First it was Indians claiming Arjuns were sabotaged, now its a Chinese traitor saying T90s were sabotaged. Oh lordy.
Man......
Actually the former wasnt correct. there was no sabotage w.r.t Arjun on behalf of Indian army.
the problem here was 2 fold.
One is time taken for the development,which let the army to go for T-90 instead of Arjun.And army got TOT for T-90 to produce in numbers to achieve its requirement numbers.
during this time Arjun was suffering with teething problems,which has to be considered a main cause.And in perspectives it was clear that army never insisted in inducting a problematic MBT,instead it went after T-90 considered as ahighly modified and upgraded T-72.
Now army has `2000 T-72 of them only 700 or so were upgraded to CIA(combat improved Ajeya)After all,T-72 was a decades old design and the threats have drastically changed.Hence the need for a superior firepower along with armour.
T-90 did excellent during trials on Russian landmass,but failed miserably in indian temperatures. It was a face saving measure by Army to cover the mess and started sending RFP for air conditioner,thermal sights ,..... which later made the tank exceptionally costly compared to Arjun with similar features.
and reason for Armys reluctance was that,it got its doctrine readied with T-90 and T-72.All the logistics and infrastructure were developed accordingly.Now all of a sudden Arjun proved beyond doubt.This put army in a dilema of inducting a system that will interfere with all its doctrinal and logistics plans.
IF IA did have followed the Israeli way of inducting MBT ,though it turned out with issues,it would have been in much better position.
Now the much possible wayout is inducting <500 Arjuns(throw them into strike corps/integrated battle groups) while going for a F-MBT design while taking use of the Arjun developmental effort.
At the same time to use the Arjun infrastructre,it would be much better to go for Tank-EX which is a T-72 hull and Arjun riffled gun.
Its actually a win-win situation if this logic was followed.On one side using the knowledge gained in the past,while on the otherside compensating developmental costs in the name of tank-EX.
And Tank-EX will do much muchhhhh better in terms of networking and providing enormous firepower.
And regarding the later,it was a known rhetoric that these fellow members followup........ just