Major Breakthrough in India's Tejas Fighter: China and Pakistan Should Be Concerned

September 22 report, Hindustan Aeronautics is advancing the plan to integrate the Meteor air-to-air missile with the Tejas fighter, claiming that this combination will greatly enhance the Indian Air Force's long-range air superiority capability.

The report stated that once the integration is completed, the Tejas will have a kill range of over 150 kilometers, and with the European top-tier missile, it will have an advantage against the air forces of China and Pakistan.

However, pre-assuming the deterrent effect based solely on equipment indicators may overestimate this almost never truly airborne domestic lightweight platform.

Since its deployment, the Tejas fighter has hardly participated in any border conflicts or combat deployments.

Even with the advanced European missiles, the performance shortcomings of the platform are still obvious. Whether in terms of power, range, electronic warfare, or payload capacity, it still has a long way to go to fully realize the maximum effectiveness of the Meteor missile.

A more critical issue is that the so-called integration plan is still a long way from practical combat.

Currently, Hindustan Aerospace has not yet fully deployed the Uttam AESA radar on the Tejas platform, which is the minimum prerequisite for the Meteor missile.

Previously, MBDA had already clearly stated that it would not allow its missile to be integrated with the Israeli EL/M-2052 radar, and many of the Tejas Mk-1A batches used the latter.

This means that in order to truly achieve effective combat capabilities of the Tejas + Meteor, India must first complete a series of expensive and time-consuming modification processes, including radar replacement, fire control matching, flight control system upgrades, and data link enhancement, which is expected to take at least two to three more years.

As for the fantasy that China and Pakistan are extremely tense and need to find ways to cope, this is overly exaggerated. If you are afraid to participate in the war, what are you going to cope with? The original platform was shot down, and now you have created a patchwork, can you still be scared of you?

Original: www.toutiao.com/article/1844034213377032/

Statement: This article represents the views of the author.