Indias Fighter Fetish | Flashpoints
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Indias Fighter Fetish
Strategic considerations played no part
whatsoever in Indias down-selection of the EADS
Eurofighter and the Dassault Rafale for its lucrative
medium multirole combat fighter aircraft
(MMRCA) competition.So argues Ashley J. Tellis
of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace in a fascinating analysis that runs counter
to many other assessments of the Indian
decision, which beggared American belief for its
rejection of the two US entrants in spite of the
increasingly close ties between Washington and
New Delhi.
I argued in an earlier Diplomat post that the
Indians had down-selected two aircraft from an
initial field of six back in April by feeding both their
technical evaluation of the contenders and the
countrys political priorities into their decision
matrix. Thats wrong, Tellis says: the technical
evaluation alone informed Indias decision to
green-light the two European aircraft at the
expense of Boeing, Lockheed Martin and the other
hopefuls.
Tellis may well be right, and his account of Indias
technical evaluation process is both detailed and
convincing. India is a country with afetish about
process, he observes, and this obsession
perhaps regrettably allowed the air force to
make a purely technical judgement that wasnt
influenced in any way by budgetary sense,
international politics past or present, or even by
the overall range of missions that the aircraft
could handle. They picked the two speediest,
most manoeuvrable planes, and that was all there
was to it.
Perhaps Indias decision-makers really have
become blinkered to all non-technical
considerations when it comes to military
procurement. But there would be two surprising
implications to this, if it were true.
The first is that the Indian defence establishment
which has a shabby procurement record, strewn
with cases of graft and with car-crash
programmes where the fetish about process was
nowhere to be found would have to have
cleaned up its act to an extraordinary degree in
order to have run the MMRCA competition along
purely technical lines.
Such a conversion isnt entirely implausible. A.K.
Antony, the Indian defence minister, is well
known for his anti-corruption zeal, and the
corruption scandals that continue to plague the
government may have convinced those
concerned that the big-ticket MMRCA deal, with all
the scrutiny it would attract, needed to be whiter
than white. The thing is, this wasnt Antonys call.
In late April, the Indian media reported that
Antonydelivered a speech to senior army and air
force officers the same men who made their
technical selection of the Eurofighter and Rafale
in which he appealed to them not to succumb to
corrupt practices. Unless Antony was preaching
to the converted, he knows what many suspect:
that the reform of Indian procurement is far from
complete, and that the technical evaluation
conducted by some officers tends to improve
given the right financial encouragement.
The second is that it would show how little the
West understands its new, and most important,
Asian ally. US President Barack Obama, French
President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime
Minister David Cameron all made personal sales
calls to New Delhi in the run-up to the MMRCA
decision to lobby for their countries entrants (and
for other contracts besides) trips that were
completely pointless if India is in fact impervious
to this kind of pressure. The US Ambassador to
India, Timothy J. Roemer, who quit when the
rejection of the two US aircraft was announced,
must have had dreadful intelligence on the
country he was working in, if he thought the
value of US-Indian strategic ties would count in
what was a strictly technical contest. But this, too,
is not totally implausible. Potential buyers often
say one thing and mean another, while salesmen
might hear only what they want to hear.
Yet if Telliss reading of the MMRCA contest is
correct, then this programme is a rarity a
museum piece in its exclusion of non-technical
factors. Personal contacts, lobbying and special
favours are the lifeblood of big business and
international politics, and this is doubly so in the
world of defence, whose wheels are habitually
greased either by financial or strategic interests. If
Antony truly has freed Indias procurement
processes from these iniquities, then he has done
an even better job of cleaning up his countrys
defence sector than people give him credit for.
