Indian Private Defence Sector

[Bhartiya Sainik]

After AMCA, will the next satisfactorily "Advanced" fighter, hopefully next-gen, hopefully multi-role, hopefully highly survivable, hopefully globally competing, come from Private Sector?
Can Tata, Reliance, Adani, etc assemble a team of IITians, NITians & experienced professionals & challenge ADA+DRDO+HAL?
Same thing for Army & Navy too.

 

[Hari Sud]

The private sector wants government money to play together with free land and water and low interest loan as working capital then only they will enter the defence sector. That is too much to ask…..

 

[fire starter]

View: https://x.com/AdithyaKM_/status/1886234199742623933?t=BV2pzhmqLqnBkcXs3Hb89w&s=19

 

[ezsasa]

View: https://x.com/AdithyaKM_/status/1886234199742623933?t=BV2pzhmqLqnBkcXs3Hb89w&s=19

after this phase of drone technology demonstrations are thru, doesn't it make sense that forces take a call on standardising ejector racks across the board for all drone munitions?

would be one less variable for future drone munitions designers, else each vendor will be coming up with their own rack design specific to their own munitions.

unlike other A2G munitions, there is no foreign global MIL-SPEC that needs to be adapted to in this case.

 

[Bhartiya Sainik]

The private sector wants government money to play together with free land and water and low interest loan as working capital then only they will enter the defence sector. That is too much to ask…..

To some extent w.r.t. land, that has already happened. AFAIK, at least Tata, Reliance have got not just land but also hangars up & running beside airport(s) already. If we take example of MIHAN (Multi-modal International Hub At Nagpur), we can see how big area has been alloted already for those industries adjacant to the airport.
Such could be the case at some other airfields also across the country, IDK.
Although these are for civillian/passenger/cargo aircrafts, but the START has already happened.





Now the question is of money. No country's govt. allows private firms to independently sell weapons abroad for obvious reasons.
Our private companies don't wan't to loose money in competition like Lockheed Vs Northrop Vs Boeing. Many big companies got sold out like McDonnel Douglas, etc.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Former_defense_companies_of_the_United_States)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_aircraft_manufacturers_of_the_United_States)
So the best solution could be joint partnership in design, production, performance, risk, accountability, profit, export, etc.

 

[Ayan Barat]

The private sector wants government money to play together with free land and water and low interest loan as working capital then only they will enter the defence sector. That is too much to ask…..

Things are in no way as nuanced as you're saying Sir. They're are extremely straightforward, working on pretty much the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest. If government run companies will lag behind then they'd be mercilessly massacred by private players and vice-versa.

Below are two 0.32ACP pistols.
One of these is made by a 200 years old government run company that get money allocated to it every year in budget and had crores in revenue. Other one is made by a small firm, headed by a single Chap about whom no-one knew anything a couple of years back.

 

[Baseplate]

View: https://www.reddit.com/r/diyelectronics/comments/1ffjpc1/repairing_peltor_comtac_xp_internal_cabling_has_3/?utm_source=embedv2&utm_medium=post_embed&utm_content=whitespace

All the tech inside a pair of peltors ,

if indian companies can't make even this , its so over

 

[Ayan Barat]

View: https://www.reddit.com/r/diyelectronics/comments/1ffjpc1/repairing_peltor_comtac_xp_internal_cabling_has_3/?utm_source=embedv2&utm_medium=post_embed&utm_content=whitespace

All the tech inside a pair of peltors ,

if indian companies can't make even this , its so over

Most of time I yap about tech and manufacturing so let's dabble a bit in economics today

Why do we buy a certain product instead of any of its competitors?

Most of the times we buy something because there's a value proposition to it. Where it provides
• same value as others but at reduced cost; or
• comparatively more value at a close price.

We can definitely make something like this but the more important question is would we be able to exploit any of the above propositions?

• Whoever takes the initiative gets a first mover's advantage which ultimately translates to economies of scale resulting in them making their products extremely cost effective. And this deters new entrants as they can't compete by providing the same values as their cost would be too high because they need to account for their fixed cost too, which older firms have amortized long ago and now more or less just needs to bother about the variable cost.

• So providing same value at a lower cost is not possible hence the only option left is providing more values at a slightly more cost. This can be done in two ways; one, you make the customer think that you're providing more values by using gimmicks. This is something you'd find in mid-range smartphone category where they use all kind of gibberish like "Beast Mode 2.3/UltraCool/69MP camera" to differentiate their phones from the competition because at its core a FakeMe and a BlueMi are pretty much the same value at the same cost. But these don't work much in aerospace and defence where everything is judged on their performance and not gimmicks, so here comes the second way; innovation. You try to come up with something so radical that it "breaks" the cost-value proposition.

tl;dr: If I try to match the price of this ComTac then my quality would suffer and if try to match its quality then my price would rise. Only way to best this paradox is if I innovate something that lets me drive down the price drastically compared to the quality or something that's groundbreaking in terms of technology like say a bone conducting ComTac with active noise cancellation.