New Delhi: Retired Commodore Jaideep Maolankar was the first ever to have successfully landed a locally designed Light Combat Aircraft (Navy) or LCA(N) prototype on the flight deck of INS Vikramaditya, the Indian Navy (IN)’s sole operational aircraft carrier, in January 2020. He is also one of the few military experts to offer a relatively objective and levelheaded assessment of the projected capabilities of the newly commissioned INS Vikrant.
“It’s all a matter of perspective,” Commodore Maolankar declared on the Mojo Story digital news channel soon after Vikrant’s September 2 commissioning at Kochi, injecting a refreshing ‘laconic reality check’ into the breathless hysteria in official, military and media circles that greeted the carrier’s induction into service.
However few, if any, of these aforementioned worthies even remotely mentioned that Vikrant would not be operationally deployable till end-2023, and that too with a combat air arm comprising deficient Russian MiG-29K/KUB fighters. Furthermore, these combat aircraft would soon be supplemented, and eventually replaced by an imported French or US-origin fighter, acquired as an ‘interim measure’, for an estimated $6-8 billion. Thereafter, the latter too will then be astonishingly switched by yet another platform – the under-development LCA(N) also known as the twin-engine LCA(N) deck-based fighter (TEDBF) – that is not likely to be ready before 2030-32, if not later.
“For everybody who does not fly, these ships (like Vikrant) are projected as massive, the biggest, the largest and the something-est,” Maolankar matter-of-factly stated. Even their names are grandiose, three-syllable names, said the veteran aviator and top former naval test pilot. Carriers, he said, bring conventional fighters to the fight for combat, power projection or humanitarian tasks – and from that perspective, Vikrant was a ‘modest carrier’.
“Such an accurate and down-to-earth assessment was at variance with the frenzied reaction to Vikrant’s commissioning by a cross-section of serving and veteran naval officers, other military and defence officials, analysts and electronic and print media reporters,” said a senior security officer. Commodore Maolankar’s credentials as one of the Navy’s veteran aviators make his sobering assessments all the more credible and mature, he added, declining to be named.
Earlier, Commodore Maolankar had been equally forthright about the ongoing LCA(N) programme, at a juncture when the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the country’s entire military-industrial complex were crowing about its under-powered prototypes, with myriad other shortcomings. “With limited human and financial resources allocated to it, developing the LCA(N) is a mountainous task,” Maolankar had candidly declared at the annual Naval Aviation Seminar in Delhi in May 2015. He further stated that the LCA(N) was merely an adjunct to the Indian Air Force (IAF)’s LCA Tejas programme, and also that there was little or no synergy between the many fighter designers tasked with its development.
“Such platforms cannot be advanced in isolation,” he had added, attracting unfair and uncalled-for public castigation from senior Navy officers at the seminar for iterating a reality, which many who were present and in the know, timidly declined to voice.
But soon after, the commodore was vindicated by no less than the former IN Chief of Staff Admiral Sunil Lanba, when he announced in December 2016 that in its present form, the LCA(N) was ‘overweight’ and did not meet the operational capability required of a fighter by the Navy. At the time the navy chief had declared that the single-engine LCA(N) – powered by the General Electric F404-GE-IN20 turbofan engine – did not fulfil the IN’s ‘thrust-to-weight’ requirement for taking off with an adequate fuel and weapons load from an aircraft carrier’s deck.
Consequently, in January 2017 the Navy issued a global request for information with the intent of importing 57 multi-role carrier-borne fighters (MRCBF) – recently reduced to 26 – as a ‘stop gap’ tactic till the TEDBF was ready. Both the MRCBF procurement and the TEBDF remain works in progress.
Nevertheless, Maolankar reiterated on Mojo Story last week that the necessity of locally developing naval fighters as import substitutes was simply not an option for multiple reasons – of which vendor hesitancy in weapons and technology transfer to India topped the list.
Meanwhile, a comparison between Vikrant and the second-hand 44,750-tonne Vikramaditya (brave as the sun) is instructive. The latter’s commissioning too was beset by delays, cost overruns and numerous obstacles.
Originally built as a Kiev-class Aviation Cruiser by Nikolayev South (now Black Sea Shipyard, Ukraine) Vikramaditya took nine years to refurbish in Russia, eventually arriving at INS Kadamba or naval base Karwar, on India’s south-west coast in early 2014. The refurbishment and upgrade of the 22-deck carrier at the FSUE Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk, northern Russia cost $2.3 billion, a nearly three-fold increase from the $974 million agreed upon earlier as the cost of its refit.
This fire-gutted carrier was originally commissioned as Baku in Ukraine in 1987, before becoming Admiral Gorshkov with the Russian Navy four years later, before it was decommissioned in 1996. Its retrofit under the IN’s Project 11430 began in 2005 and included fabricating 234 hull sections and replacing and adding 2,500 tons of new steel as well as converting the warship from a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) configuration to a short take-off but arrested recovery (STOBAR) layout with a ski jump. Vikrant too has a similar flight deck configuration.
INS Vikramaditya at sea. Photo: Indian Navy
A comparison with China’s progress
Aircraft carrier operations represent the apex of flexible naval power projection, and nuclear rivals China and India have placed these platforms at the centre of their maritime force development plans in their respective strategies of ‘dominating’ the strategic Indian Ocean Region. By comparison, China is relatively new to carrier operations, having had to start from scratch in the mid-1980s with neither naval aircraft, vessel, training pipeline, or operational experience to build upon.
Starting in 1985, China began by acquiring four retired carriers to analyse and study in its quest to launch such platforms for the Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN): the British-built HMAS Melbourne from Australia and three ex-Soviet carriers – Minsk, Kiev and Varyag. The last named underwent an extensive refit, to emerge as the Liaoning, the PLAN’s first operational carrier with 40 embarked fighters and helicopters and one which, in turn, served as a basis for China’s subsequent design iterations for similar platforms. Presently, other than Varyag, the PLAN operates the follow-on Shandong and Fujian, which is being kitted out. Naval analysts anticipate China operating a total of five or six such carriers by 2030, each one an improvement on the previous platforms.
India, by contrast, began operating carriers in 1961, with INS Vikrant (ex-HMS Hercules), a 16,000-tonne Majestic-class carrier followed by INS Virat (ex-HMS Hermes), a 23,900-tonne Centaur-class platform with VTOL Sea Harrier’s that was retired in early 2017.
IN officials maintain that the force’s ‘institutional’ maturity, experience, and knowledge provide it with a decisive operational edge over rival navies, including China’s. The IN is also one of the world’s few navies to have operated CATOBAR [Catapult Assisted Take-Off But Arrested Recovery], VTOL and STOBAR platforms, which not only gives it higher aviation skills, but also advanced carrier tactics, techniques and procedures.
Other officers, however, cautioned against such assertiveness, arguing that past performance was no guarantee of future success. They advised that it would be a grave error to underestimate the PLAN’s ability to telescope the basics of carrier aviation within a shorter timescale, and counselled the IN to adopt a more pragmatic and rationale approach to capability building