DRDO now begging the Army to place orders on Arjun Tanks

[Joe Shearer]

They dont at least not yet. They need DRDO. A tank and IFV platform can be produced with DRDO in the PPP way like ATAGS is being done. Or those players can partner with outside OEMs.

Whatever the case, IA will not let go of the weight requirement. I do think mark 2 will get orders after reducing some weight, but that platform is done, unlike Tejas.

Irony with Bhishma is it's using spin off subsystems from the Arjun's development.

Just make a weight chart for the leading ten battle tanks, and you will get the surprise of your life.

India needs to let go of state enterprises and let their private sector work for the state.

There is some confusion here.

DRDO only designs to specifications, and it is the manufacturing units who are responsible for productionising. They - HAL, BEML in the Defence Ministry, the HVF in Avadi - are responsible for manufacture. In this particular case, CVRDE is the R&D organisation within the DRDO that supports the Heavy Vehicles Factory at Avadi. The design was CVRDE (or its immediate predecessor), and the designs and blue-prints were used for manufacture by the HVF.

The Indian private sector has the ignoble record of having spent less than 1% on R&D; Mahindra and Tatas are exceptions to the rule, but they too are more Design and Development rather than Research and Development. Tatas has a clutch of secretive organisations doing very good work in very low-profile structures and organisations; Mahindras has concentrated on vehicle design, around what they have done for the civilian market; the real sleepers are the Bharat Forge people, the Kalyani group, who have done outstanding work in artillery systems. But the crony capitalists are jostling for position, and if the Ambanis, the Adanis and the Ruias get involved, nothing good is going to happen. Meanwhile, mammoth organisations who could have done all this very comfortably are rotting away/ have rotted away because they were public sector once upon a time, and nobody knew what to do about them. All that know-how and capacity is gone. But that is true of anything and everything in the east.

 

[SQ8]

Just make a weight chart for the leading ten battle tanks, and you will get the surprise of your life.



There is some confusion here.

DRDO only designs to specifications, and it is the manufacturing units who are responsible for productionising. They - HAL, BEML in the Defence Ministry, the HVF in Avadi - are responsible for manufacture. In this particular case, CVRDE is the R&D organisation within the DRDO that supports the Heavy Vehicles Factory at Avadi. The design was CVRDE (or its immediate predecessor), and the designs and blue-prints were used for manufacture by the HVF.

The Indian private sector has the ignoble record of having spent less than 1% on R&D; Mahindra and Tatas are exceptions to the rule, but they too are more Design and Development rather than Research and Development. Tatas has a clutch of secretive organisations doing very good work in very low-profile structures and organisations; Mahindras has concentrated on vehicle design, around what they have done for the civilian market; the real sleepers are the Bharat Forge people, the Kalyani group, who have done outstanding work in artillery systems. But the crony capitalists are jostling for position, and if the Ambanis, the Adanis and the Ruias get involved, nothing good is going to happen. Meanwhile, mammoth organisations who could have done all this very comfortably are rotting away/ have rotted away because they were public sector once upon a time, and nobody knew what to do about them. All that know-how and capacity is gone. But that is true of anything and everything in the east.

Public organizations are wasteful as a thumb rule in every country as such including the west simply because they are not accountable for the expenditure and have little incentive to be under time or budget.

So while there is always the risk of exploitation, at the end a private sector organization has much more at stake to deliver an excellent product than any public sector works.

 

[SrNair]

Contrary to media reports, the Russian lobby is strong and flourishing in India.

First they killed our Marut upgradation project ,now this .They also have lobby inside the Army itself I think .

 

[Water Car Engineer]

So while there is always the risk of exploitation, at the end a private sector organization has much more at stake to deliver an excellent product than any public sector works.

Defunct-ed Hindustan Motors - 1st and 3rd pic from as early as 08

Mahindra and TATAs

Both these guys started off assembling outside designs, to actually coming out with their own IP and buying out firms lke JLR,pininfarina, etc.

Right now with the liberation of the defence sector, outside OEMs are basically raising plants, testing infrastructure, essentially producing a private sector MIC. Extensive R&D is good, but assembly and testing of armour, small arms, production of ammo, etc. is being done, all of this was completely exclusive to the gov firms - baby steps.

Isnt it hilarious how a company like Bharat Forge with literally no defence back ground managed to light the artillery scene on fire by buying and transferring European artillery shops to India? Thus scaring OFB to actually work and improve that FH77 blueprint they had laying around for decades to Dhanush? Isnt it hilarious a much small Tonbo Imaging managed to robe in a massive gov company like BEL into their international deal?

Everything improves with competition. With this, some of the dinosaurs will be sent to the stone age, this sector will be dominated by private firms - big corporate ones, and niche smaller.

With that said, DRDO isnt going anywhere, they'll improve with the trend and actually focus on more strategic items while industry can come up with the small ones. HAL wont go down without a fight. There are some more that will survive, but several OFB factories I think will hit the road.

 

[SrNair]

You say this knowing, of course, that the 126 fighter jet deal was CHEAPER than the final deal.



Agree totally.



For the following reasons: the delays and design changes were entirely due to the Indian Army shifting goalposts in mid-game. After the infamous trials, the Army tried to retreat to a defensible position and made some absurd and obviously flimsy requests, as well as claiming to have detected faults: the weight, for instance, was considered to be a liability on soft ground, until it was pointed out that the Arjun weighed less per square foot of exposure to the ground than the T90. They raised, and hastily retreated, from the question of night-vision, where they committed the criminal blunder of not knowing that the Arjun had effective night vision, the T90 (at that point of time, in the configuration that India had ordered) had none.

The list goes on and on. Those of us who have actually had the doubtful pleasure of climbing into a Russia tank, a T72, or a T90, know what the Russians think of ergonomics; they can't even spell the damn word. In sharp, horrifying contrast, the Arjun can actually be operated by other than 'little people' (Oh, hello, Tyrion, didn't see you sitting there!).

In every possible respect, the T90 came out behind. If the Army is more comfortable in it than in the Arjun, there is some serious psychological disconnect going on.

Incidentally, the performance of various tanks in Syria raises some questions. The Turkish Leopard tanks suffered, quite as well. Do we now conclude that because Russian tanks did well in that very mixed war, they will do well against an organised Army fighting conventional warfare?




In my view, these are two options, buying foreign equipment and promoting indigenisation, and the military may take one at one moment, the other the next moment. Their objective is to keep these options open, rather than tamely allow the bureaucracy to decide which it is to be.

The primary fear of all branches of the military is the fear of embargo, and the possibility of technology denial. If it happens due to hostility of one or the other bloc to Indian policy at that moment, nothing to be



I'm not at all sure about that. Not any longer. They can want to buy whatever they like, but I strongly doubt that they can any longer translate these into action. Their economy needs to be able to support their appetite.


True. Let us let the unflattering imagery pass; yes, it is true that the Indian armed forces are nowhere near as powerful in their own country as the Pakistani equivalents are in theirs.

The difference, once again, is that the Pakistanis are limited only by their pockets; the Indians are limited only by their civilian managers. The case of the Indian Air Force, whose requirements and procurement decisions are heavily influenced by the politics of the matter, is a case in point.



Why do I get this queasy feeling that you have not read my note? It says,"....their tormentors, the bureaucracy...." That body of men and women have been called many things before, but never French, Brits, Yanks, Ruskies, zionists, the ISI....perhaps the day may come when they may be thought of as ISI stool pigeons, but not yet, not just yet.




the hold up being primarily in the AF domain.

I could now make a list of around ten horrible examples for each of the services; in fact, on another forum, I did so. It seems to be pointless, in hindsight; other than providing a Roman holiday for some twisted minds, it achieves nothing. The people facing the most direct consequences know this and other, deeper facts already; those who should know about it and don't, fail largely due to indifference, an indifference that stems from a selfishness and an obsession with their own central stories to the exclusion of anything that might be termed a national interest. These are few in number, but critically placed.

I cannot agree with your optimistic outlook, while at the same time, I must disagree with the other extreme, and must deprecate the kind of shallow and superficial dismissal of these institutions, for the very simple reason that these fall back to a lower but still effective level of functioning, even after denial of the higher-level integration of weapon systems embodying mobility and firepower, of training and of an increase in electronic and digital capability that is most desirable.[/QUOTE]

But there is another real problem.
Foreign components in Arjun is far higher than the Tejas .
Army is not that problematic.The level of support that they gives to the ATAGS ,I think there may be another side of story

Whom else? The bulk of our equipment is from the Russians. Without our money, their SU 57 will evaporate on the drawing boards. They have moved heaven and earth to keep everybody else, including indigenous technology, at bay.

Which part of it do you fail to see as a threat to Russia, if it stops?

For Pak Fa ,they are doing everything to play their part .Even stationed in Syria to prove their point ,after IAF doubt about it stealth capability .
Russians are stretching too much and playing too smart .
First they did it during INS Vikramaditya purchasing .
That single incident caused huge losses to them in India ,a lots of deal grabbed by US

 

[Crystal-Clear]

they have tho buy arjunk in any case . look what hapen with tejas .
anyways good for us .

 

[Mumm-Ra]

Well, actually, that is the core of the problem. If 126 is too little, what is 36? At 18 planes to a squadron, we needed around 10 squadrons (pardon my sloppy arithmetic; there are enough posts that offer a year-by-year analysis of the retirements and the acquisitions, and the nett effects on inventory, and it does not seem necessary to adopt that precision here), and instead, we are getting these two weird decisions, one just about enough, cheap enough but not sufficiently provisioned with spares guaranteeing a certain 'up-time', the other well-provisioned, but at a cost that created furious opposition and dark suspicions.

This government is a particularly inept one; the quality of the ministers is alarmingly bad, and they take the most incompetent decisions. Unfortunately, given our experiences with Antony, we are faced with a choice between the devil and the deep sea.

The new tender may go in any direction. Some background: the original requirement was for lighter, multi-role aircraft to supplement the Sukhois, those being capable but all too captive to the vagaries of an unreliable Russian spare parts production system, and not too amenable to indigenisation. Big tough planes with feet of clay, in terms of 'up-time'.

So the next set were to be the plugs between the Sukhois and the Tejas that would hit mass production only in a few years more, leaving a time and numbers gap to be plugged. In the original tender, six aircraft were short-listed and sent through extensive testing. Personally - this is entirely personal, and is not reflective of official opinion anywhere - the good choices were the expensive but extremely competent Rafale, and the extremely flexible and admirably priced Gripen. The Rafale took the lead, a large tender was floated, and suddenly abandoned; almost immediately afterwards, the same plane was bought out of tender, 36 of them, for a stiff price. Perhaps technically the right decision, but politically so laughably stupid, almost a red rag to a bull, as far as the opposition is concerned.

Right. Now we had a number of mechanically vulnerable air superiority behemoths, and a much smaller number of extremely good, well-designed, well-maintained and cutting edge (except for lacking stealth characteristics, thereby rendering them potentially vulnerable in the northern front) aircraft, AND a continuing huge gap. At this point, the word was that small and cheap was good, but not under-powered like the Tejas, that is more and more being positioned as a short-range interceptor that would have been ideal in the ground controller days of air warfare. So the thing to look for was another cheap and cheerful plane like the JF17. The tender called for single-engine planes, a zany stipulation, since there was NO specific requirement for a single engine, and there were ample requirements to build in robustly powered aircraft not subject to the dangers of failure of their single engine. However, it was out there, suddenly, and it was pulled out, equally suddenly; suddenly, equally, the common sense notion that the engine configuration should not be tendered dawned on people, so the current tender says, any numbers of engines on each aircraft, but the chosen aircraft should fill in the gap between the Tejas and even overlap with the Rafale.

The cross-currents here are that the Rafale is already bought; adding to their numbers will only spread the risk, so that materials management will be a wee smidgeon less of a three-icebag headache. On the other hand, the Donald will be mightily pleased if the F/A18 is bought, and might say something nice to the Indian prime minister on the phone. And we mustn't let anything, ANYTHING, interfere with that, must we?

Gee..and I thought our politicians were bad at decision making. If F/A-18 is bought, it will create another logistics problem. Not to mention they might also come with possible sanctions and restrictive use. Now take example of the Russians and Chinese. They do not give any thoughts on when and where their supplied equipment are used.

I would trust the Armoured Corps on this as far as I can single-handedly toss the Taj Mahal. This just does not compute.

Lol. You seem like an artillery guy.

Their minds. They don't want to go through the horrible days of sanctions once again.

If you haven't been through it, you can have no idea of what it felt like not to have access to the equals of the stuff facing you across the borders. All through the 65 war, the fears were focused on the Sabre jet, against which we had the Hunter, the just-coming-into-squadron-service MiG 21, and the Gnat. This was a psychological burden until it dawned on everybody that the Sabre was not unbeatable. The same thing happened with the Armoured Corps; they were in awe of the Patton, but the Centurion met it on even terms, and after the holocaust of Asal Utter, it rapidly got deprecated, as unfairly as it was built up as a bogey.

My information from every quarter is that the Arjun was superior equipment; one foreign team, brought in to test it in secret and anonymously, called it a sports car compared to the lumbering, truck-like T72 (not the T90 at that time).

That war was a long time ago and, since then, India has enjoyed much more access to technologies than Pakistan. I can't think of any reason why the higher command is still so spooked about sanctions. But my view on the tank is that it is a failure of project management. That fact that it took so long to develop has soured the IA towards this tank. Had this been fully available at least a decade ago, this tank would have been inducted in droves.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Gee..and I thought our politicians were bad at decision making. If F/A-18 is bought, it will create another logistics problem. Not to mention they might also come with possible sanctions and restrictive use. Now take example of the Russians and Chinese. They do not give any thoughts on when and where their supplied equipment are used.

Your politicians do what they are told to do, but of course, as one very good post put it, we are fortunate to have civilian control over our military. The down side is that this sort of sustained muddle occurs.

Lol. You seem like an artillery guy.

For some weird reason, the Pakistan Army has always understood artillery better and organised themselves better to integrate their artillery into their operations. The reasons baffle me.

That war was a long time ago and, since then, India has enjoyed much more access to technologies than Pakistan. I can't think of any reason why the higher command is still so spooked about sanctions. But my view on the tank is that it is a failure of project management. That fact that it took so long to develop has soured the IA towards this tank. Had this been fully available at least a decade ago, this tank would have been inducted in droves.

That failure of project management is definitely a factor; your comment is very insightful. The Army - and the Navy and the Air Force - are sick and tired of DRDO preventing any solution being achieved, and of their dogged insistence that they can design and test everything in time, even though they have messed up their project management almost every time.

Points well taken, thanks.

 

[Novice09]

T 90 is a total failure in thar desert... engine break down and thermal imaging issues are not rare... crew feels like sitting in an oven...

Somestime the crew put wet jute bags on engine to cool it... really scary...

Still the IA rejecting Arjun is like unreasonable...