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Subject: The Immortal Bureaucrats Of Doom
SYSOP    12/10/2014 7:48:53 AM
 
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Hari Sud       12/10/2014 8:15:49 AM
It will be totally immoral to continue buying high priced military stuff from abroad, when either it can be made in India with collaboration by paying licensing fees or simply encouraging local companies to make it in India. Guaranteed that local stuff on first attempt may not be as good as the imported, but given time and trial, the quality will improve. Moreover the local made stuff is not subject to sanctions. You can see the example that 80% of military stuff in China is made in China. Chinese have accepted that quality of their stuff is Not as good but with copy and steal, they have improved. Imported advantage is that independently made stuff can be exported without seeking permission from the licensee.
 
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trenchsol       12/10/2014 8:45:01 AM
@Hari
 
I am not particularly familiar with Indian Defense Industry, but it doesn't seem unusual to see a defense project take a long time to complete, or even to fail after long development period. I am not sure how much of an immediate threat are  China and Pakistan considered to be, also. Perhaps those imported weapons and equipment are necessary stopgap measure until domestic stuff becomes available.
 
Also, it looks like China has technological advantage at the moment.
 
It would be interesting to compare both, long term and short term costs, for either option, too.
 
 
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Hari Sud       12/10/2014 10:32:18 AM


 

Also, it looks like China has technological advantage at the moment.

 

It would be interesting to compare both, long term and short term costs, for either option, too.

 



Perhaps it is better to reexamine US industry success rate in armament production. Two out of five projects fail. The greatest failure is F35 and it's time frame and the extra money it needs to continue development. Please also do reexamine why a particular weapon undergoes so many version, one evey year. Fundamental reason is they have not succeeded initially and are coming up with new version to compensate deficiencies. They call it new technology upgrade, in fact it is remedy the deficiencies. My point here is nobody succeed the first time. Success and failure is also dependent upon how much resources you allocate. In India with meagre budget and still meagre research, time frame is longer.
 
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avatar3    Give it time   12/10/2014 10:52:29 AM
Hari;
 
I believe that given time India will pull it off. I say this because here in America I have met many Indians and they all are successful. Indians work hard, learn from their mistakes and believe in themselves, which makes them exactly like he rest of the successful people here. 
 
Give yourself more time, be like the ugly English Bulldog and hang on and remember the TAJ was not built in a day.
 
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avatar3    Give it time   12/10/2014 11:07:26 AM
Hari;
 
 
 
Comparing India and China is not a good idea because the Chinese steal a lot and don't count that as a cost. Also, like their Russian buddies they bury a lot of projects  in non-military budgets. We have no idea how much they bury in the desert or throw on the junk pile or how much money they waste on bogus projects that we feed them.  Has anyone ever seen any of there defense factories? We assume that they use automation but for all we know everything could be made by hand.
 
 
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keffler25       12/10/2014 12:16:22 PM
"with copy and steal"
 
Really? Have you LOOKED at the Chinese reverse engineered junk? Especially with the stuff they stole from the Americans, you can see that they Tu-4ed it up to the point where they copied all the Yankee mistakes!
 
 
At least when India borrows  from somebody they try to get it right. (Look at RV steer.)
 
It will be totally immoral to continue buying high priced military stuff from abroad, when either it can be made in India with collaboration by paying licensing fees or simply encouraging local companies to make it in India. Guaranteed that local stuff on first attempt may not be as good as the imported, but given time and trial, the quality will improve. Moreover the local made stuff is not subject to sanctions.

You can see the example that 80% of military stuff in China is made in China. Chinese have accepted that quality of their stuff is Not as good but with copy and steal, they have improved.

Imported advantage is that independently made stuff can be exported without seeking permission from the licensee.

 
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trenchsol       12/10/2014 5:44:11 PM
Hari, you have missed the point. Perhaps the threat from China and Pakistan is so imminent that there is no time to develop everything locally. China s moving forward rather fast, they are combining foreign solutions with local development. Whatever yields results. It might prove difficult to catch up.
 
I don't know, my post is a question rather than a statement.
 
 
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Nate Dog    Hari and the Indian procurement conundrum   12/10/2014 6:28:01 PM
Lets start with:
Please don't state your case in terms of, Chinese manage to do OK by stealing and copying from others.
Western defence industry succeeds only because there is commercial reward for innovation. Some bright spark comes up with something new, sells it and is rewarded for good work. Others see his success and try and emulate it.
Really simplifying it, but in a nutshell, that is why there is innovation. If you sanction simply stealing others ideas rather than coming up with your own, well, very soon the clever people who come up with these things will go elsewhere, why spend all that effort if you wont get rewarded for it?
 
Further. Notionally what you suggest is probably the reason given by every Indian defence contractor fighting for arms deals.
If these conglomerates had Indias best interests at heart what you say might even be true.
However, that is not the case. If you have any viable defence for what I'm about to right i'd love to hear it.
you're missing the point stated in this article.
Indian firms don't make shit because they're incompetent, far from it. They don't make anything, because of endemic corruption stymying production. Purchasing, or even tendering process's are render DOA at almost every turn because of said corrupt practices. What would be criminal liable in western countries passes for corporate tactics. India really is the wild west when it comes to such things.
You say that almost good enough would eventually be built if left to Indian firms. 
puts paid to that idea. India's field artillery probably won't make it through the opening salvo of any coming war, because of 30!!!! years of failed purchases/internal production. This artillery purchase has been such a long running flop as to be sighted often by firms choosing not to waste money tendering for Indian contracts. Indian defence industry is self destructive, but that doesn't matter to the wealthy elite, whom get paid regardless, whether the truck they sold Indian army starts, drives, or even comes with that optional engine you may have forgotten to option sir... 
Im not going to list them all, but failed made in India procurements liter the pages your countries arms procurements history. 
Im not being nasty or racist, I'm Australian, and for examples of very similar practices (although not to the same extent) please look up the Collins class submarine build. Where it was decided that Australian firms would build a sub they had little to no idea how. Lots of public money kept being thrown at an ever failing problem (In 10 years since completion, just to try and make the boats sea worthy $1 billion spent annually on repairs on faulty manufacturing). Keffler sighted an insane waste on 2nd hand helicopters that never materialised after $1 billion Aud of R&D waste. Current LHD and air warfare destroyers being built locally experiencing similar issues… sigh.
If you're afraid you may actually need to fight a war, then you should buy stuff that works if you can't build it yourself.
If you are counting on wide ranging seas and a strong Naval ally to do your fighting for you, then yes, have hugely profligate wasteful publicly funded failures perennially being built at home. 
 
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HR    Hari Sud   12/12/2014 1:18:26 PM
Hari, this article blames corruption which I do not doubt is an important component. But the story is more complex and nuanced. The Indian preference for Russian weapons for example and decades of shunning participation in Western arms industries as a subcontractor, etc.
 
So now they want to make a massive jump to being not just a participant but the main contractor and maker of key technologies that other countries have spent decades growing and maturing.  
 
Having said all this on the other hand they do have some bright spots and have found a way to cooperate with Israel (a country they shunned for decades in order to pacify Muslim political constituencies). So things are not great but they not a dis-functional disaster either.
 
A note about stealing... it does not develop the infrastructure that will allow you to continuously innovate. So in that regard China is like a junkie that got itself a "fix" but will need to go back to the well for more. And perfecting quality is a completely different thing; you can master the basics but that is different than making quality products. I also believe they have an unsustainable defense budget... cannot go for ever.
 
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keffler25       12/12/2014 2:18:39 PM
See the yellow for the reason I laugh this time.
 
HR off in fantasy land again.
 
1. If HR knew anything about AMERICAN/Indian history   he would know why the New Delhi government chose the devils in Moscow over the devils in Washington.
2. Britain had nothing to do with crippling India's economic development? (sarcasm). India finally got its act together in 1992 and its been playing catchup ever since.     
3.  Note that I DID say 1992? It took that long for India to decouple the Washington Tel-Aviv handcuffs and get the idiot Americans to recognize that Israel as a cutout was a useful influence pipeline to New Delhi. (It took the Americans that long to realize to understand that the damned Pakistanis were the ENEMY, not India.) Of course New Delhi could not forget nor forgive Richard Nixon and his aircraft carrier diplomacy from the 1971war. 
 
So... the PRC has a role model it emulates... but the key difference is that the US took what it stole and innovated on top of it. if you don't innovate, you will always be a second-rater. So the Indians have the right idea, they just have to get past the inherited defects of the British Raj. 

1. Hari, this article blames corruption which I do not doubt is an important component. But the story is more complex and nuanced. The Indian preference for Russian weapons for example and decades of shunning participation in Western arms industries as a subcontractor, etc.

2. So now they want to make a massive jump to being not just a participant but the main contractor and maker of key technologies that other countries have spent decades growing and maturing.  

3. Having said all this on the other hand they do have some bright spots and have found a way to cooperate with Israel (a country they shunned for decades in order to pacify Muslim political constituencies). So things are not great but they not a dis-functional disaster either.

4. A note about stealing... it does not develop the infrastructure that will allow you to continuously innovate. So in that regard China is like a junkie that got itself a "fix" but will need to go back to the well for more. And perfecting quality is a completely different thing; you can master the basics but that is different than making quality products. I also believe they have an unsustainable defense budget... cannot go for ever.

 
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