Structured to Fail     Indian weapons development                     Prof. Prodyut Das

29 January 2025

 

In the recent Conference at New Delhi had the Defence Secretary indicated that funds were not a problem but the ability to absorb the funds was. There was also a hint that in the future the Government (aka DRDO) should not engage in Platform development. Shorn of IAS-ese, the Secretary’s statements indicates that the Government has awoken to the reality that funds and precious time are wasted by inefficient processes. Given DRDO’s Laboratory origins, it has weak Industrial roots and its self- arranged misadventures into platform design needs regulation. One hopes that these badly needed measures are implemented.

A list of “learning experiences”

Why the measures are badly needed is indicated by the list of failed projects that disappointed in terms of product quality, time taken and budget limitations. Disappointments do occur elsewhere but never simultaneously in all three parameters and not to the extent seen in the DRDO flagship projects.  I include some projects by NAL because they are also in the same i,e socialist -government development organism. Opinions and assessments below are personal.

NAL Hansa; An all-composite aircraft of about the same complexity as a Rutan or an Akaflieg. Neither technology nor funds could have been the problem. Inattention to aerodynamic details, basing the design on a wrong muse which seems to be a common failure, the failure to control weight another common failure meant prolonged development and an unsatisfactory product, the redemption of which -drag and propeller choice experimentation for example, was hampered by lack of required soft knowledge of the Project leaders. After perhaps a ten years struggle and a face-saving production run of 15 (?) the aircraft was swept under the carpet after spending 10 years and an unknown quantity of money uselessly fiddling around, apparently without having a clue as how to set things right. One believes it is being re-funded as Hansa NG. We can expect no improvement from this because there is no vision. IF such a project cannot be wrapped up in 3 years then you are nowhere near in terms of development capabilities.

NAL Saras: NAL was possibly taken for a ride. The rear CG location of rear engine transports cause many handling problems under unloaded conditions and is the contributor to. the fatal flat spin that stopped the project.  It is possible that the consultants, Mysasichev, used our money to garner experience about a dodgy configuration. The capacity of the aircraft was such that even had it succeeded its orders would not have broken even; the product was mediocre and the market is dominated by types such as the Beech 19. No attempts were made to find a “niche” like a simple unpressurized 30-40 seat Cargo/Pax aircraft. The commercial possibilities a SWOT were never seriously considered and these projects are mere picnics.

It is a commentary on the socialist pattern of thinking that in spite of such a miserable track record the very same organization is now seeking funds to develop a 90- seater which would be on head on competition with well- established ATR type craft. Again, no market research has been done and even if it succeeds technically- not that there is much chance of that- it will fail commercially. The much- cited Chinese on the other hand are throwing a carefully crafted challenge to the established 737 market by offering in the COMAC a reasonably competitive product at a breathtaking price. That the Comac is not flash in the pan is underlined by the interesting “Boxerfish” cargo drone the Chinese have started showing off.

The Tejas; This project should have been stopped at its first project review and ADA asked to get its design right. With a 65% Composites, and using an American engine it would have got into “supply chain” troubles had it succeeded. As if to ensure failure it then had a fuselage a meter less than the going rate, an aspect ratio of 1.78 and was more than 2 tons over the consultant’s estimates. The subsequent iterations Mk1A, Mk2 or even the “order” for 40 Mk1s when the aircraft had barely flown for a 100 hours total-  are to me  elaborate subterfuges of getting more funding to rectify infantile blunders mentioned- only it seems the project continues to stumble from blunder to blunder, the Mk2 to get the Mk1's layout right and now the TEDBF to get the Mk2s canard position right..

The durability of “socialist” thinking is such that yet again- the same defaulting organization- which is up to its eyebrows trying to clear the mess of the Mk1- is being trusted to the development loads of the even more challenging AMCA and the TEBDF. 

Unless DRDO ADA can demonstrate its fitness for the job by fully certificating the Tejas Mk1 without any of the 87 concessions - ADA will not have acquired enough learning or self-assurance- competence in short- to undertake the development of the Tejas Mk2 whose configuration is a disaster waiting to happen. They will come back complaining about everything except their own lack of basic soft skills. In my estimation ADA is unfit for the task. It probably has the skills to solve the defined problems but has not demonstrated any ability to tackle the inevitable ill- defined problems that arise. We are wasting our time.

The ADE Tapas

This aircraft after several years of development (average time for such aircraft is about 2-3 years) suffered from the almost mandatory “weight increase” and performance shortfall. Much ignorant debate is being generated as to whether or not a piston engine can operate for long periods at 10,000 mts indicating that none of the experts discussing had read simple engineering history or heard of Junkers Ju 86P or the Spitfire Rs which routinely flew long PR sorties at those heights.

 Use of piston engines would mean careful design of supercharging. My point is that it seems ADE caved in to a customer about costs, used a low cost Rotax with standard supercharging, built the damn thing over a couple of centuries, found (inevitably) that such a casual approach does not work, and then, again without adequate effort to lick the problem by two stage supercharging, switched to turboprops and ended up in a flat spin, the project satisfying neither cost nor performance. ADE grasshopper-ed into turboprops which cannot be had off the shelf like a Rotax. Whilst waiting for the turboprops to be delivered, the fanboys went on to blame the customer for “Importmania” and portrayed themselves as abused victims of the import lobby whilst the real sufferers were the Armed Forces.

This behaviour, of not confronting the specifications, of selecting options without detailed and careful homework, of running away from “insurmountable” problems when the root problem was ADE’s own lack of soft knowledge about the subject and a certain lack of moral fibre. The Laboratories generally are not enthusiastic about soft knowledge because acquiring soft knowledge requires passion, not funds. Our projects get delayed and needs more funds not by the technical challenges but by sheer bad navigation-blundering about with options and running away when the challenges come.

The counterpoint- Dhruv

It is not that the Indian Industry cannot manage projects successfully e.g. the Dhruv ALH Helicopter; it went through the usual birth pangs, was delayed but not by decades, promises made were sincere, there was no attempt at publicity and now we have over 300 of them in hard worked multi-services duty and over 300,000 hrs. much of it at uniquely high altitudes. Now why could not the contemporary Tejas project turn in a similar track record? 300 Tejii in service with 15 squadrons for the last twenty five years with 500,000 hrs service plus exports abroad ? That is the question to analyse. I have not cited the Dhruv to belittle the Tejas; in that question lies the answers to becoming aeronautically atmanirbhar. the Dhruv succeeded exactly where the Tejas failed: sound basic engineering, good project management, sincere decisions and excellent weight control whilst working under the exact conditions but better equipped somehow to handle both well-defined and ill-defined problems

Well defined and ill - defined problems

Well defined problems are those which come in the middle of a development project during detail design. They are “labour intensive” (no offence meant!) in that traditional knowledge would get us an answer e.g,

i)                  Stress analysis of a torsion box or an undercarriage.

ii)                Design of a hydraulic or ECS system and component selection.

iii)              Cockpit layout design

iv)              Weight control and weight improvement

And so on. They require experience, effort and skill but they do not usually hold up progress.

Ill- defined problems are trickier; There are difficult because they have no apparent precedents and require imagination to resolve. This is the “last mile gap” problems that many of the DRDO second level people mention. Some examples of problems considered ill- defined when they first appeared were:

i)                  Refusal of the F 102 Delta Dagger to go supersonic in 1949. Since the F 102 was already using the most powerful flight cleared engine more power was nt the cure. It was cured by incorporating area rule which Whitcomb (some say the Goettingen Germans) imagined the supersonic flow as elastic ropes and created the area rule. To look at it the wasp waist and the rear bulges went against traditional ideas about streamlining but it did the trick. You see? Imagination not funds solved the problem.

ii)                The pitch up at transonic speeds. The answer was either a dog tooth or fences but since the problem was new and undefined it required the Engineer to imagine spanwise flow boundary layer growth and separation of boundary layer after a certain distance from the start of the growth, combined the two elements to realize that the lift was being lost outboard leading to pitch up. The use of fences or dog tooth to spoil the boundary layer growth as a solution then came automatically. Without the ability to imagine and connect known facts to new phenomena the solution would never be found. The old traditional Germans had a nice term TechnischeMechanik- a combination of practical experience and, initially, “rough” or non- elegant mathematical analysis for this kind of insight generation.

iii)              The vibration experienced by the Hawker Sea Hawk at high speed. It was traced to the air separating four ways at the junction of the fin and stabilizer. A small acorn fairing smoothened the airflow and solved the problem. Some say a Hawker engineer looked at the MiG 15s stabilizer and saw the fairing and cottoned on to the idea.

iv)              the failure of the F35 arrester hook -as I have earlier blogged- for all its CAE and CAD- to trap on landing until someone relocated it further back to allow the arresting wire to rise back after the mainwheel had run over it on landing.

One could go on to a lengthy list of interesting examples. Every platform comes across ill-defined problems during its development and they cause delay because though the solution may be easy it is difficult to be quantified in terms of fundamental phenomena. The solution may post facto, need careful analysis and testing but the seed of the solution lies in the imagination. 

 ADA/NAL/ GTRE/ ADE have a reasonable capability to tackle defined problems. They presumed this was sufficient. The result of ignoring “soft knowledge” – i.e. it was felt that the LCA would meet the specifications just by incorporating FBW, Composites, AESA radar and so forth. Lacking the base of “soft knowledge” a trouble prone layout was chosen with avoidable, foreseeable problems which delayed development when the hardware was produced. To cover up the initial blunder “new projects” were proposed further delaying equipment renewal. The powers that be need to ask why ADA why, layout- wise, the Mk2 configuration - with the correct appropriately positioned canard-could not have been settled in at the very first submission for funds in 1991. In fact, curiously, the first layouts of the LCA had a canard and it was correctly positioned!

The Tejas Mk1 is well below specification and instead of correcting them with determination the Agency has avoided the challenge and proposed the Mk2 which will also run into trouble as will the AMCA.  If you have seen the latest offering on the CATS Warrior by HAL the original layout of the pilotless drone was fine but what is being recently shown is illogical- it has a stealth fuselage with “non stealth” wings and the intake size and location is asking for trouble. Similarly, the first proposal for the HJT 36 was oversize but it was correctly proportioned but instead of cutting down the size the proposal finally accepted almost ensured there would be spin recovery problem which could have been avoided- with a pencil and eraser- by lowering the intakes in the drawings. I seriously wonder if there is some secret expert consultants who is retained to modify proposals so that development- and funds required- stretch to infinity. 

Space does not permit to explain the other factors in more detail but given below are some:

An unwillingness to test to the “death”: The very simple Orpheus engine in its two or three major versions Or.1, Or.3, or.12 were tested to a total of 6000 hrs of bench tests and 2000 hrs of flight tests. This was on an engine based on earlier Orion and Viper engines. The Swedes tested the RM8 (based on the licensed civil GE JT8D core) for 4000 hrs. The far more complicated Kaveri has done barely 2000 hrs in total. The F 35 programme was tested for 17,000 hours. The Tejas? Perhaps 2000, if that at FOC. By not testing extensively we wasted learning opportunities. Do we know everything that was to be learnt from the Kaveri or are we, in going for foreign collaboration, jumping from Class 5 to Class10 without doing at least 6 and 7. Does our past performances indicate the collaboration as a valid proposition. The result of such cutting of corners is unreliable products is customer mistrust..

Invalid certifications: The chorus is always about how the Customer abuse the Laboratories and does prolonged testing e.g. Howitzer testing on the moon etc. The examples in the above paragraphs indicate the customer is justified. If we compare our fundings with the others let us also compare our testing efforts.  One cannot “cheat” on testing and expect to be honourably treated. We have an independent – and professionally competent testing organization- CEMILAC but if it issues an IOC with FOC with 87 significant wavers, What has been the “learning” and what is the validity of a certificate- in India or increasingly important- on the export markets if we issue "worthless" pieces of paper? CEMILAC could have been a regional beacon - like teh IITs once were- of actual rather than self proclaimed excellence.

Fudging of figures: It is tiresome when DRDO claims low cost of development compared to others. The INSDOC book on the Tejas i.e. official figures gives the Tejas development costs as Rs.14,000 crores. This is the arithmetic sum of all funds released at various times over decades and does not include development funds disguised as “production orders”, The Scientist Babus are adept at calculating DA and very sensitive to it in their pay-slips. Why is it  not not shown in their project expenditure figures. Let all costs be quoted at Present day Value and like the US include Manpower and all other costs.

A failure to standby

Before DRDO defaulters point fingers at others let there be introspection about how it does not stand by its own successes or even defend them with professionalism eg- Ugram, Arjun, INSAS.

This Litany is endless because the sins are many and over the years but a certain lack of Moral responsibility is observed. Post failure complaints and excuses by those responsible are reprehensible.

Summing up

We have got here because “in the last bastion of the License permit Raj” as the Defence Secretary described the present structure, we have a single chain whereas there should be parallel chains; a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If there is an import Lobby the single chain is particularly vulnerable if a few agents in one of the links can snap the process. The greater the seniority of the “link” the more power it has to ensure disruption. In the Order of Precedence does Sena Bhavan outrank the CEO of DRDO?  Strengthening one or the other  element in the chain will not necessarily give desired satisfaction. Parallel chains of development is necessary. It is necessary for the Private sector to be brought in as an equally funded Partner – not as something that needs “handholding” by the DRDO - which is an ominous attempt to possibly scupper any move toward effective “fail safe” development organization.

 The State controlled Defence Sector of an electoral multi-party Democracy the State cannot have the focus, attention and management experience required to run effective Weapons Development programmes. It does not happen anywhere in the World.That it has at  all had occasional successes were chance affairs where Local leaders were able to create conditions within their organizations fur thriving development.

The reason why we got into this ineffective and crippling State Sector “Commanding heights of the Economy” I will publish separately .