News Story: Indian Army hunts for new carbines

By: Vivek Raghuvanshi

NEW DELHI — The Indian Army has issued a global request for information procure 200,000 5.56mm close-quarter battle carbines at a cost of about $400 million under the Buy & Make India category. The total order is estimated to increase to 500,000 if the requirement of the domestic paramilitary forces is also taken into account.

Efforts to acquire the CQB carbines since 2008 have not yielded any result, and the carbines developed by the state-owned Defence Research and Development Organization, or DRDO, and the Ordnance Factory Board, or OFB, have not been accepted by the Indian Army, according to a senior Indian Ministry of Defence. 

The formal tender — expected to be issued in the next six months — will seek a transfer of technology for the carbines to be license produced in India under a partnership with domestic defense companies. 

Several overseas equipment manufacturers — including Beretta of Italy, FN FAL of Belgium, Heckler & Koch of Germany, Colt's Manufacturing Company of the United States, and Sig Sauer of Switzerland — are likely to tie up with Indian defense companies such as private sector firms Mahindra Defence, Larsen & Toubro, Bharat Forge and Reliance Defence.

Read the full story at DefenseNews

Think Tank: Sea, air, land and space updates (9-May-2017)

Zoe Glasson, Sophie Qin, Madeleine Nyst and Patrick Kennedy

Sea State

Delays are catching, it seems—at least when it comes to building frigates. We heard on The Strategist last week about the rumoured delays of Australia’s own future frigate program; now the US Navy has announced a postponement of at least a year in awarding a construction contract for the Littoral Combat Ship’s successor. The reason for the delay is perhaps best be summed up by the title of The National Interest’s blog on the subject—‘U.S. Navy delays buying more frigates until they know how to build them’. The USN now intends to award the initial contract for the new frigates in fiscal year 2020, ‘to ensure designs are mature’, a postponement that’s been welcomed by the Government Accountability Office due to the number of unknowns about the frigate’s costs and capabilities.

Talking underwater just got a whole lot easier, thanks to JANUS. Developed by the NATO Science and Technology Organisation Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation, JANUS will enable interoperability between networks of unmanned systems from different manufacturers. The JANUS protocol has now been recognised as standard by NATO member states, making it the first internationally recognised digital underwater communication protocol.

Think Tank:Sea, air, land and space updates (6-Dec-2016)

Christopher Cowan, Thulasi Wigneswaran, Elisabeth Buchan and Alexander Vipond

Sea State

Starting off Down Under, the Australian government released a request for tender (RFT) for 12 new offshore patrol vessels (OPVs) last week. In a statement released by Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne, local industry considerations will play a key part of the tender selection process. The RFT requires ‘each tenderer to develop an Australian Industry Capability Plan that maximises the opportunities for Australian industry participation.’ The three shortlisted designers for the new vessels are Damen from the Netherlands and two German firms, Lurssen and Fassmer. The OPVs will replace the Royal Australian Navy’s fleet of 13 Armidale-class patrol craft, at an estimated cost of around $3 billion.

The US Navy’s controversial Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program came under heavy scrutiny during a testy Senate Armed Services Committee hearing last Thursday. The hearing—in which one of the participants stated that the LCS program ‘broke the Navy’—was part of the release of a damning Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the failures of the LCS program. The GAO report questioned the Navy’s decision to move ahead on purchasing the program’s final 12 ships, citing poor performance and continued uncertainty about the future vessels’ cost and capabilities.