I the shade, hereby attest that I have only roasted the Genrol & Marshol, not the two guys you have tagged above.
Genrol & Marshol deserve all the roasting they can get.
Look at based Admirals, they build their own ships, collaborate with DPSUs for anything else they may need, all G&M do is stone-wall and force multiple revisions, then complain about delay and "increased weight", only to make their situation so bad viz enemies so that they can force GoI into ((( emergency procoorments )))
Genrol & Marshol behave like "customer", Admiral behaves like client of shipyard and collaborator for DPSU/DRDO.
That is the difference, this is a financially-challenged country, G&M should make the best of what they are allocated from both DPSU and Private Sector instead of optimising for what foreign imported toy gives the maximum favors and kickbacks
Our country has financial issues due to bribe-scams everywhere in country, We want latest overbudgeted household items whose many features we don't use but not for defence items.
Army Generals, Navy Admirals, AF Chiefs are just operators, not R&D people.
Requirement should be generated as per latest technology.
Regarding cost, more quality = more price, be it phone, car, bike, laptop, clothes, or defence products.
But unlike Capitalist system or a very tight Communist one, we adopted Socialist mixed economy to balance cost, profit.
IAF is operator, has around 140,000 active personel(all roles) & 140,000 reserve(all roles), 1000s of pilots, engineers, technicians, mechanics.
ADA/DRDO is designer, has 1000+ engineers & scientists.
MoD is approver & fund raiser.
HAL is producer, has 20,000+ tech+non-tech employees - IDK how many engineers, technicians, other tech employees.
Now, 1 problem is that all these 10s of 1000s of employees above would have different observation & opinion bcoz none of them are complete experts on all aspects - technology, finance, logistics, production, operation, maintenanc, etc. So we need a joint task force of experts of individual domains. IDK if MoD/CCS has it.
We have IITs, NITs, IISc, top AICTE acredited A-grade colleges, thinktanks like CAPS (Center for Air Power Studies), IDSA (Institute for Defence Studies & Analysis), CENJOWS (CENter for JOint Warfare Studies), Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis, etc.
People are crying for employment.
So HAL needs to expand facilities
MoD needs to give more funding for R&D
ADA/DRDO have done many good things like RAM, RAS, avionics, etc, but need to be more future oriented to close gap with West w.r.t. design.
IAF should be ready for testing & training.
Private firms & startups will be needed to absorb population into industry.
Hence i don't think India will have any problem affording at least all 5gen jets bcoz 5gen characteristics are 35yrs old now. Only putting latest internal components in obsolete airframe of 4gen jets might sound cheap/economical today but will be liability again after 2 decades like MiG-21 bcoz these jets will stay till 2080.
There are statups in Aerospace, covered by YT channels.
If Tata, Ambani, Adani won't invest in future oriented R&D then we might see some startups in aeronautics also.
Why we can't catch up to them? 1st thing we should stop immatured personal comments.
Just assume we are giving presentation in seminar in front of 100/1000 people.
