Video: Vayu-StratPost Air Power Roundtable V

StratPost recently teamed up with the defense and aviation magazine Vayu to hold discussions around a round table on the future of Indian air power. These discussions held on July 04, 2014, were meant to shed light on how the fleet structure of the Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter aircraft is expected to evolve over the coming years and decades, given current circumstances.

We invited some of the top officials associated with planning and operations in the Indian Air Force and Indian Navy, some of whom have retired only recently, and who have been closely associated with the MMRCA and LCA procurement programs.

Participants included:

1. Admiral (retd.) Arun Prakash
2. Air Chief Marshal (retd.) SP Tyagi
3. Air Marshal (retd.) Harish Masand
4. Air Marshal (retd.) Nirdosh Tyagi
5. Vice Admiral (retd.) Shekhar Sinha
6. Air Marshal (retd) M Matheswaran
7. Air Marshal (retd.) Jimmy Bhatia
8. Air Marshal (retd.) P Barbora
9. Air Marshal (retd.) SR Deshpande
10. Maj Gen (retd.) Ashok Mehta
11. Brig (retd) Gurmeet Kanwal
12. Air Commodore (retd) Suren Tyagi
13. Col (retd.) Ajai Shukla
14. Capt (retd.) PVS Satish IN
15. Mr George Verghese
16. Mr Vinod Mishra
17. Mr Vishal Thapar
18. Mr NC Bipindra
19. Mr Nitin Gokhale
20. Mr Pushpindar Singh

The roundtable moved on to discuss the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) program, the DRDO development of a new fighter to be produced by HAL, and raised serious concerns on the impact of it’s possible failure.

Speakers included Admiral (retd) Arun Prakash, Air Marshal (retd) M Matheswaran, Pushpindar Singh, Col (retd.) Ajai Shukla, Air Commodore (retd) Suren Tyagi, Vice Admiral (retd.) Shekhar Sinha, Kalyan Ray, Air Marshal (retd.) P Barbora, Air Marshal (retd.) Harish Masand, Air Chief Marshal (retd.) SP Tyagi and Air Marshal (retd.) Nirdosh Tyagi.

Remarks

Let me go back to 1961 when the navy started the Leander project. It was a great leap of faith but today the navy owns the warship design, the warship building. They want any kind of warship to project any capability they can get it. Hopefully, soon we’ll be the same in the submarine business. So I had thrown this gauntlet right at the beginning: Why has the air force not taken ownership of everything that they need – from a basic trainer to a fighter bomber to a transport aircraft.

We’ve sunk money into the FGFA – PAK FA – which is already – three prototypes are already flying – the Russians have built it for their air force and we’ve sunk three or four billion US dollars into it – for what reason I don’t understand. So it’s committed. At the highest level of the government. So why is the air force allowing this to happen. Instead of doing all that, back the LCA. It’s got problems, sure, but here the chief test pilot who’s written a paper and his last words are ‘It’s a beautiful aircraft. Why don’t we back it – why don’t we back the LCA Mk II, and once again let me give you the navy’s example. The navy sunk 900 crores into the LCA Navy – the air force has not given them a single rupee. So if the air force had done it right at the beginning perhaps this stage would not have arisen. If you had shown enough interest, if you had backed it – meddled with it and interfered at every stage and made it go. This is only a personal opinion that we should not allow the LCA to fail. We should go on to LCA Mk II – the AMCA should also be a lead on from the LCA and then this whole thing will proliferate – we’ll have a trainer, aero engines – the whole industry. – Admiral (retd) Arun Prakash

Is the concept relevant anymore? We need to look at that. I think we’ve outlived the relevance of the concept. That is one issue. But having said that, in the context of Indian capability development – Indian aeronautics development, there is nothing more important than a program which is taken up and moved in full earnest. This choice of the program – you see you started off with the HF-24 and countries if you see them, you need to follow just like what the Chinese are following -the block approach – is what we should have done. We should have continued with HF-24 in different blocks. That’s how you build the national capability.

We closed shop there and then we jumped to a four and half generation aspiration on the LCA – much has been achieved, which is very creditable, but it will take thirty years if we jump like that. And the time frames that have been projected have all been absolutely unrealistic. And this is where the government needs to be brought in – what are they doing, how do they analyze – or they just take their words for it?

Cost and time frames are absolutely unrealistic. And example: the Kaveri engine. 89 you get the CCS approval – project is approved for 450 crores saying that a 4th generation engine – no such engine existed anywhere in the world – and mind you we haven’t made a single aero-engine that flies before that nor even today. No engine has been made – designed and made. And you want to jump to a 4th generation engine though original proposal was for a five-stage engine which people said ‘Come on, have some sense. Look into it again.’ So they made it six-stage – even that was not existing anywhere in the world.

And what do they say? We will do the complete development by 7 years – by the 7th year the series production will be ready and it will be inducted into the air force in 1996. Even for established majors like General Electric or Pratt and Whitney to start an engine from scratch design is a 20-year program. Okay, so here professionalism is in question. These are the reasons why we’ve got into this kind of a problem.

With respect to LCA, it’s time to close it. Close it in the sense – what you have achieved is what you will get. And my reports are there already in that. The first choice of the design was wrong and that design can give you only this capability, which, I’ve said, is something akin to the Bison’s capability.

So we need to close it here and move on to the next block approaches to address the problems that are there and develop different models. – Air Marshal (retd) M Matheswaran

In a sense there’s a kind of a déjà vu. Seeing a repeat of what we witnessed in the late sixties and early seventies. The HF-24 was a very brave attempt from absolutely scratch to develop a multi-role supersonic fighter bomber, as they called it. So, you go on into the 1980s and 90s – we had an opportunity again – and why I said déjà vu is because the same sort of, set of engineers came from the same country – that’s Germany and it was a competitive bid – where the LCA feasibility studies were thrown open. I think took about two years for four-five companies to respond. The powers that were selected a company in Germany which doesn’t exist anymore – MBB – and they signed the program – the feasibility study stage – it went on very well. The aircraft would have not only met the LCA requirement, it would have been a world beater.

For a very frivolous reason, a year later, the program was stopped and a new one was brought in and the French came in now – they replaced the Germans – but all they did was made it mini-Mirage without worrying about the state of the art of technologies available at that time and it was doomed from then.

You will never meet the requirement.

Okay, you could still do something. People say at least it’s still better than the MiG-21. Of course it’s better than the MiG-21. It better be. But that’s not the point. I think we’re missing the wood for the trees. The LCA was really the answer to everything from the air force’s point of view, the industry and the R&D. Where did it go wrong?

Why the air force doesn’t own it is because the air force saw the writing on the wall.

Come to a decision, be realistic, let’s see what we can gain from it, stop this farce – its a charade. Keep your 40 LCA Mk 1s – maybe convert them into lead-in fighter trainers or something. Mk II – let’s see where it goes, but give it a timeline. If they cannot meet the requirement in the next one year, stop it. And start looking afresh – look out of the box. – Pushpindar Singh

When I say take ownership, I meant the Air Headquarters should open a directorate of aircraft and aero-engine design and take over HAL and march up to the PMO and say we cannot have an aerospace industry without the biggest user being in charge. – Admiral (retd) Arun Prakash

I am completely of the school of thought that Admiral Arun Prakash here. At this point, given the fact that the Indian Air Force needs aircraft, given the fact that we need to gain something out of this LCA experience, given the fact that the whole future of India’s aeronautical industry development hinges on what we can take out from all of this, this program cannot be allowed to fail…we have just sunk in too much. Now nobody is suggesting that the Indian Air Force must buy it in its exact shape, go to war in it, get pilots killed. But surely it is salvageable from this point, something is salvageable from this point. Even if we, as Air Marshal Matheshwaran said, we call a stop at this point, move on to a next block, improve the design, rectify the shortcomings, get foreign consultancy, if necessary, for this – the Germans had come, EADS has worked on this, Gripen is panting to do it – surely, there is something we can take out. – Col (retd.) Ajai Shukla

With the LCA program, in fact I was involved in – at one time were making air defense for India 25-year plan. I was one of those who actually wrote that. ’94 and ’95, it nearly got approved. LCA, we went to see – the then chief and I. And we went to Bangalore. They actually made us sit in the aircraft and they said this is all ready and by – this was the month of May or June – they said December it’ll be taking off. In fact, 125 upgrade of MiG-21, were only done interim because I, at that point in time, in next two years – they told us that. That by ’98 we’ll start inducting and we said by 2000 we’ll have a whole lot of aircraft, so that’s why we said we’ll upgrade only 125. It’s fine for all of us to be very concerned about the cost escalations, but please understand, with our own industry when we depend, when they promise you that I’ll give you this, I say okay, I’ll accept this and I’ll modify my plan and we’ll work out and plan our air defense plan for 25 years. And all these changes have started coming after 2000 because LCA didn’t see that side of the runway till then. LCA – let’s salvage whatever we can. No some test pilot has said its an excellent aircraft. I’ve actually seen it. You open a panel you can’t fit it back. You have to hammer it down. So let’s not hoodwink and we’ve been doing it all these years and that’s why when I say that we have to be really honest to ourselves and honest to this nation and honest to the armed forces. – Air Commodore (retd) Suren Tyagi

When you start coming on a new venture – new platform, we should not just write off the technology that you have imbibed. And it must be pursued. And while it is – Mk II, Mk III is all on the cards – we should get ahead with the next design and whatever you have made, use this as a trial platform or a trainer aircraft or lead-in fighter (trainer). Because if we don’t get this technology right then we will continue to import and will remain from 70 import and 30 (indigenous) – we have not made any aircraft, actually, ourselves. So our capability may exist but we don’t have the capacity to build those numbers and its going to keep increasing with time.

The second issue is that it’s a badly managed program. Nothing wrong with the technicalities, there’s nothing wrong with the – whatever decisions have been taken. But if you have a project head and not leave it only to the LCA project team of the DRDO or somebody else to drive, this is exactly what will happen. I would very strongly recommend that we – we have spent a lot of money, there have been a lot of discussions with Matheshwaran in the IDS Headquarters even earlier – that LCA should have been better managed, it would have been flying you – you would have already stepped on to Mk II. So our thinking is that we should not allow this technology to be written off and take on from here and get on with Mk II, Mk III and use these aircraft for other purposes – for lead in fighter training or whatever. – Vice Admiral (retd.) Shekhar Sinha

LCA as a program – there is always a perpetual blame game between the air force, HAL and ADA. If you ask any of the agencies and they will blame somebody else and it is continuing for so many years. I don’t see ever a collaborative concerted effort to take it as a national mission, national priority. And we should remember that it started in the eighties as a five year research program and we have now passed thirty years – lot of money, investment and a lot of manpower has gone into it, so there is no point in junking the program at this point. I think there are still gains from the program which can be taken forward. And in these thirty years also LCA program suffered sanctions for a long time. And then there was long period of financial crisis in the nineties. So I think those things also you should take into account when you actually analyze the success or failure of the program. – Kalyan Ray

I happened to meet the designer of the Sukhoi-30 MKI. Seminov. I was in Russia then as an air attaché. And he actually said to me – he said ‘Very good you all are doing the LCA program. We wish all success.’ He’s the chief designer of this unique MKI. He said ‘ But first before you know how to make an aircraft please come and sit with us for fifteen years and maybe you’ll learn how to make an aircraft. Now Ajai (Shukla) rang me up from Bangalore, in respect of the LCA production line. He said there’s no production line for the LCA as yet. How are we forming the squadron? Four and half years back we took a decision about forming the first squadron. We pumped in our manpower there in Bangalore to produce the first squadron, based on, again, the very optimistic supply chain that the HAL would give us. Till date, like he said, serial production hasn’t started. Now, enough is enough also, na.
Our air force problems started with the LCA prompted that this is going to replace your MiG-21s. Today the shit we are in – I’m sorry for the word – the Indian Air Force structure – force structure – is because of LCA. And I can agree there – please let’s not stop, block this program. Pick up the good points – there are very good things in the LCA. Managerial capability: Very poor. Every time we have gone to the government – when I was vice chief and the chiefs were there – Matsy (Air Marshal M Matheshwaran) was supposed to pack up his bags and go to Bangalore and take over. What happened?

I mentioned it to the defense minister the day before I was retiring, suggesting as to what coud be done in respect of HAL and whatever it is. Actually, he got angry at me. He says ‘you don’t have faith in HAL’. I said, you don’t have to say it, I don’t have faith.

Frankly, we must pick up the good and go ahead and try and develop more. But we can’t do it alone. I’m sorry – we made an Ambassador car and we made rocket launchers going into space. We missed out on mid-level technology – discontinuous route. And to get into – that happened to China also, but China is very good at reverse engineering – they’re doing it. – Air Marshal (retd.) P Barbora

As someone who’s been involved closely with the program, and who’s done two studies intimately, I’d like to put certain things at rest. One: the LCA and MMRCA cannot be compared. So don’t flog that fallacy that under the indigenous program the LCA can now take over the MMRCA’s requirements and fill in those gaps – its not possible. The most important thing is, in the LCA program, we suffer from a national culture which I call – it flows from our caste culture system. Why? Because nowhere in the world, when designers are given certain tasks to design an aircraft and develop it, the interface between the user – user’s ability to convince and make him understand what he wants and what are the operational requirements so that the designer can choose the right design intent, is completely and interactive process.

Here, the scientific adviser will tell the air chief technology demonstration is my job – you’ve given me the ASR, now lay off – let me finish my technology demonstration program, then you come in – we will see thereafter. There’s the problem. Because it’s too late to come in and make changes. That’s one.

Second. What Admiral Arun Prakash said is absolutely correct. The F-22 program was – after the basic technology demonstration program the user takes over the entire program management. The US Air Force appointed a program manager with significant powers – financial as well as executive decision-making with respect to the program.

Because you must take even a decision – even if you have to foreclose the program if its not viable and you must have that wherewithal for it, so you have to be trained and you have to be fully in that process. This man took over the F-22 program as a Lieutenant Colonel – he remained the program manager when the F-22 was operationally inducted 20 years later and he was Lieutenant General when he retired. There’s a problem in our service culture and service mindset. We don’t want to put people on professional competencies as experts on a program for any length of time. Our P-staff or personnel staff in the other two services will cry hoarse and say ‘no, this guy cannot be in Bangalore for 20 years or three years or five years. So we keep breaking the expertise and it’s like the monkey climbing up and coming down two feet down so we are always at the perpetual start point. These are the fundamental factors that impinge on this.

More importantly, I think DRDO and the public sector spend more time on publicity events – on non-events. I said, stop all that. You know you have a pre-IOC, you have an IOC, you have a huge celebration – you actually keep announcing things – ‘we are the fourth country to achieve this’, ‘we are the fifth country to achieve this’ or ‘we are the third country to achieve this’ – where is the final product? Where is it going to see the operational utility? How about questioning that? Where are the timelines? Where is the cost accountability?

This is what we need to question. We stop these public events, we stop these announcements for the rest of the world and if you think that we’re fooling the rest of the world – we’re fooling ourselves. The rest of the world, who are experts in technologies in the aerospace domain – they know exactly what’s wrong with your aircraft. They know exactly where your technologies remain.

So the person who said there’s always been a conflict between HAL, DRDO and air force – there’s never been a change of stance of air force. Constantly, there’s an accusation that goalposts have been shifted by air force. The ASR was approved with everybody involved in 1985 and there were two concessions given in 1989 – no other change has ever been made. It is their inability to conform the ASR, for a variety of reasons. – Air Marshal (retd) M Matheswaran.

Starting from Admiral Arun Prakash when he talked about ownership, emphasized again, and now the reasons that Matsy has given to how we never got the ownership of this program after at least, TD-1 – I would have said there were many other programs, actually, from the beginning the user is associated even in the TD-1 phase and their liaison, like you talked about. And I suspect for many structural reasons, for individual service interests or for ministry interests we never got the ownership of this program, unlike the navy which could wrest it earlier in the Leander phase. I think the air force could have done more – whether it would have succeeded or not, I don’t know because we were too young – only history can tell us. But yes, we should have attempted that ownership. If we had ownership we would have had the program frozen in some place instead of meddling with new technology every day.

When people talk about sanctions and delays – I was with the LCA program for about eight months, myself. And I used to hear this excuse every time that because of sanctions we lost it. Mr. Mishra will bear witness to this that when we were doing the bis-upgrade program; even at that time in ’93 we anticipated American sanctions. And therefore we kept away from American equipment – at that time. How ADA didn’t foresee this – DRDO – that American will put sanctions on them, sometime or the other – particularly when one arm of the DRDO was tinkering with nukes at that time. They should have known that this would come. And they should have gone for different technology. I also want to reiterate that we had opportunities at each stage to get the LCA going in a different direction and probably make it more of a success. We forsook those opportunities for some reasons or the other.

And lastly, very briefly I would like to add to what Babs (Air Marshal Barbora) said about how is it that we make Ambassadors and then we leap to space programs. But in between we never seem to find success. My suspicion is that in between – space program nobody is going to give you, we have to make it ourselves – there’s no other way, nobody’s going to give you that kind of a technology. Ambassadors we borrowed, again. I mean we only got licensed production and we carried on improving – Mk I to Mk IV.

In between there are a lot of lobbies at work, which we never mention openly. We don’t want you to succeed there. Some of our best people who can do this stuff were taken away by lure of the lucre or whatever, elsewhere. And that is why we are in this state and that is why we need strong leadership, strong commitment and different kind of people. It doesn’t have to be a General. It can be a Lieutenant Colonel – like he said for the F-22 program. If the man has capability put him there and let him run the program. – Air Marshal (retd.) Harish Masand

The problem lies in the system and the methodology of controls we exercise in making those systems run. It’s remote-controlled from the Ministry of Defense, from the Department of Defense Production. Okay? There is no professionalism that’s involved – it doesn’t matter, you can put the best of the guys, but the result of that is none of these companies have innovation – the spirit of innovation, no dynamism, none of the chairman will ever buck the system and take a very string decision to move. They don’t even start their own research and development programs. – Air Marshal (retd) M Matheswaran

I tried, when I was in service that the chief of air staff should at least monitor what is happening on the LCA program. So one of the things was the project – that’s how (Air Marshal) Harish Masand, amongst others, went to the LCA program. But a meeting to be conducted under the chief’s chairmanship – it took us two years to have one meeting per quarter, or one meeting in six months. Two years the scientists, actually – and please understand the problem is that our minister of defense is the minister of air force, he’s minister of defense production, he needs to worry about the balance sheet of HAL, he’s also minister of DRDO. So he finds it very easy to say, ‘Inko aapas main ladhney do‘ and let my tenure pass.

Actually the truth is, yes, the air force must take ownership – there is no doubt about it. And for that we’ll have to do some homework, incidentally, because we can’t say ‘Tu chala ja udhar. Kar de.‘ Because we’ll have to find the right material. The navy has an advantage because they started at the Leander stage and it jst continued. The Indian Air Force tried like nobody’s business to see that the HAL should come under chairmanship of an air force officer. It became a war. ‘Nahin, nahin, local aadmi hona chahiye, idhar se hona chahiye, woh toh udhar se aayega‘, who will get it – who’s recommending who’s name. It actually got lost. But I’m saying the LCA Mk II type projects – we may surely have learned lessons. Maybe, one of the recommendations is, can we just sit down and say what are the lessons learned and how not to manage a project. And then say, ‘okay, now we go for son of LCA’. Under the new management concept. – Air Chief Marshal (retd.) SP Tyagi

We tried to put a team, there – leave alone takeover ownership of ADA – in 2007. It took more than a year. We wanted a chief’s review which took more than two years. Then we wanted to put a team in HAL and the minister just wouldn’t agree. And then later the team was combined to look after both. And the second issue is about supporting ADA. No matter what we feel about each other, air force paced an order for first 20 in 2006 – March. And for 20 more, before these 20 were delivered because they said we will do it and we require lead time and we require money. So we placed another order for 20 more. So all the orders are in pipeline, so even if we – there’s no mutual admiration or liking for each other – at least on this front the air force has not been found wanting.

The issue why ADA has not been able to come up is because aircraft are very complex systems. There are many technologies in use. We are using – most of the systems onboard are imported. But for whatever we are doing in house – there are more than a dozen technologies. In some we have made good progress, in some we have not. And where we have not, the scientists don’t like to admit and don’t like to take help. And the consultancy which is there looks only at a project which is projected to them because of costs. In some cases, it’s never projected to them.

And the last issue is cost-related. Cost of LCA and cost of MMRCA cannot be compared because in cost, it depends on what elements you’ve included. So in the first 20 order we placed, it was just for the aircraft. Fully formed aircraft. When we wanted to include – and there was a small component for ground-support equipment. That ground-support equipment became a major issue because HAL said ‘we did not know what were the specifications’ and another, additional amount had to be earmarked later. So if you include all the elements which are: MRLS – that is Manufacturer Recommended List of Spares – warranty, product support for certain period – eight years, normally. Five to eight years – training, all the infrastructure and at times the differed revenue cost, or the set-up cost. Then all this becomes comparable and if we add all that and the development cost, then LCA is not a very cheap aircraft. But since the figures which we’re comparing, the figures which we compare tend to create a distorted picture. – Air Marshal (retd.) Nirdosh Tyagi

The duration of this session is 35 minutes, 10 seconds.

Producer: Shruti Pushkarna, StratPost