[lbo-talk] Russia begins delivery of Sukhoi kits to India

dano dano at well.com
Sun Jun 13 13:44:03 PDT 2004


At 7:29 PM +0500 6/13/04, uvj at vsnl.com wrote:
>Dwayne Monroe wrote:
>
>> The Russians are becoming quite the tech wildcard as
> > they spread advanced equipment and techniques around
> > the globe for profit.
>
>The fSU/Russia has always been a crucial supplier of good quality technology
>for military, civilian and dual use by India for 40 years.

During the Cold War India refused to be a military satellite of the US, so the US wouldn't sell it military technology. USSR would, so India bought from them. Characterized too simply perhaps, but that's about the gist of it. The relationship continues.

I've not been subbed to this list for long enough to know whether the sales of naval warships to India are on this list. ISTR this includes destroyer, frigate and submarine* classes, and the PLAN also has at least one obsolete carrier that it is studying. One big problem for US naval "projection of power" is that both China and India buy diesel-electric submarines for coastal patrol.

One curious irony is that while China and India (and Japan and Korea) are moving to IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) with great speed, the only organization in the US moving into that space is DOD (fringe computer communities notwithstanding).

IPv6 will be very important in both social and economic development, as well as national information security infrastructures. The difference in quality of that infrastructure can be quickly summarized by: IPv4 = 1970s technology, IPv6 = 1990s technology. Gap = 20 Internet Years.

(*Diesel-electric (aka DE) are very quiet boats, and are difficult to detect by the standard Los Angeles class nuc HK subs of the US fleet. (Seawolf may be different. I'm not caught up on my reading.) A few DE boats in the strait between mainland and Formosa and US surface fleet is effectively locked out. The strait is shallow and noisy which favors DE over nuc anyway.)



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