The Aegis Weapon System is the best off-the-shelf solution to meet the pressing need of the Indian Navy to defend its coastline from the threat of medium and long range ballistic missiles

Developing India’s Emerging Fleet: A Procurement Dilemma

I have followed with great interest India’s commitment to an expanded and modernised naval surface fleet to meet its growing strategic threats. India, like all countries, must consider the costs and benefits of two potentially opposing national interests. Firstly, India has a national interest in developing a more advanced indigenous defence industry that will support its economy and ensure its long term political-military independence. Secondly, India must consider its need to deploy at the earliest a modern and reliable naval force, by procuring a foreignbuilt proven combat system as a part of the force. The second need, if pursued, would allow the Indian Navy to effectively defend Indian waters and project naval power to protect its national and economic interests. This procurement dilemma is particularly applicable to the Indian Navy’s pursuit of new classes of destroyers and frigates, ships that will not only be important as stand-alone units, but will also be critical to their nation’s commitment to aircraft carrier battle groups in the future.

Some might believe that the greatest benefit to India would come from its Navy tapping into its indigenous defence industry, to develop and produce the next generation of surface combatants, and their supporting combat systems. In fact, I understand that a significant investment by the Indian government has already gone towards codevelopment of a surface ship AAW combat system, and the Indian Navy might in effect be able to get the benefit of this research and development. However, the benefit of indigenous development is not very clear. Indepth analysis found two important reasons for it, the longer time period required for substantive development of a sophisticated and truly integrated system, and the fact that embracing a more off-the-shelf foreign solution may in fact provide much greater benefit for India’s indigenous development capabilities in the long term, because of the tailored integration that would be required.

With regard to the time involved—the time that India may not have because of the growing strategic threats—the successful fielding of a fleet-wide AAW capability from the bottom up is substantial. It requires multi-function radar of sufficient range and coverage, a long-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) of sufficient engagement capability and lethality, and the weapons control functions to integrate the two. In total, this is a lengthy evolution that could arguably take decades for successful completion. The US Navy’s Aegis system, the world’s premier naval combat system, is a prime example of the investment in both time and funding required to arrive at such a capability. It took 18 years and more than 60 missile test firings, to achieve Initial Operational Capability (IOC) from concept definition alone. Since achieving IOC, over 25 years and Rs 3,7100 crore ($80 billion) have been invested by the US in continually upgrading this system’s capability to provide effective sea-based Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD), and to deal with the modern AAW threats that have evolved.

It is well recognised that the combat system development efforts currently supported by the Indian government have made significant strides, but much effort, money and time still remains to be given. It is a serious technology challenge to develop a long range SAM with flight dynamics that allow precision control, particularly against high speed targets and against both endo-atmospheric and exo-atmospheric threats. It is yet another challenge to develop radars with the power and signal processing capability to detect and track small as well as potentially numerous targets at long ranges. And these criteria, after all, are only the fundamental building blocks. Despite overcoming the difficult hurdles, a still more difficult challenge remains, integrating the individual system components, across an array of sea-borne platforms, into a robust combat system that provides capability in all environments and also against a wide variety of deadly tactical and even more deadly strategic threats.

All of the aforementioned challenges can be overcome more rapidly by embracing an available, proven system, rather than relying solely on indigenous development. And such a system would also address the second aforementioned potentially positive impact for India — that cooperation with a more mature technology provider during a procurement and implementation project of this magnitude would surely result in an accelerated transfer of systems engineering and operational employment disciplines that come from years of lessons learned in the fleets of other nations. Perhaps counterintuitively then, this approach could mean a great deal more for getting India’s indigenous military technological base to a higher plane, sooner. This approach can be mutually beneficial to the foreign industry partner and its host government as well — both for technological and political reasons?