Indian Navy Developments & Discussions

[Hari Sud]

Read and comment on this article on AIP on German and Spanish submarines:

https://swarajyamag.com/defence/explained-whats-holding-up-indian-navys-project-to-build-submarines-that-can-stay-underwater-longer

 

[Binayak95]

Any of y'all nibbiars know the story of how Navy turned from (((buyer's navy))) to builders navy

All i know is there is a certain Warship Design Bureau and they design the ships + decide which parts to procure or co-develop, and the actual building work goes to some DPSU shipyard.

As of now most of our surface fleet is built in Indian shipyards only based on Navy made designs.

I don't know which Mahatma Admiral created this design bureau however or what was the Navy's motivation considering there is a lot of malai to be had in importing warships from foreign vendors( France, Italy, Germoney, Holland and ofc Roosi all sell warships ).

Navy overall even has a good progression from importing requirement to indeginization, case in point that our INS Vikramaditya which was a modified Soviet "aircraft carrying cruiser" to the current INS Vikrant which is a purpose build Aircraft Carrier.

Out of the 3 only Navy seems to be the serious force about it's requirements, unfortunately it is least likely to see action in war time

Theres this wonderful series of book by Vice Admiral GM Hiranandani called the Transitions series.

Transition to Triumph, Transition to Eminence and Transition to Guardianship that cover the history of the Navy to the 2000s from its origin. Its freely available at the Navy's website. Thats the most detailed and thorough coverage of the topic from the horse's mouth.


In brief though, the IN realised that the govt will GASLIGHT the shit out of the navy's budget thanks to our principal and primary threats being entirely land and air based - and thus from the need to getting the most out of the money that they were allocated, the IN decided from the 50s to build here.

Also good thing was that the british left enough infrastructure in India that basic repair and refurbishing skills were there insitu by default, so you had a small corps of skilled people by default and the navy was tightly integrated with shipyards from the get go.

Then the next smart thing IN did was to send some engineer qualified officers to the british yards for integration into the leander project - and that allowed them to modify on their own without british involvement the last two ships, Taragiri and Vindhyagiri, and give those ships the ability to operate the huge Seaking helos.

This modification was done by the then new Naval Design Bureau whose core team was ex British trained officers who had gone to the british yards to learn on the job.

Then we modified some Type 12 ASW frigates (ex RN) to take Russian missiles and FCR from the Osa class missile boats - which added to the IN's confidence (much to the stupefied shock of both the Brits and the Soviets)

and then P16 (Godavari class) just kicked open the doors to building everything here.

 

[shade2]

Theres this wonderful series of book by Vice Admiral GM Hiranandani called the Transitions series.

Transition to Triumph, Transition to Eminence and Transition to Guardianship that cover the history of the Navy to the 2000s from its origin. Its freely available at the Navy's website. Thats the most detailed and thorough coverage of the topic from the horse's mouth.


In brief though, the IN realised that the govt will GASLIGHT the shit out of the navy's budget thanks to our principal and primary threats being entirely land and air based - and thus from the need to getting the most out of the money that they were allocated, the IN decided from the 50s to build here.

Also good thing was that the british left enough infrastructure in India that basic repair and refurbishing skills were there insitu by default, so you had a small corps of skilled people by default and the navy was tightly integrated with shipyards from the get go.

Then the next smart thing IN did was to send some engineer qualified officers to the british yards for integration into the leander project - and that allowed them to modify on their own without british involvement the last two ships, Taragiri and Vindhyagiri, and give those ships the ability to operate the huge Seaking helos.

This modification was done by the then new Naval Design Bureau whose core team was ex British trained officers who had gone to the british yards to learn on the job.

Then we modified some Type 12 ASW frigates (ex RN) to take Russian missiles and FCR from the Osa class missile boats - which added to the IN's confidence (much to the stupefied shock of both the Brits and the Soviets)

and then P16 (Godavari class) just kicked open the doors to building everything here.

Thanks for the reply, didn't know that IN started this early and it was incremental development from foreign ship modifications to fully domestically designed and built ships

I used to assume that in the 70s-80s they may have decided this and directly started the Warship Design Bureau + domestic shipbuilding since iirc first domestically build ships started from the 90s onwards.

Wish the other two armed forces wings were also like this, pursuing incremental development of whatever they need.