indian army thumbs down to US offer of javelin ATGM

[sancho]

The US makes sense as a trusted seller only and only if you are part of a strategic military alliance with them. Where, you will deploy forces to forward core US foreign policy interests. Which in a way means, you need to make your foreign policy and their foreign policy similar in areas of interest or neither should have divergent policies in core interest areas.

UK and Canada being good examples.This need not necessarily mean, UK and Canada are slaves. Simply they are aligning their interests and see eye to eye with the US.

In certain fields thery are, since they have less freedom to buy or integrate what they want, if they use US fighters for example. Canada, or Israel had the potential to develop a good own aero industry, which was scrapped basically under US pressure and now they are bound to US fighters mainly. Canada and UK are partners in the F35 program, but don't get radar source codes, can't integrate own weapons or systems and even the initially planned British contribution with an own engine, HMS or weapons is far lower now than expected. So they have to take what the US allows and this industrial dependency, besides the political one is very limiting compared to the freedom India has with FGFA. That's why India can't allow the US to create a similar dependency relation, but have to dictate terms! If the US complies great, if not ditch them and take one of the several options we have. That's what we have done with C130J, C17 and P8I, where certain limitations and restrictions were reduced to comply to our demands, but also why we rejected them in all major deals that includes licence production under ToT so far.

It's good to increase our capabilities and options by adding US arms, but it's more important to remain independent from them and their policies!

 

[ashish1]

Heard about a shoulder launched variant of Nag was in development, any info on that?

Saurav Jha has tweeted about that.You can check his tweets.