Posted on 04/05/2007 7:52:30 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
India’s big-bang shopping gun booms
SUJAN DUTTA
New Delhi, April 4: India has reopened an artillery competition for global armament manufacturers for an order that could be worth more than Rs 15,000 crore.
The defence ministry has re-floated two global tenders — called Requests for Proposals (RFP) — inviting bids from 12 makers of 155mm/52 calibre self-propelled guns, a source told The Telegraph here today.
This signals the beginning of a fresh round of big-ticket defence procurements for Indian military orders running into billions of dollars. An RFP for 126 multi-role combat aircraft for the Indian Air Force (for an order that may run upwards of $9 billion) was expected by March 31. It is now said to be likely in June.
The self-propelled guns — to be mounted on truck or tank chassis — are part of an artillery modernisation programme that also includes towed guns.
An RFP for the towed guns of the same calibre is also likely to be re-floated shortly because Bofors had emerged as the single vendor for the towed gun. The Bofors gun — currently a product of Bae Systems Land and Armaments Division — is also competing for the self-propelled version.
The first of the tenders is for wheeled guns — for which an RFP was floated in early March. It was sent to makers and prospective competitors.
The second tender was floated last fortnight for tracked guns.
The source said the offers would be evaluated in accordance with the new procurement policy. A small number of guns would be bought off the shelf — the effort is to get them by 2008.
The defence ministry will assess the offers for not just the price quoted at face value, but also for the licensed production arrangements, spares support and spin-offs (offsets) for domestic industry.
The defence ministry re-floated the tenders after the cabinet committee on security concluded that:
a) A single-vendor situation must be avoided (as with Bofors for the towed artillery)
b) There have been technological developments in heavy artillery in the five years since the first tender
c) The defence procurement policy has been revised
d) The standards for the selection of the guns also needs to be revised
e) Denel, the South African gun maker, that had emerged as the single vendor for the tracked version, was blacklisted in 2005 on another deal involving anti-materiel guns.
Among the competitors in the fray are many of the original bidders — such as Bofors and Soltam of Israel but also new entrants like K-9 of South Korea. The US was also nudging the Indian defence establishment to try out its Paladin M109A that was studied by the Indian Army during the 2003 war on Iraq.
Bofors is likely to compete for the order with a variant of its FH 77B mounted on a 6X6 wheeled Volvo truck chassis. Israel’s Soltam had offered the Atmos 2000 last time and claimed that it could be mounted on a 6X6 Tatra truck that is manufactured by the public sector Bharat Earth Movers Limited.
France’s Nexter (originally called Giat) is likely to bid with the Caesar GCT AUF1. The army chief, General Joginder Jaswant Singh, is understood to have been given a demonstration of the gun during a visit to France last year.
The decision to re-float the tenders conforms to policy and is also politically convenient to the Congress-led UPA government. Only last month, the Bofors controversy re-surfaced with the detention of Ottavio Quattrocchi — suspected of being the middleman in a 1997 deal — in Argentina.
The wheeled guns would be mounted on truck chassis. The tracked guns would be mounted on caterpillar tracks — like those of a tank. The Indian Army proposes to initially buy 180 tracked and 220 wheeled systems.
The two RFPs have been issued after the General Standard Quality Requirements were revised. The guns will be evaluated on the basis of performance in extremes of climate and terrain — in Rajasthan and Ladakh — and their performance for target acquisition, firing rate, command and communication will be assessed. Among the other bidders in the fray are likely to be Kerametal of Slovakia, now a division of Rheinmetall with its Zuzana howitzer.
In speaking of artillery (as opposed to small arms) ‘caliber’ has a different meaning than the ‘bore diameter’: it is the number of times the gun tube (past the chamber) is the length of the bore. To put it in simple terms, think of a 6” (155mm) gun or howitzer (guns are typically longer tubes than howitzers and fire a flatter trajectory to a longer range and tend to have fairly small deflection probable errors and large range probable errors - howitzers fire a higher trajectory a shorter distance (good for going over obstacles) and tend to have greater deflection probable errors, but smaller range probable errors, but back to our 6” gun/howitzer...) A 6” howizter with a 25 caliber tube will have a tube that is 12.5 feet long, a 6” gun with a 52 caliber tube will have a 26 foot long tube.
155mmx52calibers=8060mm [8m] barrel length
M110A2 8” SP ping! I was in the 7/9 FA for 5 yrs, a reserve unit headquartered in Pompano Bch, FL, now deactivated. Our gunners and FDCs were as good as anybody’s on active duty. We shot every other month, about 5 times a year, with 2 weeks at Camp Blanding every summer.
Our Bde, the 227 FA Bde, had 5 bns; 2 of Puerto Rico NG 105s, 2 bns of FLANG 155 SP (the Gator Guns, 1/116 and 2/116, good ole boys almost to a man) and us, 7/9 FA.
A kid coming off active duty in ‘86 told me he thought the Guard and Reserves shot more often than the Regulars. We had lots of money for training and ammo then too, the Reagan years and all, plus we were a nuke capable unit. I knew two captains in that unit that that both went on to make general over the years.
I always loved to watch a Bde TOT mission, specially at night, pop, pop, pop from the 105s, boom, boom, boom from the 155s and WHAM, WHAM, WHAM from the 8”s, better’n fireworks any day!
Dang!
I thought this post was going to be about the Kasmir border shooting competiton that ignites from time to time!
They most certainly do. And one of the best wheeled APC platforms.
Semper Fi.
Google 152mm artillery, would you like to know more? :)
IIRC, that's old technology.
From the 1970s.
Not that it wasn't offered, and proven, to the US DoD at the time.
By that crazy Canadian physics genius that the Mossad eventually allegedly offed for helping Saddam build a "super" gun.
I believe the name of his long defunct company was "Space Industries". Probably because the super gun idea was originally intended to launch satellites. Artillery was an off shoot of that.
I believe the South Africans came up with a cooler burning propellant that lengthens barrel life, ie can take more firings until rebore.
Nothing like an 8" howitzer. When I was in R&D at Sill, working on the cannon launched guided projectile (copperhead) and the designators for it, the motivating idea was said originally to have been combine the accuracy of a well-registered 8" howitzer with a moving target.... I have actually seen demonstration batteries put an 8" inert round in a 1 m by 1 m window at 10k (admittedly with a fresh met, 1st order survey, absolutely accurate powder lot information and temperature and a fresh registration, but still....). An old brownshoe guy told me that in the '40s they put them into the blockhouse on Signal Mtn.
Cooler burning = less energy. That’s what they had to use in Long Bertha in 1918 and still burned the 150+ caliber barrels like candles. There is only so much playing with the propellant grain shape one can do, while maintaining ballistic uniformity.
“The Denel system, which is actually bi-modular, won hands down although bi-modular was less than ideal. The reason for this is a very clever design that puts cooler burning propellant gas against the barrel wall with hotter inside it, in consequence barrel life went thru the roof, for ever in arty terms, so they didn’t need to buy so many barrels.”
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