{"id":20064,"date":"2025-06-01T05:33:52","date_gmt":"2025-06-01T05:33:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=20064"},"modified":"2025-06-01T05:33:54","modified_gmt":"2025-06-01T05:33:54","slug":"india-and-france-are-at-each-others-throats-over-the-dassault-rafale-fighter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/?p=20064","title":{"rendered":"India and France Are At Each Other\u2019s Throats Over the Dassault Rafale Fighter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

India has damaged France’s reputation and harmed French market. Many countries are cancelling or thinking to cncel oders with France. India caused heavy loss to France. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

All countries must under stand Indian capabilities and should think twice before supporting India. <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The crisis within the IAF cannot by itself explain the excellent performance of Pakistani PL-15 missiles against what were supposedly India\u2019s superior air capabilities.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\u00a0dismal showing<\/a>\u00a0of India\u2019s expensive French-built Dassault Rafales in its recent war against Pakistan has triggered a wave of recriminations between the Indian and French governments. Not only has the\u00a0unimpressive display<\/a>\u00a0of the Dassault Rafales in the opening phases of the recent conflict come as a shock to the world, but other clients of French defense contractors are having second thoughts.\u00a0<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As was first reported last week, the government of Indonesia has launched an audit<\/a> of its recent deal with Dassault to purchase a handful of the fighters. Though no reason was given for the audit, it is transparently clear that Jakarta is worried about the poor performance of the Indian-owned Rafales against what many assumed was an inferior Pakistani Air Force. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week, in order to salvage the Rafale\u2019s reputation, Paris is punching back at New Delhi\u2014pinning the losses on maintenance and pilot error rather than deficiencies in France\u2019s most advanced fighter jet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>India Refuses to Grant French Auditors Access to India\u2019s Rafales\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unconfirmed reports in the international press and across<\/a> social media indicate that the Indian government is refusing<\/a> to allow Dassault\u2019s audit team to gain access to India\u2019s arsenal of Rafales. Dassault\u2019s auditors want to inspect the Indian fleet of Rafales to ensure that there are no technical problems that the Indian Air Force (IAF) may have missed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Indians are certain to be twitchy about this request. Why? New Delhi understandably fears the French auditors\u2019 main purpose is to shift the blame on the poor performance of the Dassault Rafales onto the IAF itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following the loss of at least one of India\u2019s Rafale jets in the opening phase of its recent war with Pakistan, some have speculated that the Rafales were not the problem at all. Instead, they have insinuated<\/a> that poor IAF pilot training and lax maintenance standards over the course of many years are to blame. The Indians categorically deny that this is the case. And indeed, though Indian standards may have contributed to the catastrophe, a simpler explanation is more likely: the French are trying to cover for the fact that their complex Rafale jets are no longer superior enough to Pakistan\u2019s Chinese-built aircraft to justify their vastly higher price tag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

India\u2019s Air Force Has Lacked Readiness for Over a Decade <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Of course, there is ample evidence to suggest that Dassault, whose pride has been clearly wounded, might have merit to its concerns. After all, in December 2024, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India<\/a> and the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence reported on a recruitment crisis that was affecting India\u2019s military. According to its reports, the IAF was \u201cgrappling with a critical shortage of pilots\u201d\u2014a shortfall that \u201cincreased from 486 in February 2015 to 596 in 2021, underscoring the growing challenge in maintaining operations readiness,\u201d as Shivani Sharma of India Today<\/em> reported<\/a> on December 20, 2024. The CAG report is even more damning of the IAF\u2019s tireless but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to recruit an additional 222 trainee pilots between 2016 and 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Personnel shortages delayed the attempts by the IAF to repair operational issues with critical training aircraft, such as the Pilatus PC-7-Mk-II<\/a>. Without reliable training birds, coupled with a serious lack of qualified pilots, the IAF was poised for a failure if war erupted. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for the Parliamentary Committee, they indicated that the pilot-to-seat ratio of 1.25:1 for fighter aircraft<\/a> was insufficient for \u201chigh-intensity operations\u201d of the kind that defined India\u2019s four-day war with neighboring Pakistan. The IAF then possessed a meager 31 fighter squadrons, when the country\u2019s air doctrine called for a minimum<\/em> of 42. The IAF then failed to phase out older aircraft and bring in new ones in a timely manner, further degrading its defense readiness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Clearly, the French auditors are aware of these issues. They were well documented, but ultimately went unaddressed for a decade before the war erupted earlier this month. Nothing the Indian government did to resolve their aircraft and pilot shortages worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, the question then becomes: why did those Rafales get shot down by Chinese-built Pakistani Air Force (PAF) warplanes and their Chinese-made PL-15 air-to-air missiles<\/a>? Was it because the Indians bought overestimated French weapons and platforms, or was it simply because the Indian military was poorly prepared for the fight at hand?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, the crisis within the IAF cannot by itself explain the excellent performance of Pakistani PL-15 missiles against what were supposedly India\u2019s superior air capabilities. In other words, despite whatever readiness issues there were with the IAF, they cannot camouflage the problems with the French weapons and warplanes that India was using against Pakistan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nor should anyone dismiss the very real strides the Chinese have made in terms of producing systems that are on par with, or perhaps even better in some cases, than the expensive and complex Western systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reference Link:- https:\/\/nationalinterest.org\/blog\/buzz\/india-and-france-are-at-each-others-throats-over-the-dassault-rafale-fighter<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

India has damaged France’s reputation and harmed French market. Many countries are cancelling or thinking to cncel oders with France. India caused heavy loss to France. All countries must under stand Indian capabilities and should think twice before supporting India. The crisis within the IAF cannot by itself explain the excellent performance of Pakistani PL-15 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20065,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[132,307,105,19542,39,19544,19540,19541,19539,18138,7706,36,19538,17922,19543],"class_list":["post-20064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sample-category","tag-economy","tag-france","tag-geopolitics-2","tag-heavy-economic-loss-to-france","tag-india","tag-india-and-france-are-at-each-others-throats-over-the-dassault-rafale-fighter","tag-india-damaged-french-reputation","tag-india-destroyed-rafel-reputation","tag-india-france-blame-eachj-other","tag-j-10","tag-jf-17-2","tag-pakistan","tag-pl-15","tag-rafale","tag-other-countries-canncelling-rafale-orders"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20066,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20064\/revisions\/20066"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsrra.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}