Before you start reading this stuff, a warning
1: I’m not a soldier, sailor or flier.
2: I might be wrong.
3: You might call me un-patriotic, but that’s no me.
I’m as red-blooded as all other Indian are. But sometimes, the eternal optimist(that’s me) get too pessimistic. Any newspaper-reading citizen of this billion-strong country of mine will know that we’ve inked the deal for the ’’Admiral Gorshkhov’’. We’re paying 6, ooo crores for what? scrap-metal?
The ’’ Admiral Gorshkhov’’ is a Kiev-class aircraft carrier. Commissioned during the Cold-war as the ’’ Baku ’’, a boiler plant explosion made it un-usable before being actually used. The Navy sent it to some Alaskan pier where it has been lying frozen for years. Like all other carriers of it’s class, ’’ Admiral Gorshkhov’’ would have been cannibalised for spares too, if the Indian Navy hadn’t come knocking.
So why did we chooses this carrier for our fleet? Because it’s the only medium sized carrier on sale. For all I know, even the Russians haven’t thought about bringing this carrier back into service. So are we trash-cans, to buy this stuff? A complete refit will make her 70% new, they say. But by the time they bring this thing into service(sometime in 2008), the hull will be past half it’s service life. So how long do we intend to sail it for?
The aircraft we’ve selected to fly onboard this carrier is the MiG-29K. Now, this aircraft wasn’t used by even the Russians, who built it in the first case. It failed their tests. Back in the 80s, they were sent back due to flimsy landing gear which wasn’t safe enough for landing. But we’re still buying this crap.
There’s a lot of controversy on what missile system is to be put onboard the carrier. The Russians want us to put their ’Kashtan’’ systems, we want the Israeli ’Barak’. And the ’Barak’ failed it’s tests in India a couple of days back. So isn’t is wise enough to wait till the ’BrahMos’ is fully developed so that we can put them onboard instead? But we still cant wait. The real question is that do we need a carrier immediately? I don’t think so. We have our indigenous carrier on the drawing board. We could wait for it to develop.
Is the government listening?