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Posted on 12/04/2007 3:38:18 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Gorshkov deal at sea
Jatin Gandhi, Hindustan Times
New Delhi, December 04, 2007
Indian Navy Chief Admiral Sureesh Mehta said on Monday that the government should neither pay more money to the Russians for refurbishing aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov, nor pull out of the deal. He said that the contact signed by Russia quotes a fixed price and it should be honoured.
Russia has asked for $1.2 billion over and above the contracted price of $1.5 billion, almost doubling the agreed cost.
"It is a fixed price contract and they should honour it,” Admiral Mehta said, while ruling out pulling out of the deal. "The ship is our property. We have paid them almost $500 million already. There is no question of pulling out,” he said.
Admiral Mehta said Russia’s attitude raised vital questions about India’s partnership with the Russians. “Where is our relationship with Russia going,” he asked, adding that India had signed the deal with Russia at a time when they were going through a crunch. “They said give us work. I would like to believe we helped them in their time of need.”
With the shipyard getting more work and the Russians striking it rich with oil prices rising, the Navy Chief accused them of going slow on the project. His tough talk on Russia comes ahead of the visit of a high-level Russian team for renegotiating the price. The issue had also figured during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s recent visit to Russia for a summit with President Vladimir Putin.
Under the Indo-Russian inter-governmental contract signed in 2004, Russia was to deliver the carrier by August 2008 for $1.5 billion. Apart from seeking a hike that violates the contract, Russia has indicated that the carrier cannot be delivered to India before 2012. The Naval Chief said India was trying to persuade the Russians to work faster on the project. "If they put enough people on the job, the naval carrier will be commissioned by late 2010 or early 2011,” he said.
Navy comes clean on N-sub
For years, the Navy denied the project even existed. But on Monday, Admiral Mehta said India’s nuclear submarine — the Advanced Technology Vessel (ATV) — would be commissioned into the fleet in two years time. “The project is somewhere near completion,” he said.
The Russian government is a bunch of gangsters. India deserves whatever it gets if it is going to sign multi-Billion dollar contracts with gangsters.
And the 1.2 Billion dollar price increase would not be the end of it. India should try to negotiate a deal to take the ship as-is.
Well that bunch of gangsters are the only ones who offer you a 20 year old mid-size aircraft carrier or nuke-subs for lease.Kind of a hard choice.
Sounds right to me.
A deal’s a deal. It’s not India’s fault that the Russians underpriced the thing.
India needs to stand pat and make the Russian’s pay. After all, they have all that nice oil money, don’t they?
& those gangsters do know how to catch you by the Ba**s.
The U.S. Navy and it’s defense contractors have about 70 years of institutional knowledge in the building, servicing, and sailing of aircraft carriers - the most complex military system in history. If will be impossible for any other nation to approach our level of expertise in this sector. France and Russia have both tried and have failed miserably....
“France and Russia have both tried and have failed miserably....”
Most humorously, the French.
True enough, but my point is simple. The Russians signed a contract with the Indians for a birdfarm at a certain price.
If the Russians can’t deliver the ship, as contracted, within that price, the Indians should either demand the Russians pay the extra or give the money back. That is just simple business.
There is rumors abounding that either the Indians or certain parties within the United States are touting the USS Kitty Hawk for sale to India after her decommissioning from the USN.
Whether or not it would be a good idea to sell the Kitty to the Indians, it is definitely certain that it would she would be a much better bargain, whatever the cost, than the Gorshkov.
The Kitty is a proven weapon’s system with more than 40 years of honorable service behind her. She has stood the test of time and served in all oceans of the world.
I actually like the Russian STOAL concept and think we should be building our own. But even though they thought of it, they haven’t gotten it working right yet. We could do better.
The Indian navy chief has already ruled out the Kitty Hawk-it’s twice as old as the Gorshkov & irrespective of it’s currrent condition,won’t serve as long.Besides,it’s twice the size,with over twice the crewing requirement.
About STOBAR,well everything I have read about it puts it at a disadvantage against catapults barring lower costs.
Yeah I got the totals all here:
Labor, Materials, Overhead, GSA, Profit...
OPPPS! I forgot the Russian Mafia...
That’ll 1.5 Billion more please.
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Obviously there is not substitute for a full deck, catapult-launched, arrested-landing carrier. The laughable attempt by France to create a pocket version of the concept has shown how silly it is.
That being said, a STOAL carrier, Short Take-Off, Arrested Landing type carrier COULD do a lot of things well that do not require quite the global reach that the USN requires.
People say that STOAL launched aircraft cannot carry enough ordnance to make their sorties worthwhile. I say there are a number of ways around that including RATO (Rocket assisted take-off), in-flight refueling from shore based aircraft, and even UAV tankers.
In fact, since UAV seems to be the coming thing in aircraft evolution anyhow, a STOAL capable version of a Hawkeye could be built carrying nothing but onboard electronics data-linked to the carrier. It would be expensive, but minus the need to carry 14 some-odd crewmembers it could be built a lot lighter, thus longer-ranged than a Hawkeye.
Taking the concept further, a UAV anti-sub version of the S-3A, data-linked to the carrier, with onboard sonabouys and torpedoes could plug what is now a major gap is USN fleet ASW capability.
Once all the bugs were worked out, a STOAL carrier built to USN specs would probably cost a third of the cost of a Nimitz class birdfarm, and when combined with a well thought out battlegroup, would give the USN a HUGE flexibility boost.
Will any of the above happen? HELL NO!
The USN is run by carrier pilots at all the important levels, except for the bubbleheads, (and they might as well be in a separate Navy) and pilots think the only purpose of the Navy to give them big flat ships to land and take off from, plus spiffy aircraft they can zoom around in.
Hard to play Tom Cruise with your balls clicking as you stride down corridors when all you do is sit at a console on deck and push a joystick around.
Of the Indians can demand to take possession of the ship as is. They can tow it to Mubai and do the work themselves. They will learn more that way, anyway. The way they are going, this ship is not going to be a useful weapons platform at the end of the day, so they might as well gain some experience from the process.
Here is a concept for the Indians. The problem with carriers is that the aircraft have a high top speed, but need to take off and land slowly. All of the heroics are designed to increase that take off/landing speed as much as possible, so the aircraft design can be optimized as much as possible for high speed flight.
But what if you forget about supersonic flight, or even near-supersonic flight? A carrier capable of launching large numbers of tough turbo-prop fighters, attack aircraft and maritime patrol aircraft with a top speed of about 300 mph could be a very useful military asset for providing ASW coverage for your fleet and for power projection against many lesser powers. It would not be able to take on a US carrier task force, but what can, these days?
If you look at the problem, you have aircraft flying at 800 mph and missiles flying at 3000 mph. The speed differential between a F-18 and a missile and a slow turboprop and a missile is more or less the same. For missile engagements, it is more important that the aircraft be numerous, have good coordination and radar, and be as stealthy as possible. These requirements can be dealt with much more readily in a package designed with a 300 mph top speed, which gives you more payload, a more convenient shape, longer endurance, lower unit cost and much simpler maintenance.
I know the military is in love with things that go fast, but there may be a place for a different approach. Designing a carrier around a 80 knot stall speed would be a much, much simpler operation.
Lots of good points there. Let’s take my last post and yours, design a birdfarm, sell it to the Pentagon, and make lots of money!
If navalized UAV's advance as rapidly as they might, you could see an experiment using an LHD/LHA platform like Jimmy Carter's "Sea Control Ship" program. If successful you might start to get purpose-built UAV-carriers for ASW & over-the-horizon air defense.
The angled flight deck is handy for simultaneous take off/landing operations, so I would keep that. But something along the lines of the Essex class would be about the right size, IMHO.
I'll believe it when I see it.
US Navy ships, especially aircraft carriers, are very heavily constructed and there are a lot of classified engineering details in their design and fabrication based on lessons learned going all the way back to WWII. Heck, even the details on the deliberate sinkings of WWII carriers post-war are still classified.
Doubtful we are going to hand that knowledge over to the Indians or anyone else.
My feeling is that Kitty Hawk will be stripped of hazardous materials and sunk in very deep waters.
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