I have gone through a lot of this threads previous posting, and I have some comments on the general state of who I think are Indians and their understanding of the Indian Army's position.
It feels that they are too quick to praise, and too quick to deflect and blame. Every attempt at a new vehicle or technology, it seems that they look up to the highest peak of human technology and try to immediately replicate. They reach for what is so high but forget that they stand too low to reach. There has never been an instance in human history of such leaps of technology that the Indian military tries to achieve regularly. And so, it is doomed to fail each time.
It is easy to say that this technology and that device can be combined to produce, say, an AI-operated machine gun. But as I and others here point out, the road to a true fusion of these two fairly straightforward technologies is a hard one. It feels that Indian Army procurement strategy relies upon a pale mimicry of the state-of-the-art technology of other nations, that their pundits and what this forum calls "Jai Hind"s immediately seize upon as the greatest in the world.
How can it not be the greatest in the world, when it is being modelled off of the best platforms in the world, and has improvements grounded in observation of those platforms? But just as it is easy to talk theory of quantum particles or perhaps vaguely gesture about differential equations, while being unable to actually do anything useful with this theory, it is just as easy to talk of such wonderful platforms with such wonderful technologies and be completely unable to deliver.
Time and time again in this thread, this has happened. Some wonderful new melding of cutting-edge technology has been announced as an Indian Army procurement goal, only for the project to fall flat on its face when it becomes clear that describing the cutting-edge technology and building it are two rather different things.
But, each time, the "Jai Hind"s do not learn. They do not realize that this leap is something too great to make, that it is in complete defiance of the way of technological progress, and so they deflect, and they blame. It is true that the Indian Army suffers from a good deal of internal dysfunction that hinders the progress of domestic projects. But even this dysfunction, no matter how great, could not possibly explain all of these failures. But it is easier to blame the failures of a bureaucracy, or perhaps the crafty wiles of a foreign nation eager to keep India down, than it is to acknowledge that the goal is too lofty to achieve in one step.
I am not sure if this state of self-delusion can ever end, or if it is too late to fix, because India every year falls another technological increment behind. Every year they will try to make a jump even larger than the previous, and every year they will fall flat on their face. To fix this, India must acknowledge in its military procurement strategy that a suitable domestic supply of weapons will only arise from a strong foundation of knowledge and experience, not amateurish attempts to leap directly to the state-of-the-art.
I really hope that future "Jai Hind"s who come to this thread can realize this, and instead of flooding this thread with useless word-vomit describing what wonderful technologies India would like to build into its weapons, instead think of what India can actually build into its weapons to slowly improve its foundations of research and manufacture.
. Interesting also that they seemingly chose STANAG 4 using PLA border units QJG02 as baseline threat, but use of DGJ02 tungsten carbide SLAP renders it ineffective outside of extended range engagements. Frontal arc should be vulnerable to being penned by 35mm HEDP from QLU131 or QLZ04 as well lol