Zeitgeist Explorer⚡

🇮🇳India's long-term game: India will implement the decommissioning of its old 🇫🇷🇮🇳Chetak and 🇫🇷🇮🇳Cheetah helicopters with 200 new Light Multirole Helicopters (€1.9-2.1Bn), to be produced in India under licence by the competitors in the tender: the 🇮🇹Leonardo + 🇮🇳Adani and 🇫🇷Airbus + 🇮🇳Tata partnerships will likely split the order, probably with a prevalence of Leonardo's AW109 TrekkerM. 🇺🇸US based Bell, also competing in the tender, is unlikely to win. This tender concerns premium helicopters, while Bell's helicopters could compete with 🇮🇳HAL's LUH in secondary procurements. 🇷🇺Russian Ka-226T, which had been selected in 2014, has not entered the procurement process, and even the old order failed because of European sanctions that blocked the production of the engine (🇫🇷Safran). The share of 🇷🇺Russian weapons imported by the Indian armed forces has fallen from 70% in 2011–2015 to less than 40% today, while the 🇪🇺European share (led by France) has risen from a few percentage points 10 years ago to around 40% today. 🇮🇱Israel has also grown, from 4.5% to 15%, alongside the 🇺🇸US and 🇰🇷South Korea. Major weapons flows are one of the best proxies for strategic shifts, because the strategic bodies deciding procurement do so based on expectations of strategic alignment and the supplier's long-term reliability, as it is essential that the supplier cooperate in production, maintenance and technical assistance for the vehicle under the widest possible range of scenarios. India, aware of being essentially indispensable for an orderly decoupling from China, is playing its strategic cards well, remaining just ambiguous enough to retain leverage without becoming repulsive to the trillions of Western capital moving towards the peninsula in the Indian Ocean. For instance, it continues to buy cheap Russian oil to support its industrial expansion. On the issue of distancing itself from the BRICS and strategically and militarily aligning with the US and its allies, however, India seems to have taken a rather decisive path. 🇵🇰Pakistan obviously matters, as a regional adversary and by now virtually a 🇨🇳Chinese colony through the port of Karachi, and 🇮🇷Iran matters as a consequence, which partly explains the alignment with Israel. And of course, Russia's weakness matters: now an economy smaller than India's and incapable of projecting power or industrial capacity, Russia is increasingly seen by Delhi as a balance on certain regional issues against China, and as a gas station. The Indian economic "miracle" that we will experience over the next 20 years, as the capital of the first globalization pours into the country, will probably be different from the Chinese one. Many would bet on it being "inferior" in a certain sense, and undoubtedly the country south of the Himalayas is more difficult to organize as a perfect cog in global supply chains. Nonetheless, a more genuine and structural alignment with the West (China, for instance, has never bought weapons from the US or Europe since Tiananmen events), its natural exposure to the sea, and a less rigid economic-strategic vision of the world than China's could make India's development more sustainable in the long run. My base case at the moment is that not only will India grow much faster than China over the next 10–20 years (easy bet), up to x3-4 faster over the course of that period, but the Indian economy could overtake the Chinese economy within two decades and then become sustainably integrated into global trade in a way China never has. The OP, lamenting that India will buy (in part) foreign helicopters instead of the domestic one, obviously has a narrow view of this whole affair and misses the broader implications and signals of military procurement. Beyond the quality of the products, for India, buying Western weapons today is an enormous guarantee of security and economic success. The value of the deal in billions is entirely irrelevant in the face of this. India, by all means, is playing the long-term game. Below the 4 likely backbones of India's future light helicopter fleet: the AW109 TrekkerM; the AW169; the Airbus H125; the HAL's LUH.