I don't get it. If Tejas is as good as we are being told, then why keep the Jaguars around?
Sustaining existing capability via low-cost acquisition of otherwise surplus materiel is a sensible investment. What it suggests about the IAF's near-term inventory prospects and the decisions that have contributed to that state of affairs is another matter.
That's precisely my point. Tejas was never intended to compete with Rafale-class aircraft. The whole concept behind the LCA program was to replace the large MiG-21 fleet & eventually help offset the retirement of other legacy platforms such as the MiG-23s, MiG-27s, & Jaguars, thereby maintaining squadron strength.
The requirement was fundamentally about numbers as much as capability. Unfortunately, decades later, the IAF is still grappling with a squadron shortfall while many of those legacy aircraft have already retired or are approaching retirement. That's why the discussion keeps returning to force levels.
One can debate whether Gripen would have been the ideal choice, but had India opted for a mature platform like the Gripen earlier, the squadron situation today might have been considerably better. The Gripen was already an operational 4.5-generation fighter with an established production line, potentially allowing faster induction & larger fleet numbers. Instead, the IAF has spent years trying to bridge the gap, to the extent that it was even evaluating older Greek M2Ks last year.
Rafale is undoubtedly the more capable aircraft, but capability alone doesn't solve a numbers crisis. Air forces need both quality & quantity & the original purpose of the Tejas program was largely to address the latter.
From a clean-sheet perspective, Gripen E/F would've been a compelling acquisition, however at the time it was considered it was still a developmental aircraft which did not enter squadron service until 2022. Plausibly that development schedule could've been compressed somewhat if India had in fact opted for it, but the point remains. Gripen C/D was the "mature" solution available and one major problem is that it clearly trod on the toes of LCA, which was not then expected to be decades away from delivering a useful capability.
In terms of acquiring a relatively modest and affordable western combat aircraft to sustain the inventory, the real missed opportunity in my view was in not doubling (tripling, quadrupling) down on Mirage 2000 in the late-90s to mid-2000s as Dassault was winding that program down in favour of Rafale. One can somewhat appreciate why it didn't happen, in that the timelines more-or-less overlap with those of Su-30MKI and state resources were limited, but in hindsight it was a mistake.
In an alternate reality where India did go down that path, IAF could today plausibly be operating hundreds of domestically manufactured M2Ks, with extensive ongoing domestic industry involvement in upgrade pathways executed at economic order quantities, with further production batches readily substituting for delays in LCA, declining availability of MiG-21, MiG-23/27, Jaguar, etc. And as an older program that was being superseded, Dassault may have been considerably more accommodating in relation to ToT and the like than they were and are for Rafale. Of course these are suppositions and one does not in fact know how the terms under which Dassault was willing to deal. It's possible that they may have been such that, on detailed examination, the prospect was unattractive. But given that Dassault was otherwise faced with the prospect of wrapping up the M2K production line without further returns, they surely would've been incentivised to negotiate in good faith. And on the Indian side of the equation, the evidence of recent decades provides little basis to think that the non-decision on M2K was the product of careful and thorough analysis and a robust decision-making process.
