XBradTC

Like a lot of countries, India wants the best weapons it can afford. But ideological and financial concerns mean there are a lot of things it won’t buy from the United States or Europe. That pretty much leaves, well, Russia.

India has been a big buyer of Russian weapons for 50 years. Those haven’t been easy years for New Delhi. India’s defense contracts with Russia have consistently suffered delays and cost overruns. And the resulting hardware doesn’t always work.

Of all India’s Russian procurement woes, none speak more to the dysfunctional relationship between the two countries than the saga of INS Vikramaditya. In the early 2000s, India went shopping for a new aircraft carrier. What followed was a military-industrial nightmare.

via Don’t Buy Your Aircraft Carrier from Russia | RealClearDefense.

Back when this deal went down, a lot of smart Navy blogs like NepLex and CDR Salamander (and the plethora of commenters there) suggested the Navy should have cut a deal with India. Gift them one of our decommissioned oil-fired carriers, and then pr0fit from the almost inevitable sale of F-18s to India.

Given how poorly India came out of this deal with Russia, that idea looks better and better.

India would have benefited, and the US could have gone a long way to forging stronger ties with the second most populous country in the world, which, oh, by the way, happens to be a nice counterbalance to China.