Only a month down the line since India’s Ministry of Defense has issued sorry figures with regards to crashes of its military aircrafts. Indeed, in the course of the last 3 years, particularly from 2011 and up until 2014, Indian Air Forces (IAF) ran short of 30 aircrafts and helicopters, which led to the total damage of $193 mil. Roughly speaking, pilots’ mistakes reasoned only 29% of the foregoing crashes, however, the remainder leans more to the technical shutouts.
Primarily, the IAF fleet is made up of the Soviet and Russian materiel, out of which the following aircrafts came down: five Su-30MKI, three MiG-29, one MiG-27, seven MiG-21, and two Mi-17-V5.
Without doubts, the primetime of MiG-21 and its slightly newer incarnation MiG-27 is long gone, while the combat worthiness of MiG-29 is hardly capable of meeting the dictates of the present-day air fight. All along, the key reason for those crashes boils down to the extreme age of the said aircrafts.
Furthermore, the situation with relatively modern Su-30MKI turned into a source of splitting headache for the Indian military authorities due to their strategic hopes for the respective aircraft fell on deaf ears.
Seemingly, along with the burden of existing problems, the IAF is confronted by an array of unprecedented challenges that could not have been forecasted beforehand.
IAF enjoys the experience with Su-30MKI for 20 years when in the far-off 1994 Russia kicked off negotiations with India towards the delivery of Su-30MK fighters. In the next 2 years the aforementioned sides materialized a contract on the first batch of 40 fighters. Time ensued, and after a range of modernizations and upgrades Russian aircrafts assumed a new role in the IAF turning into a multipurpose attack aircrafts under the name of Su-30MKI.
Those days Indian generals remained rest assured that they had penned a nice deal. Indeed, 20 years ago Russian defense industry, experiencing a colossal financial thirst, was keen on not only furnishing India with the state-of the-art aircrafts, but ready to execute transfer of technologies as well, which comfortably fell in line with the interests of Indian side.
Although, Indian national authorities have recently took a decision to conduct more purchases in favor of American and European military hardware, India still buys from Russia.
Irrespective of losing a couple of sensitive helicopter tenders to the Americans, Russia managed to stay afloat with Su-30MKI project due to its strategic priority in the eyes of the Indian authorities setting their heart to hit the quantity of 240 these aircrafts, which would constitute one third of the entire fleet of the IAF.
Nevertheless, the Indians faced harsh reality riddled with problems they were unable to anticipate or fix in advance. Those problems were mainly hatched by the Russian partners.
To start off, apart from constant bragging about the invincible nature and top-level quality of its military produce, Russia’s real level of technical development leaves much to be desired and, markedly, does not show any signs of growth, but vice versa tilts to a downward trend.
Having come to power 15 years ago, Putin made the defense industry one of his top priorities. Due to a steady rise of the Russian export staples, i.e. gas and oil, military plants and corporations managed to adjust the everlasting shortage of necessary means.
Though, given to the rife corruption and respective HR-policy, the situation changed for the better only in terms of salary for the military top management, who brazenly exploited Putin’s veneration for the Soviet weapons.
As regards to design and engineering realm, the technical level of the Russian produce not only pales in comparison with their arch rivals, the Americans, but hardly matches the Soviet standard.
This is clearly seen in all weapon prototypes as long as all of them are bred by the Soviet past. Along with that, we can hardly remember any successful project pulled out during the era of Putin’s tenure.
Frequent crashes of brand-new Su-30MKI stand as a telling example of the technical slowdown and cultural degradation of the Russian military plants. Presumably, if continued in the same vein, there would hardly be any substantial progress seen in the immediate future, nonetheless, Russian propaganda keeps chanting about its military defense successes even louder than the Nazi’s exaltations about the miracle weapon during the WW2.
Still the most daunting threat for Russia’s defense cooperation with India as well as with other countries is Putin’s suicidal foreign policy.
Russia’s economy entered the period of stagnation last year. Subsequently, Putin is set to harbor the reasons of the spiraling economic crises via narrowing it down to international sanctions imposed on Russia coupled with enemy’s incessant plots. Nevertheless, this is far from making Putin come to halt.
This is crystal-clear in his steps with regards to Ukraine. All these years the US government showed unflagging patience towards Putin’s aggressive policy, i.e. war in Caucasus, attack on Georgia, cottoning up with Bashar Asad and Iranian ayatollahs, however, the Crimea’s take-over as well as throwing the Eastern part of Ukraine into war was the last drop both for the USA and EU.
To date, two facts stand out of the pack. The first is that Putin would hardly cease to follow his way. In the nearest future he would resort to the escalation of hostilities in Ukraine. Secondly, the West will exploit Putin’s aggression as a pretext to tighten sanctions, which could lead to far more disastrous consequences, than history saw in 1991.
Obviously, in such a case neither Putin, nor Russia as a whole, will be able to carry out the obligations under the contracts closed with foreign partners. This is easily explained by the influence of sanctions having being slapped on Russia’s military plants and corporations, which, all-in-all, may yield to the entire demise of Russian defense industry in general and arms export in particular.
