After all the pains that India took to insure that the MMRCA tender was handled completely professionally, there is no way that the government will now throw away the carefully crafted competition and tender evaluation process.
The one "advantage" that the United States had over the Europeans was that their equipment has been in use for over a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan, where much of the European equipment has not been used under "combat" conditions. Libya has given the French and the Eurofighter consortium the opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of their own smart weapons in a real world environment.
Do you really think that the Libyan operation ever really needed front line Rafales in order to carry out the civilian protection UN mandate?
There are still ‘inadvertent’ exit clauses at this stage of the MMRCA competition particularly if the government feels that the contract costs are too high and are not balanced by the offset proposals. While that’s very unlikely to happen, it is still a window of opportunity and a legitimate one at that.
Again, the point I’d make about Libya is this-how much weightage should a country give for how well a system performs against a rusty military?? The Rafale showed it can carry a heavy payload over long range while the Typhoon dropped a few bombs while carrying 4 or more air to air missiles; but haven’t they been capable of doing that for a decade now. Same goes for the smart munitions-they worked as advertised in near ideal test conditions.
Let's be frank, Rafales were not on UN civilian protection mandate, they were on NATO mandate of mass murder of civilians. And they were quite good at that.
The whole Libya crime started when Daffy's chief of protocol fled to Paris in November 2010 and brought a ledger of planned visits with him. French intelligence figured out that Daffy will not buy French equipment worth 2billion Euro and most likely will switch to better deal with Ruskies.
As a result, French and Brits planned attack on Libya to rob Libya blind and subcontracted U.S. to do the heavy lifting because they could not do it on their own.
Operation Southland was planned to cover up preparations for attack.
So far, USAF, RAF and French AF were successful in murdering some 50,000 civilians.
Unfortunatelly for looters, the end is not in sight. For example, 20,000 MANPADS are missing. Why NATO did not bomb depots in more than 6 months? Could not find them or unable to destroy them?
NATO top banana declared that NATO was "surprised" by Gaddafi resistance. Ouch, armed people die when venture into foreign land uninvited.
Scores of British SAS have been whacked and British Defense Secretary Liam Fox was forced to resign October 14 under some goofy excuse.
Since Oct. 14 more of SAS were killed, so it is very likely that new Defence Secretary will resign soon.
If you were member of procurement commission of any reputable military, would you deal with such clowns?
The only reasonable selling pitch French and Brits could make is "buy our equipment or we will order U.S. to bomb the daylights out of you".