In the 2008 MMRCA Competition, the USA made a similar offer to India with the F-16, proposing a redesigned version named the F-21. However, after evaluation, the Indian Air Force deemed the F-16 an obsolete fighter jet and instead shortlisted the 6-7 times more expensive Rafales and Eurofighter Typhoons.
This isn't the first time the USA has tried to sell its fighter jets with attractive offers, such as shifting the production line to India, only for India to reject them.
I will concede the point that USA has tried to sell fighter aircraft to India before. This information however does not necessarily suggest that USA is willing to sell F-35 to India, or to bring India into the global supply chain of F-35 production.
I will bring up some new points. The paper you link suggests that "close-in air combat manoeuvring" was the key deciding factor in the choice of Rafale over F-16. Is this marginally superior close-range maneuvering in a single Rafale worth 6-7 F-16s (per your cited prices)? If it is not, what can justify such an astronomical price tag? I maintain that the argument that USA will not permit usage of purchased aircraft against Pakistan is absurd: once again I must point out that Pakistan is one of the largest purchasers of Chinese weapons. I question the decision-making competency of the Indian Air Force.
I also ask this: seeing that India seems to struggle very much with production (HAL Tejas), and if I recall correctly has attempted to have the French manufacture Rafales in India, why did India reject the offer of USA shifting F-16 production line to India? Would India not benefit greatly from manufacturing experience gained? I must again question the decision-making competency of the Indian Air Force.
Tellis on MMRCA! This brings back memories.
Tellis is of Indian descent but embedded within the American establishment as a voice on the Indo-US relationship. Prior to the down-select from the initial six contenders to two, Tellis had argued that MMRCA was a political acquisition program and hence that the American contenders would sail through, because signing an American aircraft for the largest defence acquisition program in India's history was to be the lynchpin heralding a new Indo-US strategic partnership. That didn't happen: F-16, F/A-18E/F, MiG-35 and Gripen were all cut in the first round of operational testing, leaving Rafale and Typhoon to proceed to commercial evaluation. A lot of very important folks in Washington were invested in this idea of a burgeoning Indo-US strategic partnership and were most distressed by India having dismissed
both American tenders so cavalierly, not even permitting them to save face by allowing one contender to advance to the next round. So at this point (i.e. in the linked article) Tellis changes his mind: the MMRCA selection is now of no political significance whatsoever, rather the Indians were overly process-bound and indeed stupid: too stupid to know that fighters cost real money and that this should actually be considered from the outset, too stupid to know what even counts as performance in the modern combat environment, too stupid to consider the benefits of aligning with the greatest nation the world has ever seen. It's not Washington's fault that the Indians are so stupid, Tellis reassures his American readers. Keep in mind that the evaluation process that Tellis decries here was public knowledge at the time. In previous works he was happy to consider political angles when he thought those were favourable to Washington (thereby implicitly acknowledging that the formal process is not necessarily the real or only process), but when the result turned out not to favour Washington he decided that politics was irrelevant, rather than admit that India was sending a message that was not what Washington wanted to hear.
My thesis is that Tellis was right the first time: MMRCA
was a political/strategic acquisition program
and that's why the Americans didn't win. Because contrary to what folks in Washington wanted to believe, India had
not forgotten the sanctions that had been imposed upon them a decade earlier, affecting the LCA and other aerospace programs. India also had no intent of being drawn into the American web of alliances, particularly its War on Terror, as Washington so clearly desired. By failing to select an American aircraft for MMRCA (and simultaneously refusing to sign "interoperability" agreements such as CISMOA) New Delhi was communicating to Washington exactly what kind of relationship it did and did not envision with the United States going forward. Washington had thought that arranging for a Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver for India was an act of great generosity that would be reciprocated by a grateful nation, whereas India saw that merely as correcting a previously unjust state of affairs. And over time, Washington has indeed come to temper its expectations about India, such that Tellis has more recently been penning articles for
Foreign Affairs such as
.
Rafale won the MMRCA tender because France was the best
strategic partner for India. Having a particular result in mind, it is a simple matter to craft an evaluation process that leads inexorably to the desired outcome. You exclude value-for-money at the initial stage. You place a premium on instantaneous turn rate and transonic acceleration. You ask for combinations of range and payload that the smaller Gripen can't meet. You deny Lockheed Martin the opportunity to retry a failed engine changeout procedure. You penalise the American engines as developmental while not penalising European radars as such. You don't even pretend to take the Russian submission seriously, because wanting a non-Russian aircraft (and a non-Russian technology pipeline) is why MMRCA exists in the first place. And having whittled the field down to two and progressed to the commercial evaluation phase, you declare Rafale as L1 because you haven't forgotten that Germany and the UK signed on the American sanctions regime as well.
Of course it is perfectly reasonable to point out that this was all highly questionable from the perspective of getting needed capabilities into service at an acceptable cost in an acceptable timeframe. Political considerations aside, F-16 would probably have been the correct choice for the IAF at that particular juncture. But there is no such thing as an apolitical Tier 1 military acquisition program.
