Jasjit Singh on the US offer to sell F-16s

The flight of the falcon

India must use its substantive leverages to strike the most sensible deal

Jasjit Singh

The decision of the United States to open the arms pipeline to Pakistan with the F-16 Falcon multi-role combat aircraft supplies, anticipated for a long time by every observer in India, raises a number of questions especially since promises have been made by the US government indicating that it was willing to enter into arms trade with India as a “reliable partner”. The gut reaction of many here is that the Americans cannot be trusted in a key area like weapons and equipment, where unhindered supply of spares and product support for the next two decades would need to be assured. Our experience with British armaments, which had some US parts coming under the US sanctions regime, is much too recent for complacency on this account. It had resulted in the Navy’s Sea Harrier aircraft and Sea King helicopters being withheld during overhaul in the UK. Three broad issues require serious attention in this context. The first concerns the implications the US supply of F-16s to Pakistan have for our security. Pakistan’s army leadership which rules the country has come a long way from the days when generals thought F-16 was a “corner plot” in Islamabad! Pakistan Air Force could not intervene in the Kargil war in ’99 for fear that it would get wiped out by the Indian Air Force before it could make the slightest impact. The reason was that while IAF capability had suffered due to a lack of modernisation, the Pakistan Air Force had also suffered due to the door to its main source of hi-tech systems — America— closed due to the ’90 arms embargo for violating its promises not to cross the nuclear weapon red-line. There was the additional factor of Pakistan’s economy, which was on a steep decline since mid-1980s. This made the French Mirage fighters, that it had sought in the mid-1990s, simply unaffordable. Hence, as long as we continue to maintain the routine modernisation of our air force, the supply of the expected 70-odd F-16s would remain a manageable challenge. The second issue is that of IAF modernisation. By all known accounts, the combat force level of IAF has been dropping down due to fighter aircraft shortages resulting from a large number of older versions reaching the end of their design life in recent years without replacement aircraft having been ordered in anticipation of known retirements. This decline will obviously continue into the coming years until new aircraft actually enter service. This makes the purchase of 126 aircraft something of a priority. Linked to this is the question of self-reliance and assured sources of product support. The Soviet Union had been a reliable source of supply for three decades, but the collapse of the Soviet Union had resulted in a serious strain on our combat readiness. Currently, aircraft of Soviet origin compose nearly 80 per cent of our combat aircraft fleet, and nearly 95 per cent of the transport aircraft inventory. The remaining 20-odd per cent of combat aircraft are of European origin. This might have been alright during the days when the Soviet Union was dependent on us for a variety of things, including medicines, and so on. But things have changed in fundamental ways, even if the rhetoric has not. Prudence demands that this level of dependence on Russia is reduced, not the least because its defence industry is getting increasingly linked into the China’s military programmes and even getting dependent on it for funding resources and export orders of a far greater magnitude that what India can offer. Thus, while we would possess a total of about 200 Sukhoi-30 class aircraft by 2015, China would have upward of 450 such aircraft by that time, not to talk of the J-10 and other aircraft modernised with Russian technology. The procurement of 16 per cent of combat inventory from a different supplier would neither reduce the importance of the Russian sources of supply, nor would it make us vulnerable to the US as a supplier. In other words, we now have unique opportunities that we must objectively look at, uninhibited by traditional approaches. The European, and to a limited extent even the Russian, defence industry is getting integrated into the US industry as part of the globalisation of military and aerospace industry. This requires a fresh look at issues of import dependency from the US. With a shrinking global arms industry and trade, the US itself has a need to export to try and make use of the economies of scale. India offers a large market for arms due to the deferred modernisation decisions of the past 15 years. Linked to that is the issue of civil airliners and infrastructure investments, which is expected to touch $21 billion in the next five to seven years with only two main suppliers of such aircraft: Boeing of the US and Europe’s Airbus Industries. We must use the substantive leverages available to us, not only to negotiate better financial terms of procurement, but also to leverage self-reliance through interdependence. The answer lies in ensuring that arms trade offsets, preferably in the shape of direct offsets, are negotiated with the manufacturers as part of the deal. In other words, the seller must not only help set up capabilities in India for the licence manufacture of the aircraft and spares, etc, but also to buy back systems and components produced in India for supply to its own forces and other customers of the manufacturer. Recent data shows that the US has been providing an average of around 82 per cent of the sale value of an arms trade contract as offsets to the buyers, although in some cases the proportion has been as high as 150 per cent. This would increase the American stake in ensuring the sustainability of the aircraft being sold to India through its life-cycle; and our private sector would receive a fillip through deeper entry into the defence industry sector with tremendous advantages in the long run. At the same time, shifting around 16 per cent of our combat inventory to American sources would only increase and not erode our self-reliance without excessive dependency on any one source of supply.