Part II - Naval Aviation and the Physics of the Deck

In the first part of this essay, I argued that the Naval LCA’s troubled journey was less about bad faith and more about how an air‑force‑optimised design collided with the unforgiving physics of the flight deck. That experience left us with a hard‑won body of knowledge, a test infrastructure, and a cadre of people who now understand what it actually takes to make an aircraft live at sea.

The next question is what we do with that inheritance as we stabilise today’s carrier force with Rafale‑M, design TEDBF, and think seriously about unmanned naval aviation. The choices we make over the next decade will decide whether the Naval LCA becomes a one‑off cautionary tale or the expensive but necessary foundation for a sovereign carrier‑aviation ecosystem.

A caution from within: the fear of “dooming carrier aviation to irrelevance”

Not everyone inside the naval aviation community sees the Rafale‑M path as benign. In a recent comment on reports of a combined IAF–IN Rafale buy, a senior naval test pilot who has been deeply involved with ADA and NFTC warned that he “sincerely believes the Navy will come to regret this, most probably at the cost of dooming carrier aviation to irrelevance.”

Read generously, it is not simply a protest against imports, but a fear that once a powerful foreign type dominates both shore‑based and embarked fleets, indigenous naval design gets crowded out, and carrier aviation becomes an optional luxury. If land‑based Rafales are seen as “good enough” for most contingencies, political appetite for the cost and complexity of serious carrier air wings can erode over time. The same logic can easily extend to the next wave: if manned Rafales absorb attention and money, serious investment in navalised unmanned systems and Manned–Unmanned Teaming (MUM‑T) concepts risks being deferred or reduced to bolt‑ons, rather than being treated as a core design driver for future decks.

Those are valid strategic worries. To my mind, they strengthen, rather than weaken, the case for being precise about why the Navy is buying Rafale‑M (fleet stabilisation within a defined window), and for ring‑fencing the design and funding space for TEDBF, naval MUM‑T architectures, and follow‑on indigenous projects. If we fail to do that, the fear of carrier aviation – manned and unmanned – sliding into irrelevance may become self‑fulfilling.

A small aside: while preparing this piece, and for earlier posts on MRFA-Rafale, etc., I approached Dassault for images to illustrate the argument. A photograph can sometimes tell the story better than a paragraph. I was politely informed that Dassault’s official media library is reserved for “professional” outlets. Those, presumably, are the platforms that help tell the company’s story. Independent analysis must rely on open-source imagery instead. So readers will have to make do with the photographs used here.

Unmanned layers and a Rafale‑centred fleet

This unease also ties into a larger question I have raised elsewhere. In a December 2025 article in The FORCE Magazine (“Reach is Power”), I argued that naval aviation needs a structured three‑tier unmanned architecture—HALE/MALE systems for broad‑area cueing, shipborne UAVs to extend the horizons of destroyers and frigates, and carrier‑borne ISR/light‑strike UAVs adding sensing density and strike mass on the deck. Together, such layers would give India an unmanned architecture commensurate with the scale and speed of the modern maritime battlespace. If a large Rafale‑centred buy ends up absorbing the oxygen needed to build that architecture and to design future manned platforms around MUM‑T from the outset, then the fear of “dooming carrier aviation to irrelevance” will apply as much to unmanned naval air power as to the manned fighters we are arguing about today.

Budgets, submarines and the tyranny of capital architecture

Naval aviation does not live in a vacuum. It competes for resources within the Indian Navy against ships, submarines, infrastructure, and now cyber and space enablers.

Two features of India’s capital architecture matter in practice:

Protected strategic lines: nuclear submarines and certain strategic projects sit on long‑term, CCS‑sanctioned funding heads and are treated, rightly, as national rather than purely naval priorities.

Contested aviation lines: carrier fighters, trainers, and helicopters usually draw from more flexible pools within the Navy’s capital plan, which must also fund surface combatants, conventional submarines and shore infrastructure.

Where indigenisation stops being a choice

From the perspective of a frontline navy that has endured sanctions, supplier collapses, and obsolescence, indigenisation stops being a noble option and becomes a Hobson’s choice. The question is less “Do we indigenise?” and more “On which systems must we insist on design and integration sovereignty if we want to remain operational when the taps are turned off?”

Why shipbuilding looks “easier” than aviation

The Indian Navy is often, rightly, held up as an example of shipbuilding indigenisation success. But naval shipbuilding and naval aviation rest on very different economic and technological foundations.

In shipbuilding:

A dedicated warship design organisation has existed for decades, now formalised as the Warship Design Bureau.

Classes of ships run in series, letting fixed design and yard costs be amortised across many hulls.

Domestic content in the “float” and “move” segments is high; dependence is increasingly concentrated in “fight” systems.

In naval aviation:

Batch sizes are small – a few dozen aircraft at best – magnifying per‑unit R&D and certification costs.

Certification cycles are long and unforgiving, especially for carrier suitability.

Propulsion remains foreign; without a sovereign aero‑engine, every project carries external risk, export‑control exposure and upgrade constraints.

Each new airframe, therefore, becomes a high‑stakes bet. Failure is costlier, success slower, and even partial success can be hard to integrate operationally if key performance parameters are not met. It is not surprising that institutional risk appetite is lower here, and that naval thresholds appear stricter than those of land‑based users.

Design sovereignty: more than “built in India”

Indigenisation is often reduced to where the airframe is assembled. For a navy, what really matters is who controls the design.

Design sovereignty in naval aviation means:

Being able to integrate indigenous weapons, sensors and EW systems without waiting on external design authority.

Owning the software, or at least the interfaces, that govern mission systems, flight controls and ship–air data links.

Having a voice in the engine and propulsion roadmap, even if early iterations are co‑developed.

Without this, a “domestically built” aircraft can still be strategically fragile. Every major upgrade, every new weapon, every attempt to integrate with shipborne systems becomes contingent on a foreign OEM’s timelines, interests and export clearances.

Seen from that vantage point, Atmanirbharta in naval aviation has to be understood in very concrete terms: who decides what goes into your aircraft over its life, and how much of that decision‑making is sovereign.

Naval versus air‑force perspectives: institutional wiring, not virtue

There is also a quieter cultural difference that shapes how these questions are approached.

A naval aviator is embedded in a system in which the aircraft, ship, sensors, weapons, and logistics chain are experienced as a single fighting organism, itself only one part of a larger all‑arms system. Daily reality includes deck cycles, spotting plans, the tyranny of limited hangar and lift volume, and constant interaction with the ship’s engineering, combat systems and aviation support branches.

An air‑force officer, even with identical flying skills, usually grows up in a more functionally vertical environment: squadrons, bases and specialised branches.

Neither vantage point is superior; they are simply wired differently. Recognising that difference helps explain why navies push hard on integration, deck impact and supportability in ways that can seem excessively conservative – or excessively demanding – from outside.

A provocation: who should set the baseline?

History offers an intriguing pattern: several successful aircraft families began life as naval designs robust enough to be adopted widely by air forces, rather than the other way round. Once you build for the sea, the land usually looks easier.

In India, that suggests a provocative question:

In a world where we will operate carriers for decades, should naval operating conditions be baked in earlier and more centrally into our future fighter‑design processes?

Instead of asking whether a naval aircraft can be derived from an air force baseline, should we be asking whether future land‑based families ought to grow out of a carrier‑optimised core?

The Naval LCA, with all its constraints, is a vivid lesson in what happens when we try to do it the other way round. In practice, our search for scale led us to treat the naval variant as an offshoot of the larger air force line; a more radical joint approach would flip that logic, accepting a tougher naval baseline so that both services can share a common, more robust family from the start.

Beyond Fighters: Scaling MPA & AEW&C

This question is not confined to fighters. We already expect the Navy to add “scale” (albeit in limited numbers) for national aerospace programmes – from maritime C‑295 variants to an indigenous AEW&C programme. My own conviction is that, at least for some of these families, the design centre of gravity may need to move the other way: start with a deck‑capable, CATOBAR‑suitable baseline (a true carrier AEW platform, for example) and let the land‑based versions exploit that robustness, rather than bolting naval requirements on as an afterthought.

There are also hard limits to what even mature aerospace powers will do for tiny production runs. France, with all its aviation depth and strong political instincts for defence self‑reliance, did not design a national carrier AEW aircraft; it bought the E‑2 Hawkeye for the Charles de Gaulle because the numbers could never justify a clean‑sheet programme. That is not a lack of pride; it is a matter of scale arithmetic. Our Atmanirbharta conversations rarely grapple with this logic. We tend to argue at the level of principle – “indigenous good, import bad” – rather than asking, case by case, where sovereign design is essential and where it is fiscally irrational.

From “planned failure” to deliberate experimentation

All of this loops back to the carrier deck. If we are serious about flying off our own ships on our own terms, we will have to be ruthless about where scale arithmetic allows compromise and where it does not. Fighters, MPA, AEW&C may sit on different spreadsheets, but the real decision is the same: which parts of our aviation ecosystem must remain sovereign if we want those carrier decks to matter?

The same question has shadowed our rotary‑wing choices for years. Indigenous ALH‑based naval variants, leased stop‑gap utility helicopters and imported MRH such as the MH‑60R are not separate stories, but different ways of answering how much of India’s future deck‑helicopter ecosystem we are prepared to own—and at what cost.

Nor is this only about external suppliers. Naval aviation lives within a highly specialised but fragmented two‑star structure: ACNS (Air), ACNS (Air Materiel) and FONA each hold pieces of the brief, all ultimately reporting through the three‑star DCNS, who sits, more often than not, as a fish-head in a vast-and-growing bureaucracy. That tilt quietly shapes which naval aviation bets are pushed, postponed or pared back. But that, as they say, is another story—one that can be extended across services and bureaucracies.