Ajai Shukla
Joined: 06 Oct 2004
Posts: 11
Location: New Delhi
Posted: 06 Oct 2004 Post subject:
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Dear all,
Someone pointed me towards the Bharat Rakshak forum as one where there was much heartburn over my NDTV story on the signing of the JV between DENEL and BEML. I normally don’t respond to viewers but I’ll make an exception here.
I don’t know any of you and I’m not sure whether you even know each other, but let me start by introducing myself. I’m NDTV’s Defence Editor, an ex Colonel in the armoured corps, who retired after commanding Hodson’s Horse, a crack armoured regiment equipped with T-72s. I have been a tank man for 22 years and a graded instructor in tank automotives and electronics. I have participated extensively in the Arjun field trials.
This is not to say that I know a great deal more about armour philosophy, design, ethos, operations and tactics than anyone here ever will; all I’m saying is that you may be a bit smug and premature in assuming that every journalist is a “jackass†(MT Singha), “sensationalist†(JCage), or is engaged in “subterfuge†and “double crossing†(Raju).
Furthermore, I am in first hand touch with people in the army, many of them my course-mates and buddies, who operate the systems that you all only read and hear about. I often visit the ordnance factories where equipment is manufactured, sometimes attend the trials of key platforms and in any case keep myself informed by chatting to those who are involved in trials. My views on equipment are shaped by how the equipment is shaping up, not by notions of patriotism.
For those who like to brand as “Pakis†or “Chinese†all critics of Indian weapons procurement programmes, I would only ask: who’s anti-national? People who try to ensure that 78,000 crore rupees of Indian money buys the country robust and effective defence, or those who don’t give a damn where it is spent; everything’s fine, as long as the middlemen are making money? Like RajeevT who is “praying that this deal be passed.â€
Finally, I don’t need to prove my nationalist credentials in some website chatroom. I’ve already done that in live operations for India.
Now on to the issue. Why don’t we need the DENEL-Arjun hybrid SP gun?
First: India hasn’t fought a war in thirty-three years and is unlikely to fight one again soon. What it urgently needs is not an expensive, heavy SP gun that is optimized for strike corps operations in desert terrain. Instead it needs larger numbers of towed 155mm artillery that can be used anywhere along the border, including for their most likely employment task : punitive fire assaults across the LOC. The Kargil conflict (not war, a limited skirmish involving less than two divisions is not a war) illustrated the value of dual-use, towed artillery that can support both strike corps thrusts as well as mountain division operations. So a heavy SP gun is a poor choice for India to begin with.
Second: Nowhere in the world, NOWHERE, has a viable SP artillery platform been made by mating an artillery gun turret with a tank chassis. Like tank design, SP gun design is all about integration; about optimizing space, systems and electronics. Almost every system in a tank, whether NBC protective, radio, night vision, gun control, you-name-it, is spread over both turret and chassis. So when you get a turret from South Africa, having ripped out half the systems that should go into the chassis, and mate it with an Indian chassis, you are basically riveting pipes, wires, hydraulics etc all over the place without any design having gone into it. The number of things that could fail in the long run are too numerous to recount.
Third : JCage, you argued that I contradicted my own story in which some army officer “noted that the Arjun tank had cleared all trialsâ€. Wrong. Some army guy saying it doesn’t mean that I am saying it. I have consistently argued that the Arjun tank has serious drawbacks; if you know someone in the armoured corps, ask him. The first few series production tanks handed over to the user unit have all been handed back. They all had serious problems.
Fourth : There are serious issues of strategic mobility that will dog any inter-theatre movement of the proposed SP gun. It’s not just about weight… though that will be a major problem in moving a 50-ton-plus gun across a country where many bridges are no stronger than class 40. The bigger issue is about size. The Arjun already sticks out on either side of a railway wagon which means that it cannot be taken on any line that has a platform on the side. After mating the Bhim turret, you will also have height problems, which means that the railways will have to give Over-dimension Clearance (ODC) each time the gun moves by rail.
Fifth : The DENEL gun, thanks to the single vendor situation that we have gotten ourselves into, is being sold to us at an exorbitant price. The cost of a single SP gun will be 20 crores plus. That’s a shocking price, in a country where the most modern MBT --- traditionally the most expensive platform --- comes for 9 crores. Why are we in this situation? I leave it to you.
Sixth : Your questions on artillery guns firing anti-tank rounds. Every artillery battery in the Indian army is trained to fire, with guns level, at tanks attacking their gun position. It’s called “firing through open sightsâ€. The shell of an artillery gun has a far slower muzzle velocity than that of a tank gun (T-72, 1800 metres per second, the highest muzzle velocity in the world), but it’s considerably heavier. A 155 mm HE round ploughing into a tank at 1500 metres would send its turret flying. Even a 130 mm HE round would knock out the tank. OK, Nandai? And Singha… RAP is of no use in firing over open sights. The rocket would not kick in soon enough to make a difference to the muzzle velocity.
Seventh : Rajkatare, the Indian armed forces have a long and illustrious history of having unsuitable weaponry shoved down their throats. The Vijayanta tank is just one example. The Bofors scandal, for those old enough to have followed it, revealed that the selection can be manipulated without a problem. It was just our good fortune that it’s a great gun.
There’s more… but I shall leave it here for now. Watch NDTV; my news may not be politically correct, but at least it’ll be correct.
Best regards,
ajai
