Quote from: Sithara007 on May 27, 2022, 02:12:13 AM

Quote from: DrBeer on May 26, 2022, 08:22:37 PM

How it is presented to the Americans, or to a housemate, or in the market - everyone is free to voice it as he likes. I just showed that the problem of low-quality Russian weapons is in no way connected with any requirements of third parties, but is of a long-standing and systemic nature. Plus, I don’t think that India is a country where the US will tell it what to do, India is not a technologically backward country with a resource economy, but a very significant part of the world economy, which has its own regional and global interests. And what is important - India has quite a significant weight in the world economy and is actively developing. The issue of developing your own helicopter platform is a matter of not a single decade, this is the development of entire sectors of the economy, technologies, this cannot be done quickly and immediately with high quality. Therefore, it is quite expected that after signing the development program tomorrow you will not receive your helicopter!

This is not the first time India is trying to replace the Russian made weapons with locally manufactured ones. The first attempts were made two decades ago. But everytime the HAL delivers low quality products (even worse then those from Russia) and in the end the defense ministry is forced to go back to dealing with Russia. One advantage with Russian weapons is that they are very affordable compared to the ones from France or Germany. And with one of the lowest per capita GDPs in the world, India can't afford to splurge a lot of money on imported weapons. And sourcing them from China is out of consideration, due to poor relationship between the two countries.

There is a lot of chaos in this region. The things are unstable - in India and Pakistan, and then there are super powers like Chine and Russia and then there is Afghanistan and Irqa and Iran on the other side. Will that instability end some day? I am not sure!