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India’s urgent search for 114 multi-role fighter aircraft and aspiration for the fifth-generation development programme just got more complicated. United States (US) President Donald Trump has sprung a surprise offer of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), while the Russians have offered to partner with India on their S-57 E Felon production with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) by this year itself. These offers have caught the mainstream and social media’s attention, fuelling widespread debate and speculation. With the US actively leveraging the imposition of trade tariffs while boosting military sales to India, the offer comes with added complexities. Two questions immediately come to the fore: Does the platform satisfy the operational requirements of the Indian Air Force (IAF) with its depleting fighter squadron bench strength? Does the deal make strategic sense for India’s geopolitical dynamics?
With the US actively leveraging the imposition of trade tariffs while boosting military sales to India, the offer comes with added complexities.
An analysis of a fighter aircraft is much than the surge of somewhat simplistic number-crunching comparisons being aired. The F-35 has been a trouble-ridden programme that has faced serious reliability, availability, and maintenance issues as it struggles to meet testing guidelines and mission readiness goals. Its stealth features are difficult to maintain and have not been fully tested, and its logistics train is so long that it is difficult to deploy. are some key issues as per the US ‘Fiscal Year 2024 Annual Operational Test and Evaluation report published at the end of January 2025. Cost overruns are another challenge as the original estimate was US$200 billion to develop and purchase approximately 3,000 F-35s, which today, have doubled to US$412 billion for a fleet of 2,456 platforms. The JSF has been called a ‘trillion dollar trainwreck’ that has ‘hollowed out the US Air Force’. [1] The project has also come into the crosshairs of Elon Musk, who leads the unofficial US Department of Government Efficiency for fiscal cuts in governmental spending.
The exorbitant F-35 will severely limit the number of squadrons that can be purchased, and numbers matter for retaining India’s conventional deterrence. It will also have enormous hidden costs for setting up dedicated maintenance and repair infrastructure, facilities, and equipment, as the IAF has had to do with the US C-17, C-130, and Apache fleets. Then comes the cost of weapons with their environment-controlled storage and testing facilities and operational mission support systems. Given the limited number of squadrons that the IAF can afford, it means that it would have effectively added yet another country-specific variant with no maintenance, repair, and overhaul interoperability to its already diverse fleet of Russian and French platforms, adding to its fleet management challenges.
The exorbitant F-35 will severely limit the number of squadrons that can be purchased, and numbers matter for retaining India’s conventional deterrence.
The stringent US foreign military sales policies and protocols mean that the control source codes for fighter radar, radar warning receiver, electronic warfare (EW) equipment, and self-protection suites, vital for operational mission-programming, will not be available with all aircraft of US origin. This is possibly the most critical operational constraint from the IAF’s perspective. These platforms would also be operationally stand-alone as they will not be able to integrate into IAF’s net-centric operations as the data-link and networking protocols of its mainstay fleet of SU 30, airborne warning and command systems, airborne early warning control aircrafts, indigenous radars, and Active Denial Systems (ADS). This also means that the platform cannot be a part of any composite multi-platform packages necessary for penetrating, attacking, and surviving adversarial air defence systems in the IAF’s offensive counter-air missions and strategic deep strike missions. It will not form part of future integrated air operations of the IAF and joint operations, where aerial and surface sensors and shooters of the Army and Navy are also combat-networked, a vital future joint warfighting imperative. Its single engine will not only affect its combat survivability, but the prohibitive high cost of the aircraft will be a serious safety concern for peace-time training in bird-intensive environments.
The long history of close relationship and military assistance to Pakistan—an important strategic lever of the US and its military—will be an added dynamic in the combat employment of the F-35 against the Pakistan Air Force’s mainstay F-16 fleet. Equally, operating on a daily basis with the IAF’s Russian origin fighters, EW equipment, and AD weapon systems will be an issue with the US. There are also bound to be peace-time restrictions of operating the platform close to India’s northern borders with Chinese electronic and signal intelligence collection sensors, further impacting IAF’s operational freedom.
The long history of close relationship and military assistance to Pakistan—an important strategic lever of the US and its military—will be an added dynamic in the combat employment of the F-35 against the Pakistan Air Force’s mainstay F-16 fleet.
From a strategic perspective, how the first-time purchase of US fighters will impact the long-standing Indo-Russian relations will need to be seriously considered. The deal will certainly impact India’s own fifth-generation Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft development, its future Combat Air Teaming System programme, and the future AD systems, as it is all-important they integrate operationally with all of IAF’s mainstream combat platforms and sensors of ‘non-US’ origin. India’s further development of the Tejas fighter that remains hostage to US-supplied engines and has already been interminably delayed highlights a big red flag. The US offer will need to be closely assessed against the long, steady, and relatively more reliable strategic relationships with Russia and France to ensure the preservation of India’s strategic autonomy. The final choice must take into consideration that the Rafale and the Su-57 are ‘well-balanced platforms’ with ‘solid upgrade programs’, ‘free of US content’ and would be more cost-effective to operate in the long run.[2]
The US offer will need to be closely assessed against the long, steady, and relatively more reliable strategic relationships with Russia and France to ensure the preservation of India’s strategic autonomy.
The necessity to arrest the IAF’s reducing combat strength since over two decades, continues in its downward spiral especially with the urgently needed purchase of the 114 multi role fighter aircraft (MFRA), is also stagnating amidst indecision, apathy, a ‘broken’ procurement system[3], and a systemic failure to grasp the long-term consequences. The nation’s MFRA requirement is entirely separate from the indigenous fifth-generation fighter aircraft production aspirations, and the distinction is imperative to prevent the further exacerbation of an already complex imbroglio. An expedited MFRA purchase is a critical requirement to prevent air power’s contribution to the nation’s conventional deterrence from weakening any further, as it will directly impact our national security in the air, land and sea domains. The Indian military can ill afford to ignore air power, considering that our two main adversaries have strong air forces. The fifth-generation fighter requirement, on the other hand, is a natural process of continuous improvements in platform, systems and weapons capabilities, which, if not ensured, will swiftly lead to the redundancy of IAF’s air power. Considering the inevitable proliferation of fifth and sixth gen fighters in the inventory of India’s adversaries, the choice must be military-driven to bolster the nation’s conventional deterrence, balanced with its future growth, geopolitical trajectory, and strategic autonomy.
Air Marshal (Dr) Diptendu Choudhury is a former Commandant of the National Defence College at New Delhi.
[1]
[2] Ibid
[3] Bhaswar Kumar, ‘MoD to reform procurement policy in 6-12 months: Defence Secretary’, Business Standard, February 19, 2025
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