{"id":181124,"date":"2016-09-23T18:17:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-23T23:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/09\/23\/lets-talk-about-the-backstory-here\/"},"modified":"2016-09-23T18:17:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-23T23:17:00","slug":"lets-talk-about-the-backstory-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/09\/23\/lets-talk-about-the-backstory-here\/","title":{"rendered":"Let’s Talk About the Backstory Here"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Dassault won the medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) contract, it wanted to partner with Reliance Industries, but the Indian Government insisted on local co-production be conducted by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL)<\/a>, the company that took over 30 years to deliver the massively under-performing Tejas fighter aircraft.<\/p>\n

When Dassault saw the level of technical competence at HAL, they refused to work with them, figuring that it would be a complete horror show, and they would be on the hook for this, so now we have India signing a deal for 36 French made fighters<\/a>:<\/p>\n

India has concluded a deal to acquire 36 Dassault Rafale fighters, with a contract signed in New Delhi by the nation\u2019s defence minister, Manohar Parrikar, and his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian on 23 September.<\/span>

<\/span> The deal is worth \u20ac7.75 billion ($8.69 billion) for the French-built aircraft along with associated weapons and a support package.<\/span>

<\/span> Finalisation of the contract brings to a close a long-running acquisition process to equip the Indian air force with the Rafale, which was selected as the winner of its medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) tender in 2012, defeating the Boeing F\/A-18E\/F Super Hornet and Eurofighter Typhoon. Other previous candidates for the deal included the Lockheed Martin F-16, RAC MiG-35 and Saab Gripen.<\/span>

<\/span> The air force was originally slated to acquire 126 aircraft via the programme, but the original deal ran aground over cost concerns. [Cost concerns my ass. Dassault found HAL incapable of executing a co-production deal] It was revived by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to France in 2105, when he declared that 36 aircraft would be acquired in \u201cfly-away\u201d condition from Dassault. This was keeping in view the \u201ccritical operational necessity\u201d of the service, he said at the time.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This was the Rafale’s first foreign sale, and it was a very big deal for Dassault, but they could not get co-production to work, but the fact that they had this order made it a viable choice on other foreign markets, which is why there are sales to Egypt and Qatar as well, so the deal, even if much diminished was a lifesaver for the Rafale production line.<\/p>\n

The ineptitude of the Indian defense establishment in developing new systems (see the Tejas<\/a>, the Arjun<\/a> tank, the INSAS rifle system<\/a>, etc.) remains staggering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Dassault won the medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA) contract, it wanted to partner with Reliance Industries, but the Indian Government insisted on local co-production be conducted by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), the company that took over 30 years to deliver the massively under-performing Tejas fighter aircraft. When Dassault saw the level of technical competence …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[950,772,778,820,832],"class_list":["post-181124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-aggravation","tag-aviation","tag-defense-procurement","tag-military","tag-south-asia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181124"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}