

Whatever You Do, Don’t Buy Your Aircraft Carrier from Russia - smacktoward
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/whatever-you-do-dont-buy-your-aircraft-carrier-from-russia-e0f6707cb4ee

======
beamatronic
What are the geopolitical risks if India were to buy large quantities of
state-of-the-art weapons from the United States?

~~~
smacktoward
I doubt there would be any significant risks; India and Russia don't share a
land border, and Russia's more concerned with China (whom India has also had a
contentious relationship with) and Eastern Europe.

The biggest barrier to such a shift would probably just be domestic inertia.
India has a long history of buying Russian weapons, going back all the way to
the early Cold War (see
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Russia_relations#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Russia_relations#Soviet_Union_and_India)).
This would mean they've built up a lot of infrastructure, training and
doctrine revolving around the characteristics of Russian hardware, so they're
unlikely to just drop all that overnight.

That being said, they have been moving to diversify their portfolio of arms
suppliers; the Indian Air Force operates the French Dassault Mirage 2000
alongside its Russian-designed Su-30s and MiG-21s, for instance, and
domestically-designed aircraft will be mixed in as well if they can ever get
their HAL Tejas project
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_Tejas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_Tejas))
finished.

