With the selection of the Rafale Marine by the Indian Navy, here’s a look at how it happened, and the challenges and consequences ahead.
Boeing has announced the end of production for the U.S. Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters in 2025. With no scope for early Rafale M deliveries, here’s how this could become an opportunity for the Indian Navy to get all 26 of its new Multi-Role Carrier-Borne Fighters by the end of 2026.
French website Mediapart has revealed an agreement was concluded between Dassault and the Anil Ambani-led Reliance Group the day before an Indian defence ministry review overturned the selection of the Rafale as the winning bid in the IAF contest for 126 MMRCA fighter aircraft.
The F-15EX is neither a ‘navy fighter’ nor a renamed F-16 and the IAF is curious about it. That’s why the Rafale might finally have a formidable challenger, if India can get past the fact that it’s American.
The IAF’s new contest for fighter aircraft is expected to get underway over the next few months. But there remain a number of significant outstanding problems ahead, that could delay or derail the process.
Part III of this analysis examines the implications of the single most interesting data point to emerge from the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India. This date has never been mentioned in earlier media reports, and what is almost startlingly significant is not only what transpired on this date, but the fact of the date, itself.
Part II of this analysis examines how the defence ministry’s Contract Negotiation Committee (CNC) interpreted an inflated cost analysis of the Eurofighter bid and undervalued the cost of the Rafale bid, five times.
Part I of this three-part analysis is a contextual reading of the February 2019 CAG report and outlines how the IAF’s MMRCA contest was fixed to get the Rafale back into the contest after it was rejected, three times, and how the threats to a Rafale win were removed.
One representative of an MMRCA 2.0 competitor said, “The process is so elaborate, difficult and expensive. If you’re permitting cheating, at least have the decency to not make the rest of us work so hard.” “Just the thought of it being tailored to one of the contestant would discredit the whole idea of a competitive bidding process,” said another.
The most substantial challenge in the formulation of the RFP for 110 fighter aircraft is the incorporation of the industrial cooperation program under Chapter 07 of the Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP), something that has never actually been implemented in any form before.
Even after two decades since the acquisition case, the Very Short Range Air Defence (VSHORAD) search has seen a system absent from trials and failing trials, being passed as technically compliant and ending up as, apparently, the cheapest. Also problematic is the difficulty its purchase could pose by provoking U.S. sanctions under their CAATSA.
We examine lessons learned from the MMRCA contest and look at seven ways to derisk the process to prevent a repeat of the result in the earlier MMRCA competition.
Angad Singh and Pushan Das help StratPost editor Saurabh Joshi understand how the new IAF fighter contest will be different from the last one and why it will take two general elections before an order is placed.
Updated: MMRCA 2.0 will be a repeat of the MMRCA contest with the same six aircraft: F/A-18 Super Hornet Block III, MiG-35, F-16 Block 70, Gripen E, Eurofighter and Rafale.
Lockheed Martin’s Vivek Lall welcomed the IAF’s open contest for 110 fighter aircraft and explained why he thinks the F-16 makes a good case for India.
