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I guess sexy models will win more orders than anything else!NEW DELHI — Of the 30 countries that attended a defense exposition last month to sell weapons to India, the world’s largest arms importer, only the Russians had the chutzpah to dress up their tanks and guns with women in tightfitting camouflage.
The confident and sexy display reflected Russia’s longtime position as India’s dominant military provider, but decades of effort by India to make its own hardware may finally be bearing fruit. India recently rolled out its own fighter jet, a tank, a mobile howitzer and a host of locally made ships.
Good Luck with that!If India succeeds, the Russians could be in trouble. Russia has nearly $39 billion worth of military equipment on order by India, representing nearly a third of Russia’s total arms exports.
India’s defense minister, A. K. Antony, said at a news conference during the exposition that the country’s reliance on foreign arms makers must end. “A growing India still depending on foreign companies for a substantial part of our defense needs is not a happy situation,” he said.
Don't TRY - Just Do It!Whether India can break its import addiction is anyone’s guess, but many arms analysts are skeptical. India is expected to spend about $11 billion this year buying weapons from abroad, despite decades of effort by the government to create a domestic military manufacturing sector.
“I don’t think there’s another country in the world that has tried as hard as India to make weapons and failed as thoroughly,” said Pieter D. Wezeman, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which studies global security.
Mr. Wezeman said he was skeptical that India’s new products would change that history, saying that its fighters, tanks and guns were “of questionable quality.”
Amen!India ranks eighth in the world in military spending. Among the top 10 weapons buyers, only Saudi Arabia has a less productive homegrown military industry. China, by contrast, has been so effective that it is beginning to export higher-technology arms.
India’s main problem as an arms manufacturer is a corrupt and inefficient government sector that has neither the expertise to develop top-notch weapons nor the wherewithal to make them in abundance, said Manoj Joshi, a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, a policy group based in New Delhi.
Economies of Scale!!In one telling example, India could buy fully assembled Russian Sukhoi fighters for about $55 million each, but instead mostly relies on kits that are sent to the government-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, which assembles them at a cost of about $68 million each — nearly a quarter more. In another example, government labs spent billions trying to develop an aircraft engine, only to abandon the effort and buy engines from General Electric for the recently introduced fighter, the Tejas.
“While it’s more complicated assembling Sukhois than putting together an Ikea flat-pack, it’s not that hard,” said Samuel Perlo-Freeman, a program director at the Stockholm institute. “And it’s far from an independent and autonomous development of a new weapons system.”
Again - Just Do It!India has tried to encourage private companies to make arms in India, both in partnerships to the government and independently, but few of these efforts have succeeded. Most of India’s homegrown arms are developed in 50 government labs and built at eight large government manufacturing facilities and 40 government ordnance factories.
No, no, no! Just Privatize and open up the playing field - manufacturing and imports!Mr. Antony dismissed criticisms of the government’s chokehold on arms production. “Indian scientists and Indian industry are more efficient, and the government will have to support them,” he said.
Well Said! But who is going to bell the cat?But Mr. Joshi said India’s government needed to get out of manufacturing. “Our defense industrial base is hopelessly out of date,” he said. “It needs to be dismantled and handed over to the private sector.”
Sigh!Production was transferred to India not because costs were lower (surprisingly, they were not), but because having a local facility might encourage sales in India, said Ashish Saraf, program manager for the Tata-Sikorsky joint venture, of which Sikorsky owns 26 percent.
But the challenges have been immense. New roads had to be built to the venture’s 11-acre site, and they came slowly. The company had to build its own facilities to treat water, handle sewage and harvest rainwater. It eventually got power from the state but operated initially from six backup generators, which must be kept operational for occasional power cuts.