Indian UAV Procurement Programs : General Discussions
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• Approval for 87 MALE drones (ISR + strike-capable): ~₹20,000 crore.
• Support and logistics for 10 years: additional ₹11,000 crore.
• These drones aim for faster induction than the 31 MQ-9B ‘Predator’ HALE drones (₹32,350 crore), deliveries for which will begin 2029-30.
BEL hinted at some archer uav procurement case, is it this same 87 MALE ones or the latter one MALE category? probably 2 separate cases I guess ?
Is this going to be the Adani screwdrivergiri drone that crashed during trials?
Could the indigenous Tapas drone with significantly lower cost though just shy of the altitude requirement that could have been improved with spiral development be afforded the same grace?
Nope, stifle indigenization in the name of "capability". Vishwapappu.
Tapas is not exactly for strike role as of now. ISR is ok, but in contested airspace will get shot down.
Also, some imp subsystems are Israeli, so in a way it is some level of S word giri anyway. Does it matter much at present ?
For ISR against Pak, Tapas will fare just as well as the foreign drone. And against China, neither will be survivable - drone interceptors in the RU/UK theater have been operating at 36000ft for a while.
As far as strike is concerned, Hermes900 isn't capable of that role. And for that, Archer-NG is maturing as well.
OTOH, Tapas offers the following advantages:
- 90% indigenization including a local ICE which makes it vastly more attritable
- In an era of system-on-system warfare, Tapas comes out of the box with the DEAL datalinks. Has the foreign drone even been onboarded on to the battlenet?
- Support for spiral development especially given the babu's habit of creating requirements from copy/pasting foreign military brochures
- At least did not crash while testing
IMHO, Op Sindoor has temporarily pinned Paxtan and given China some pause given how their weapons bungled. This has given some breathing room for India to push hard on all indigenization efforts and build out supply lines before we're all deep in the era of war and this window of opportunity is lost.
On a related note, until India's own HALE RPA is ready, the MQ-9Bs might actually be a decent buy, and may even turn out to be great with the Saab AEW upgrade. Perhaps that could also be used to arm twist the Swedes to do less business with the scoundrel neighbor wrt Erieyes?
Source: trust me bro.
Tapas is a failed project that should have been closed a long time ago. If project cant deliver basic defined specs its failure. They knew about it a decade back but didnt act. Now we have to import. But somehow, they blame the men in uniform. Brainwashed swadeshi only nutjobs are coming to this forum from other places.
It crashed twice!
Dont make up shit. It's not even flying. Delayed by 2 years just for the first flight.
The arbiter will be the user trials. Just like MPATGM vs Javelin, WhAP vs Stryker, etc. I have reason to have faith. Should it meet the requirements, it is in the best interest of the "user" to show partiality towards the indigenous product-- unlike the previously mentioned cases or worse, a transmission-like job being pulled like was done with Arjun.
The failure was one of funding and I am making the case that Op Sindoor provides a reprieve so we do not have to rush.
Further, what it demonstrated is India's sore need for space-based ISR assets which unfortunately is a capability that has a long ramp-up time. The runway to bridge that ISR gap through much more easily ramped up MALE/HALE alternatives will be shorter. Going through the import path which will result in just a small handful being inducted, will do nothing to address the ISR gap and worse stifle local options. What India lacked a decade ago, it has now -- and the "user" can do much to provide the minimum orders that will spur the local industry.
Everybody wants the men in uniform to have the best kit. The import path gets you that only in limited numbers and only during fair-weather.
Learn to differentiate between products under development and products that are off the shelf, that too being shamelessly exported.It crashed twice!
Also you make my case -- see how quickly the foreign failure was ignored while doubling down on local failure.
And it never will if limited budgets keep being diverted by import babus away from local R&D and productionization efforts.
The half-glass-empty types would do well to recognize that both in the government and on forums such as this and others, your import addition will no longer be given a free pass.
ADE is literally saying Tapas failed tto meet requirements. Your vibe based "faith" wont fix that. It's the most incompetent lab in the DRDO.
Since we already had a conflict. Let's wait longer. What kind of logic is this?
No, you don't . You prefer ships without sonars because NPOL promised they would deliver. You prefer billion-dollar submarines without torpedoes because you think waiting for another decade for DRDO to come up with a new design is a good idea. You prefer not to remember how a 15-year delay in delivering LCA caused the loss of so many young pilot lives on Mig-21. You forget HAL is yet to deliver IJT after placing order for LSPs 19 years ago.
Dont shift the goal post. You said it never crashed.
Again, illiterate takes. The CAPX and R&D budgets are different. All recent projects are properly funded according to the DRDO chairman.
Getting the best possible tools to fight for the forces will always override your "faith" based logic.
Selective amnesia of swadasi cult will be disappointment to know import is inevitable if we relay only on DPSUs and DRDO for everything.
I'm sure the foreign drone met full operational requirements as it was falling out of the sky.
BTW I thought GTRE was the most despised amongst DRDO haters? Is it ADE now that GTRE has been basically defunded and UAVs are the need of the hour?
Sure, LCA, IJT, sonar, torpedoes, etc. have had delays and performance gaps. But every one of these "failures" has left behind hard-won domestic capability in aerodynamics, composites, sensors, avionics, propulsion integration, and manufacturing. The early PSLV failures were embarrassing too, but it laid the foundation for Chandrayaan and Aditya for a fraction of the budget of NASA today.
And the Mig-21 crashes? That wasnt caused by the existence of LCA but by decades of import addiction before it, which left no domestic alternative ready. If things weren't abandoned after Marut, blowing capital budgets on MiG/Jaguar/Mirage/etc. that capability would have been built up by today. And folks will still pine after Su-57 and F-35 and things will be repeated with AMCA.
Funding CAPX for imports instead of funding R&D for indigenous systems, is effectively voting against your own industry's growth. Every dollar towards import is a dollar less to grow local industry capacity.
And it is hilarious if you think DRDO is in a position to demand any funding. The less than 1.5% of the total defense budget they're getting now for projects will also be funneled to the import babus.
The Pakistanis and cheenis were both given a bloody nose. Theyre welcome to try again, but i will give even the goat brains more credit. This is the time to seriously evaluate priorities. If Ukraine can build a drone industry when their country looks like the surface of the moon, India can too in the momentary peace it has just bought itself.
More importantly Op Sindoor's success was possible because of the indigenous capability in the mix. And i want India to build on that success.
Every flying object can crash; that's natural and part of the process. Tapas crash as part of development is acceptable as long as it delivers on the promise. Criticism based on facts is not hate. Less evolved beings might have a hard time understanding this.
What does Chandrayaan have to do with the failure of DRDO programs that left services vulnerable? You should learn to argue without shifting goalposts.
Accept failures quickly and support import when needed. We need to ensure that services have the necessary equipment.
CAPX means a modernization budget that is 70% allocated to Indian companies, not imports. And ~4% of defence budget goes towards DRDO. At least make some sense in arguments.
From the latest leaked lab reports on X, Tapas and other drone development continues to move forward. Now is the time to fund them properly so we don't keep expecting a $2.5B dev. class engine with a $250M budget. Since you're very understanding that even the great foreign maal isn't perfect, could you kindly extend that courtesy to domestic drones, O greatest of all evolved beings?
Sure, anything expended during Op Sindoor should get restored quickly through the emergency procurement route ASAP to get readiness levels back up -- but ONLY to minimum thresholds.
The following point appears to be repeatedly getting lost. India has just taken out Pakistan's C&C, airbases, radars, MRO equipment junked, multiple birds including AWACS junked, its nuclear doctrine has been flushed down the toilet -- they are naked and not in any position to prosecute shit. China which provides 80% of Pak's h/w deploys the same HQ9s at their border; they are scratching their heads right now if they need to shift their best kits from the eastern flank and whether even that will work. India has just bought something precious -- TIME!!
Look up analogy in the dictionary.
The PIB FY24 procurement envelope (see- https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2035748) puts complete imports at 25% of the total outlay which results at ~$8B.
And this is just the lower bound. With the rest, with 40-50% of the ~$12.6B allowed to be non IC, puts the upper bound at ~$14.3B
Out of the 3.5% of defense budget given to DRDO, I was specifically referring to project expenditures (see-- https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2035748) which is ~$1.5B. But okay, let's add pensions and the rest which makes it ~$2.7B
So in FY24, that's $2.7B that builds national capability and all of it goes back into the local economy compared to $8B - $14.3B of lost forex to trade some "capability" at the cost of lost sovereignty.
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BTW, I am not a DRDO/DPSU diehard. I would just as well prefer private enterprise like NewSpace build some ISR variant of the Abhimanyu. But no whitelabeling and no IKEA assembly.
And I fully recognize that some capability is significantly further out which will need to be substituted by imports. But I do not think the drone industry up to MALEs fits this bill.
Ya follow some twitter clickbaiters and give gyan here. I didn't expect anything better. Tapas has been running for 15 years now. Seven years ago, the ADE chief was saying it's not possible to achieve the desired requirement with a twin-boom design. It is a fundamentally flawed design that cannot be fixed by simply throwing money at it. Thats why they are going for Archer-NG.
Sure, let's chill out for now if you say so.How many times do i have to prove you wrong?
Tapas never crashed - Wrong
R&D budget comes from CAPX budget - Wrong
DRDO budget is 1.5% of defence budget - Wrong
Do you have the decency to acknowledge it? No. Just blabber by shifting goalposts. You sound like a gen z kid who better be on forums like reddit or twitter. Bye.
The entire DPSU ecosystem learned to produce things because they did screwdriwer giri with public money. But somehow standard is different for private sectorm, they will always have to do R&D prove themselfs first.
yeah, if we cant build a drone locally that cant operate against pakistan then there is little or no hope left competing against china. Frankly buying super expensive weapons to fight against pakistan is self defeating ,cost/performance ratio is way too high. It would be ridiculous to spend $70 billion and get the same result of a country which spends $20-25 billion.
should cancel it now & save a lot of trouble later. US will certainly take the money & string us along. They have done that against pakistan for F16's and not expecting the same treatment against us would be nothing short of sheer stupidity.
It's literally posted on this forum-- Ghatak and Rustom Indigenous UAV Programs
And I was referencing the last 18hr LE AF-9 flight
Spoon fed the link to GoI and PRS research where the data comes and you're still having difficulty:
> Out of this allocation, a major share of Rs 13,208 crore is allocated for capital expenditure.
Yet you have no single argument that local research is given at best $2.7B compared to the $8B+ for imports funding foreign research.
Exactly! And Tapas doesn't need to be fielded at Leh. There are plenty of other border areas where it can be put into service where it can be shy of that 30k ft ceiling requirement, and help gain valuable data including with the jayem engine which then feeds into the next Tapas2/ArcherNG/etc SETB and Ytail designs... some other folks on this forum can't fathom how iterative spiral development works and instead blow the budget on imports.
Tapas failed to achieve the desired performance of 24 hour endurance and altitude. It's time to focus on follow-on developments like Archer-NG. Let's hope that the services will place some nominal order.
The import of MALE UAVs is a direct result of the failure of this project. There is no point in squabbling over it.
So, here is what happening with high end UAV procurement.
In 2023, CDS ordered studies on major military platforms used by all three services. The study recommend to acquire 31 MQ-9B High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) UAVs and 155 Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAVs.
Currently, 31 MQ-9B HALE drones are under order to be delivered by 2030.
Now to MALE procurement:
In 2023, CDS ordered studies on major military platforms used by all three services. The study recommend to acquire 31 MQ-9B High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) UAVs and 155 Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAVs.
Currently, 31 MQ-9B HALE drones are under order to be delivered by 2030.
Now to MALE procurement:
- Under EP, Army procured 4 Heron Mk2 and 2 Hermes Starliner each by AF and Navy. Currently operational.
- Tapas, 10 to be ordered by Navy and Airforce.
- Tender is our for procurement of 87 MALE UAV under local production with 60% localisation. DAC clearance last week.
- India currently operate around 70+ older Heron UAVs which were suppose to be upgraded under project cheetah. The original idea to weaponize was dropped to reduce costs. Army aviation operates around 30 of these.
Unlocking UAV making system: 2 players to get Rs 30,000 crore order
The Defence Acquisition Council has cleared a ₹30,000 crore deal to procure 87 MALE drones, fostering indigenous UAV manufacturing.The ₹30,000 crore deal to supply long-range drones to armed forces which has recently been cleared by the defence ministry is set to unlock the UAV manufacturing ecosystem in the country, with two players set to split the order, creating distinct production lines that can cater for larger orders in the future, besides exports.
Defence Acquisition Council recently gave the the go-ahead to procure 87 medium altitude long endurance (MALE) drones that are to be made indigenously. The drones will carry out tasks such as reconnaissance, electronic warfare and precision missile strikes.
The armed forces will shortly come out with an expression of interest, inviting Indian companies to bid for the contract, after which trials will be carried out before reaching the final stage of commercial negotiations.
Sources said a key decision taken at DAC is to ensure that two of the bidding players get a part of the contract. The final order - estimated to be in excess of ₹30,000 crore - will be split between the two lowest bidders. Sources said the split will be in the 64:36 ratio, with the lowest bidder getting the bigger share.
This would ensure that India would have two separate manufacturing MALE lines, giving the flexibility to ramp up production at short notice if needed. The bidding companies will need to ensure that aerostructures and main parts are made locally and even the engine for the drone is assembled and tested in India. Importantly, even the components for electro optical payloads and satellite communications need to be made indigenously, ensuring supply chain stability and security of the most critical military use components.