Well, I am happy that our armed forces & specially our political leadership is finally giving importance to south in our whole security architecture, we always had the continental mindset & our eyes were only fixed on Pakistan & China, we forgot completely that Britishers din't came from land but sea. IOR is fast turning out to be a region of global importance with US, China, France etc. fixing there sight on it, it's important that we develop our Navy accordingly & also IAF not ignore that bases in southern region are equally important like bases in north, A sukhoi 30 in TN is just icing on cake, as with it's extended reach it can cover almost entire IOR & counter any threat to Indian interests, hope this is just the beginning & IAF will station more sukhois, tejas, rafale & probably FGFA in the south.
I disagree with you here, for me it's just a waste of important resources, that could be better used in the North West and North East. When there is no threat, you don't need big military forces, that's why for decades we didn't needed a big navy as well, because there is hardly any country that can send naval forces against us.
Even the forces of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh can't really compete here with our lower end fighters, so why place the high end there?
Imo, it would be tatically better to divert costal defence completelly to IN, because once their vessels are the main contributer here anyway, but with the growing number of fighters IN will have till the end of the decade and since most of them will be at shorebased IN airabes alongside the costlines and near to their major ports, you could easily divert air defence in these areas to them as well.
I would even go a step further, give IN all LCA MK1 and Mig 29 UPG squads too, since they will use the same fighters with the same techs, weapons and capabilities anyway from their bases. Same training, same logistics, same roles (air defence, maritime attack, strike) and replace the Mig 29s in IAF by more Rafales produced in France. IAF would only needs 2 or 3 squads of MKIs that are able to carry Brahmos at the costlines and can focus their placements to the important sectors, not to mention that it would speed up the modernisation as well.
However, it's doubtful that IAF will share these important parts of their power with IN and would rather waste such important assets there, before they give up something to IN.
What counts as "immediate" is debatable, especially in India. But there certainly are plans to have at least one squadron of MKIs in Andaman, and have been there for some time now. It makes a lot of sense too, since they can strike a lot of strategically important targets from there, as well as giving air cover to the navy in the east. They can dominate the Indian ocean and bay of Bengal, and prevent PLAN from coming anywhere into our areas of interest.
Those plans were revised, because the weather conditions and possible risks of Tsunamis makes it too difficult to operate fighter squadrons from there.
IAF has stated to cover that area from Kalaikunda, which will get an MKI squadron as well.
hey can u guys plz tell me the exact no of su30mki that we are going to have in future it is 272
270 is the plan, the media ist just confusing the numbers.
50
+140
+ 40
= 230 - 3 crashes = 227
+ 42
=> 469 (one was lost after another 42 was about to be ordered, but it is likely that it will be replaced as well, since they will be added to HALs productionline anyway).
