraft—hence the training requirements would more than double in case of the Sukhoi, a huge task in itself. The Rafale’s wingspan is small and it fits into existing blast pens on our airfields while the Sukhoi requires costly bigger ones to be constructed. The differences are many but each aircraft has a unique place in the war fighting calculus of the IAF. The catchword is “role”; an air force decides what are the roles that it needs to perform and accordingly recommends the proposal that meets the qualitative requirements. The IAF has done just that and would perform its role with the equipment it possesses when the balloon goes up—it’s the only Plan, Plan A that it has. A Plan B? What’s that?
Now to the really strange issue raised by the “analyst” of Rafales being procured by Qatar, being flown by Pakistani pilots and being upgraded by Saudi money and being transferred to China for a strip evaluation such that when IAF Rafales get into a fight with the Chinese, their air defence system would shoot them out of the sky! Incidentally, the Chinese have the Su-30 MKK in their inventory and are going to get the Su-35 very soon; one wonders how the Su-30 MKI would be a total mystery for them and escape their air defence but the Rafale would not? Does the analyst realise that he is passing this judgment on a professional outfit like the IAF? And he adds that the French “…won’t allow the indigenous Brahmos supersonic cruise missile to take out targets inside China from standoff range”. The Brahmos is yet to fly on the Su-30 and the Rafale is yet to come in to IAF; one wonders why Dassault has refused permission for mounting the Brahmos on the Rafale without the IAF even asking for it?
Readers of this newspaper can rest assured that their Air Force is held in high esteem for its professionalism in choosing its equipment and using it in war. Sleep well dear countrymen and women—our skies are safe and will remain so!
The writer, a retired Air Vice Marshal, is a distinguished fellow at Centre for Air Power Studies. Email: m_bahadur@rediffmail.com