Show Notes
India's Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft, or AMCA, is usually discussed as a fifth-generation stealth fighter: low observable design, internal weapons bays, sensor fusion, advanced engines, and all the cool stuff that makes defence nerds sit up straighter.
But this episode of In Our Defence asks a slightly different question: is AMCA really about building a plane or about building the factory, institutions, and accountability structure needed to make that plane real?
The Ministry of Defence's AMCA tender lays out an ambitious plan to rope in a private-sector industrial partner in order to create a fifth-generation aerospace manufacturing ecosystem.
But then comes the big gap: who is the real project manager?
ADA owns the design. The IAF owns the requirement. Private industry will build and integrate. Certification agencies will certify. GTRE-Safran's engine effort appears, for now, to be running on a separate track. So, if X owns A and Y owns B...Who owns the delay?
In this episode of In Our Defence, host Dev Goswami and defence expert Sandeep Unnithan unpack why AMCA needs more than a good airframe. It needs the kind of mission-mode structure India built for the ATV/Arihant submarine programme - one that brings the alphabet soup of agencies together under real authority.
We also get into the quirks of India's L1 bidding culture: sensible for many contracts, but possibly dangerous when applied to complex, high-risk, must-succeed strategic programmes like a fifth-generation fighter.
Tune in!
Produced by Taniya Dutta
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