Not buying a stop-gap 5G jet would only invite more provocations like Pahalgam from Pak imo. That's the crux of it - if we had overwhelming military superiority, Pindi would have been more circumspect about their actions.
When has Fauji Foundation required a reason to target India & simultaneously when have they not miscalculated ?
Leave aside the present instance go back to 2021 & that famous photograph of the then DJ ISI - Faiz Hameed sipping tea in a 5 star hotel in Kabul with the new Lords & Masters in Afghanistan - the Taliban !
Now the entire aim of the Paxtani Punjabi establishment was to keep the Pashtuns on both sides of the Durand Line destabilized which is the reason they started interfering in the internal affairs of Afghanistan in the first place after Mohammed Daoud who'd seized power in coup against his cousin & king Zahir Shah in order to shore up support for himself & his regime declared his government didn't recognize the Durand Line thus setting in motion a chain of events affecting both Afghanistan & Paxtan till date.
All that talk of strategic depth was to misguide the Pashtuns towards channeling their energies taking on India. While it enjoyed great success in its initial years especially once the insurgency broke out in Kashmir where the biggest component of the foreign terrorists were Afghans / Pashtuns from both sides of the Durand Line - veterans of the Afghan war like all good things it's came to an end .
Pashtuns have seen through the game & while the civil society in KPK has been battling for civil rights to be upheld besides opposing Fauji Foundation from supporting various tanzeems engaged in promoting terror there, organisations like the TTP are demanding a full Sharia'h compliant state to now quasi independence if not full independence.
Fauji Foundation will be there to prosecute their agenda of death by 1000 cuts as long as they're in existence which means even if the Paxtani state doesn't exist tomorrow remnants of Fauji Foundation & Pak Nationalists all believers in Do Qaumi Nazaria will be at it.
After all Paxtan is at the end of the day a state of the mind before it was realised on the ground & will continue being so long after it has ceased being a state.
Assuming they get J-35 in 'the coming months' as a Jane's report recently put it, their window of opportunity (until we get AMCA) would be almost a decade long. No way the IAF is gonna wait that long.
If the IAF didn't lose their sleep over the J-20s concluding that the IACCS apart from the Rafales along with the upgraded Su-30 MKI & other supporting elements like the upcoming Rocket Force was enough to sort out the PLAAF, I don't think they'd be reconsidering their decision if PAF got the J-35 / FC -31.
If anything it should speed up the procurement process of the MRFA.
I'm all for building asymmetric capabilities like anti-stealth radars, passive detection systems, etc. But we cannot hand our enemies the psychological advantage in the interim. The Pakistanis may only get a handful of J-35 to be a major threat but China would be waiting in the wings to try another Doklam.
As I've pointed out before China's planned upgradation / modernization cum theaterization would be through in 2027-28. Whatever we're to expect will be post that date.
Secondly I've also theorised why a two front war will turn Nuclear from our perspective. All we need to do is tweak the NFU & you will see how Fauji Foundation reacts. For all their claims about them being ghazis & waging ghazwa e hind just that tweak will make them justify their brown camouflage.
I'd also venture we're heading towards exactly such a scenario. We haven't called off Operation Sindoor. I suspect either we're expecting more mischief from Fauji Foundation or for once we're going to be pro active & launch pre emptive attacks on them destroying their war fighting machinery in the form of PAF & PN assets.
We'd know exactly how things pan out by this time next year .
By the French AFs own admission, Rafale is unable to hold its own against the F-35. Our older jets would be much more vulnerable. Space based sensors can improve situational awareness but the shooters need to be survivable too.
We're not going up against the F-35, are we?
The problem with the Su-57 is unless the Russians certify it FOC with the Item 30 TF & other upgrades I don't think the IAF would be interested in it & this is assuming we go in for outright purchase of 2-3 squadrons on an as is basis which is to say no monkey models.
If the objective is MKI ization that's a time & resource consuming process which would take us a good 10-15 years, luxury we lack for time is of essence. You already know why the F-35 doesn't fit into our plans . So in the light of this information tell me where's the scope to induct a 5th Gen platform from what's available to us?
Here's Shiv Aroor for you:
Aroor is conflating a lot of things including relying on that midwit & presstitute Kutta. While the deal was signed in Deve Gowda's tenure where Mulayamwa was the RM, it was finalised in toto during the reign of PVNR.
In fact the incident Aroor's alluding to where we made advance payments even before a contract was inked got PVNR in a spot of trouble.
News leaked to the opposition & ABV was about to raise it in Parliament when PVNR intervened & informed ABV that he did what he did as a favor to Yeltsin coz the latter personally requested him for funds as there was literally no money to pay salaries to their entire aerospace ecosystem.
There's another interesting tid bit of information nobody mentions today namely the monies we owed Russia on account of purchases of a lot of stuff from the USSR. After its collapse & the financial turmoil in Russia, the rouble collapsed.
India actually signed an agreement with Russia pegging the rouble to the USD at a far higher rate than what was the market rate. If I'm not mistaken this was during PVNR's era or the agreement could've been signed during Deve Gowda's tenure with the agreement having been finalised during PVNR's reign.
The catch was we wouldn't pay them up front. We'd do so in installments plus we'd have access to their state of the art arms. That's how the Brahmos, MKI, Kundankoolam N reactors, Russian collaboration in INS Arihant etc came about.
There were other considerations as well like the fact the Chinese were getting access to a lot of state of the art Russian arms like they signed on to mfg the Su-27 with full ToT which resulted in the J-11 & them reverse engineering the AL-31 TF & so on which considerably soured relations between the 2 for years afterwards.
All this can be verified on the net provided you know where to look . This is countless hours spent as a college student in the early 2000s over totally unreliable Internet connections courtesy VSNL going thru Rediff, BRF, Readers Digest & other archives online talking .
. Pakistani were having it all easy before recent engagement.... This only show how s**t scared they & their Chinese masters are. Pakistan’s inability to penetrate or challenge Indian airspace without stealth or advanced stand-off capabilities..... The recent shift in tone from confident declarations to desperate interest in stealth tech reflects the hard reality that in a contested environment, flashy acquisitions mean little without survivability and integration. “we wuz kang” bravado churan has met the cold wall of physics and radar equations.
. I am really confused where this M-2000 vs MKI is coming from? M-2000 vs Mig-29 in the 1980s is a well-known stuff. But MKI? MKI was IAF's foray into procuring an absolute exquisite Air-Dominance Platform. And looking at its combat success in back to back conflicts, they'd be proud of what they achieved. Plus, they didn't order 272 units of it in a fluke. The above huge order of the MKIs over the years by IAF themselves completely discards the theory that MKI was forced on to them just to bail out Russian Sukhoi Corporation, lol.
. They will never let us live in peace. History has proven that whenever they have supposedly got a wonder/superior weapon than ours, they try to attack us. They will again try to attack us, this way or that, post J-35's acquisition.
