Chandigarh: The phasing out last week of two Russian military aircraft types from the Indian armed forces inventory definitively presages the end of the era when Moscow-supplied fixed-wing combat, surveillance and transport platforms and assorted rotary-wing assets monopolised the catalogues of the country’s three services.
On October 31, the Indian Air Force (IAF) retired one of its three remaining upgraded MiG-21 ‘Bison’ fighter squadrons, the same day that the Indian Navy (IN) decommissioned, after 44 years, the last of its five Ilyushin IL-38 Sea Dragon long-range maritime patrol aircraft from the same epoch. The IAF also aims, by 2025, to superannuate its two remaining MiG-21 ‘Bison’ squadrons of some 40 fighters, all of which had been imaginatively exploited by three generations of fighter pilots.
The MiG-21s will be imminently replaced by the indigenous Tejas Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), while the IL-38s already have two substitutes in place: 12 Boeing P-8I Neptune long-range maritime multi-mission platforms and 26 German-origin turboprop Dornier Do-228s, licence-built by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) in Bangalore with refurbished engines, composite propellers, advanced avionics and a glass cockpit. Another 12 Do-228 maritime variants were presently on order from HAL by the IN.
“There is now little or no likelihood of India acquiring any more Russian military aircraft,” declared a former three-star IAF fighter pilot. He said that other than intrinsic handicaps of low serviceability and crippling maintenance issues, Moscow’s previously questionable reliability in providing after-sales support, including spares, for its in-service aerial platforms had now ‘multiplied exponentially’ following US-led sanctions for invading Ukraine.
A cross-section of serving and retired military officers concurred that the ‘golden age’ of Soviet/ Russian aerial military platforms that began in 1963 with the induction of the single-engine, single-seat MiG-21FL ‘Fishbed’ fighters into the IAF, and was thereafter supplemented by a vast panoply of other platforms, was finally drawing to a close.
Even Russia’s defence industrial complex itself, for the first time after the imposition of sanctions 21 months ago, had publicly expressed its inability recently to continue delivering materiel to its many clients, including India, as it needed to ‘prioritise’ domestic military manufacturing to sustain domestic needs. Its unstated message signalled the urgency for Russian armament manufacturers to ensure uninterrupted equipment supplies to its armed forces to continue executing their deadlocked Ukrainian campaign.
In an October 19 press statement, Rosoboronexport, Russia’s dominant joint stock arms export corporation, admitted to currently facing ‘pressing challenges’. Consequently, in a departure from the past that focused primarily on exporting equipment, Rosoboronexport offered potential foreign partners alternate cooperative formats centred on technology partnerships. Military and defence planning officials in New Delhi fittingly interpreted this admission to signal the precipitous decline of Russia’s once gargantuan military industry which, almost single-handedly, armed India’s military since the 1960s, especially its aerial requirements.
The IAF’s transport fleet, for instance, earlier dominated by Antonov An-32s and Ilyushin Il-76, had undergone a significant makeover, with the induction of 11 Boeing C-17 Globemaster III and 12 Lockheed Martin C-130J-30 air lifters. Another 56 C295 MW medium transport aircraft from Airbus Defence and Space were on stream to replace the IAF’s legacy Avro-748M fleet, with 16 of them acquired in flyaway condition and 40 manufactured at a recently inaugurated facility in Vadodara, via a transfer of technology. And though some 100-odd An-32s continued in IAF service, their $400 million upgrade agreed with Ukraine in 2008, stands suspended after around 60 of them were retrofitted.
The Indian Air Force’s Antonov An32 ‘Cline’ transport aircraft. Photo: Oleg V. Belyakov/Wikimedia Commons CC BY SA 3.0
And, in early 2019, the IAF began replacing its dwindling fleet of 8-10 Mil Mi-25/35 attack helicopters with 22 Boeing AH-64E Apache equivalents that were acquired alongside 15 Boeing CH-47F Chinook heavy-lift helicopters. Both latter rotary aircraft were shortlisted after besting comparable Russian platforms in user trials. The Indian Army (IA) too is scheduled to take delivery in early 2024 of the first of six Apaches it had signed up to acquire in 2020 for around $500 million.
“India’s decades-old defence ties with Moscow have plateaued and are now on the downswing, especially with regard to military aircraft,” said Amit Cowshish, former Ministry of Defence (MoD) advisor on acquisitions. The materiel road for India, he added, now leads fortuitously to Western vendors and towards fast-tracking atmanirbharta (self-reliance) to indigenously develop weapon systems and platforms, or to a practical blend of the two, underscored by technology transfers.
That being said, Moscow undoubtedly takes commercial solace from the reality that some 60% of India’s overall in-service military kit was Russian in origin, even though Delhi’s materiel imports from Russia between 2017 and 2022 had dropped from 62% to 45%, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. But the IAF, the IN and to a large extent even the IA remain heavily dependent on Moscow to technically support their swathe of Russian fixed-wing and rotary aircraft, which are expected to remain in service for at least two decades or more.
The most prominent amongst these were the IAF’s 260-odd twin-engine Sukhoi Su-30MKI (India) multi-role fighters and some 65 retrofitted MiG-29UPG air superiority combat aircraft that presently constitute the ‘sword-arm’ of the IAF’s combat squadrons. And, in September the MoD had, after extended deliberation, approved the procurement of 12 HAL-built Su-30MKIs as replacements for an equal number lost over years in accidents.
In the meantime, a cursory evaluation of the steady drawdown of Russian-origin aerial military platforms by the IAF and IN, in particular, is instructive.
In 2006, the IAF retired its fabled Cold War-era MiG-25 ‘Foxbat’ supersonic interceptor and reconnaissance platform, nick-named Garuda after the mythological bird-like creature from Hindu scriptures, whose purported activities were as mysterious and enigmatic as those of this aircraft.
Thereafter, in March 2007 it phased out some 120 MiG23MF/BN ‘Flogger’ air defence and ground attack variant fighters – christened Bahadur by HAL, followed 12 years later, in late 2019, by retiring its last upgraded MiG-27 ML ‘swing-wing’ combat aircraft, of which some 165 examples were licence-built by HAL. Around the same time, the IN bid farewell, after 29 years, to eight of its four-engine Tupolev-142MK-Es, possibly one of the best maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare aircraft of the Cold War years.
Furthermore, India has also bypassed Russia on recent aircraft contracts, with the MoD more or less scrapping the over $1.2 billion tender from 2014 for 200 Russian Kamov Ka-226T ‘Hoodlum’ light utility helicopters. Of these, 135 were intended for the Army Aviation Corps and 65 for the IAF, but over years of negotiations, the deal became mired in a myriad of insoluble complications over technology transfer to HAL and overall cost, and was abandoned.
The IAF was also sidestepping Russia in upgrading 84 of its Su-30MKIs to ‘Super Sukhoi’ standards, in its first retrofit tranche, by enhancing their overall operational performance, to keep them in service till 2045-50. Negotiations for the Su-30MKIs retrofit by HAL and a consortium of local vendors which includes upgrading some 51 of the fighters operating, offensive, surveillance and detection systems, but not their Al-31F engines were initiated with Russia’s United Aircraft Corporation (UAC) and Sukhoi Corporation in 2011, but these rumbled on for years, before being recently abandoned.
And in yet another telling indicator of the IAF’s disillusionment with Russian military aircraft, was its reported ‘unenthusiasm’ and ‘disinterest’ in even evaluating UAC and Sukhoi Corporation’s offer of MiG-35 ‘Fulcrum-F’ and Su-35 ‘Flanker-E’ for its proposed procurement of 114 multi-role fighter aircraft (MRFA). Both Russian manufacturers had, alongside five other overseas original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), responded to the IAF’s April 2018 request for information or RfI for the planned MRFA buy to bolster its depleting fighter squadron numbers that had declined to around 29-30 from a sanctioned strength of 42 squadrons.
Senior IAF and industry officials are believed to have reasoned that for a variety of operational, availability and sustainability considerations, even evaluating the two fuel-intensive Russian fighter types for eventual acquisition, was ‘irrational and unworkable’, categorically precluding Moscow’s role in the lucrative contract. The other OEM responders to the IAFs MRFA RfI included France’s Dassault (Rafale), Eurofighter (Typhoon), Sweden’s Saab (Gripen-E) and the US’s Boeing and Lockheed Martin (F/A-18 and the upgraded F-21).
Conversely, the IN too was in the process of edging away from inducting Russian fighters into its new aircraft carrier’s combat air arm. Currently, it was in advanced negotiations to acquire 26 French Rafale (Marine) fighters for INS Vikrant, instead of supplementary Russian MiG-29K/KUBs, all of which had collectively proven operationally inefficient and hugely problematic since their commissioning into service from 2009 onwards.
The IN had acquired 45 twin-engine MiG-29K/KUBs between 2004 and 2010 for $2.29 billion but presently operated around 40, almost half of which were believed to be in reserve because of their dismal performance and inability to deliver their weapons payload to their stated range with a full fuel load. An excoriating analysis by the Comptroller and Auditor General in 2016 had binned the MiG-29Ks, whose operational availability between 2014 and 2016, he revealed, fluctuated from 15.93% to 37.63%, whilst that of the MiG-29KUB dual-seat trainers hovered between 21.2% and 47.14%.
A MIG-29k takes off from INS Vikrant. Photo: Government of India, GODL-India
Revealingly, the IN is also believed to have halted negotiations with Russia to acquire 10 additional Kamov Ka-31 ‘Helix’ airborne early warning (AEW&C) helicopters for $520 million, approved by the MoD in May 2019, for deployment aboard Vikrant, following uncertainty in supplies over sanctions and attendant knotty payment mechanisms. These 10 Ka-31s were to have supplemented 10-12 similar platforms in service with the IN since 2003, all of which needed upgrading, that too was now imperilled by sanctions on Russia. Meanwhile, the IN had acquired 24 Lockheed Martin/Sikorsky MH-60R multirole helicopters in a $2.6 billion deal agreed upon in early 2020, deliveries of which were ongoing, further diluting the navy’s once-prodigious Russian rotary wing assets.
In conclusion, Delhi’s druzhba or friendship with Moscow which sustained prodigious bilateral military commerce between the two, worth over $70 billion, seems to have run its course at the altar of newly emergent geopolitical configurations, encompassing a beleaguered Russia cementing close strategic, political, diplomatic, economic and, in time, even military ties with India’s feared foe Beijing.