 |
| INS Kolkata: Kolkata class Destroyer |
By Abhijit Singh
Is the Indian Navy justified in building large warships?
The Indian navy recently unveiled the INS Kochi – the second ship of the Kolkata class guided missile destroyers at Mumbai. At 7500 tons of displacement, the Kochi is the one of largest guided missile destroyers ever assembled by an Indian shipbuilding yard. Its cutting-edge weapons and sensors suite – comprising Brahmos cruise missiles, long range surface to air missiles (LR-SAM), surveillance and fire-control radars and a towed array sonar – makes it one of the most sophisticated surface combatants to have graced the Indian Navy’s fighting fleet.
This is the second big Indian destroyer to have been commissioned in the past fourteen months. In August last year, INS Kolkata, the lead ship of the P 15-A class, joined the Indian Navy’s Western fleet. The excitement surrounding the two war vessels followed the enthusiastic averments of India’s political leadership and strategic experts, who sought to portray them as India’s battleships, meant to assert strategic dominance in the Indian Ocean.
While branding them as “battleships” might border on hyperbole, the commentary surrounding the new acquisitions has certainly triggered a debate in Indian strategic circles about the desirability of building big warships. Following the Kochi’scommissioning, critics of big ship construction raised doubts over the economic logic of acquiring expensive naval behemoths. High cost, time delays, expensive maintenance schedules, and superfluous capability add-ons, they pointed out, makes the construction of large warships a particularly profligate activity. With a construction cost of over Rs 40 billion ($617 million), skeptics wondered if the new class of ships could deliver value for the money spent, particularly when the Indian navy is vulnerable to the vagaries of budget cuts and in no position to build more expensive combat platforms.
Read the full story at The Diplomat