Rafale DH/EH of Indian Air Force : News and Discussions
- Thread starter Herciv
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Neither the Stratus nor the Hammer XLR will be ordered. Our equivalent weapons will be under user trials by the time the first rafales start arriving.
Iirc, Stratus is still in the concept definition phase. It will be a while before it completes dev and testing and finally becomes available for export.
Besides, MBDA is currently upgrading the Scalp itself based on feedback from the Ukraine War. (France also wants to replace US components in the missile to get around ITAR restrictions)
The company will not want to jeopardize demand for Scalp by introducing a new weapon just yet.
I still expect some amount to be bought, as forces like diversity of different sources.
Rampage is an israeli air launched Rocket, i don't think it can be compared.
Stratus has two variants. Brahmos NG may be equivalent to the super sinic variant, but the lucrative thing about stratus is its have stealtg subsonic variant probably an advance variant of scalp. Definitely IAF will opt that.
Like I said role equivalent. Capabilities that Rampage, Brahmos-Ng & LR-SOW provide will be similar to Hammer XLR and Stratus.
The IAF has already chosen the Israeli Ice Breaker as its next-gen stealthy subsonic Alcm. So there may not be room for another missile in the same class in its inventory.
Plus, if news about L&T co-producing new Scalp ordered by the IAF is true, it will require an extensive retooling of the assembly line in a short span of time. Before they can recoup the costs.
I'd say we might just continue to build Scalp for our needs long after it is decommissioned by the Euro AFs. Just like we did with the Milan ATGW.
Armed forces like having modest amount of *diverse* foreign weapons, especially for munitions.
I've written about this before. Just to reiterate - GoI / MoD & the IAF have jointly decided to induct as many weapons both desi & imported as possible on our platforms be they desi or imported . Idea is to kill several birds with one stone.
From the PoV of the Tejas it is to give potential clients a whole plethora of weapons to choose from thereby reducing the costs of integrating them later thus reducing the overall CAPEX & OPEX if Tejas was opted for.
The other reason ties in with MII getting these munitions factories to establish their mfg hubs here cater to the IAF needs as well as their own AF's needs & use India as an export hub.
The third reason is we don't have to face a Kargil like situation where the French & Israelis charged us an arm & a leg to integrate LGBs onto the Mirage 2000s especially since we're going up against China & to a lesser extent Paxtan later this decade.
This move gives us much needed redundancy.
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Fair points. However, who knows what the French will decide to do. They dragged their feet on the integration of Spice 2000 (and likely the Litening LDP) on the IAF Rafale to make way for their Hammer + Talios combo.
Plus their weapons are niche in that they are produced in much smaller quantities compared to say, the Americans (JSOW or JASSMs). This makes them very expensive.
So much so that when it came time to use them the IAF chose not to ( French-origin Matra BGL LGB in Kargil). They bought Israeli bombs instead.
That isn't much of a problem. If the IAF is interested, the US might be open to integrating JDAM/JSOW/JASSMs on the Rafale.
As you know, our Jags are already fitted with WCMD and Harpoon ASMs.
Was talking about M variant. Do we have any agreement with France to integrate our weapon of choice on m variant?