COMMITTED TO THE DEFENCE SECTOR!
Better than the UPA lot, yes, by somewhat of a margin. But it is nowhere close to what we need, as in what we needed yesterday forget now.
And no, before people quibble about something being better than nothing, this isn't a matter so trivial, this is like saying that while facing a 5.56 slug a level-2 plate is better than having no protection at all, ghanta, you will still have a hole in you by the end of it and you will still bleed out. In such matters you need performance, from the first moment, at a quantum and quality which you NEED to address the problem, that we do not have, will NEVER have at this rate given our congenital issues.
Look at the folks in the video, they're dumbing it down for us, the real gems are right there.
1) No strategic defence review. Yup we are perhaps the only large country which does that.
(THIS IS THE BIGGEST MISTAKE IN THE WHOLE SCHEME OF THINGS)
2) No planned expenditure, LTIPP banaya aur phir kachde me phenk diya. Even this year's budget, all the expenses go in the unplanned bracket, why? Because it takes acumen and intellect to run with the LTIPP, acumen and intellect India as a nation lacks so far in its ministerial and ruling dispensation.
3) Structural reforms, CDS, unified MoD, recommendations from 84 to the most recent committees, all thrown in the dustbin.
Lollipop chuso!
Lets get more specific.
LCA:-
The program starts and the MoD decides that the one organisation which had the best bet of designing the plane won't design it, ad hoc decision taken to set up ADA from scratch for the purpose, HAL reduced to systems integrator with no real design ownership. Hallelujah! Forget all else that follows, its too long a story! In case you don't understand the significance of the aforementioned, take some time and think about how that translates to the problems we are facing today.
Scorpene:-
The French setup a comprehensive industrial package, one of the best in the world, the yard gets the option to pick its own in country partners to participate, in country cos. fail to absorb technology, cannot meet QC/QR (DCNS bangs its head on the wall), finally after failed batches orders go back to France for the components (even the limited transfer of know how not realized) causing the delays we so lament now (in addition to the 1.5 year delay in signing the contract after it was finally hashed out). The standard model of constructing first two vessels in France, with the said duration used to fine tune the transfer package so as to bring up QC/QR ignored, end result, clusterfu%k!
OFB:- Kept under the Department of Defence Production, structurally bound and owned by the MoD with biased access to all available infrastructure and kept alive on screw-driver giri, loves to be handheld by OEMs. No structural or policy changes envisaged.
The list is SO LONG!