asif iqbal
Lieutenant General
Buying air defence is not same as buying a SAM system and that's it, it involves entire change of air defence doctrine and a lot of training and practice with air force, especially if you have no history of using a high altitude air defence systems and if you don't know what your doing you can easily get a situation of downing your own fighter and hitting your own SAM sites, a error which one simply can't afford, a Patriot system downed a F18 hornet During operation Iraqi freedom, it would erode Pakistans capability if we went down that road
Pakistans answer to incoming enemy is simple, art of interception, best way to engage a enemy aircraft is to send one of your own one up, so I don't think there will be scope for high altitude SAM for Pakistan
The problem in Pakistan is politics, We just completed a order for delivery of the Aspide 2000 system From Selenia For $415 million, the money could have been much better spent if we bought some LD-2000 systems and used them to guard high value targets
We can do with WZ-10, and at least 48 of them, 12 x Y-9 aircraft and more 4 x AWACS
Say Y-9 platform is $50 million a peice, that's $600 million for a transport fleet not bad when you consider C130J for India was worth $1 billion for 6 units
I have no idea how much WZ-10 costs but the 48 units would be say $500 million with 4 addional ZDK-03 at $250
So really we are only taking just over $1 billion there for WZ-10, Y-9 and ZDK-03 which again isn't out of this world, buying from a Western source with strings and sanctions attached we could easily see the figure be 5 times that, I mean we paid just over a $1 billion for just 4 Erieyes from Sweden, and the 4 ZDK-03 from China were just $278 million, for that price we could have bought 16 x ZDK-03 AWACS or a mix of ZDK-03 and KJ-200 balance beam, and I don't think there is much between them in terms of capability
But the biggest deals lie from the Navy, the 4 FFG and 6 SSK are worth more than $2.5 billion+, spread over a 10 year period that's just $250 million per year well withing the Navy procurement budget, the recent replenishment tanker deal went to Turkey for $70 million which I thought was going to China, so we have that deal to look forward too
Cheap price, good capability, transfer of technology, break neck delivery and sanctions free makes China very attractive for weapon from Pakistans perspective, you can bet all major arms deals from now on will go to China
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