Content area
Full Text
Although most naval commentators seem having barely noticed it, a truly impressive naval shipbuilding race is currently taking place thorough the Asian continent. As many as five countries are simultaneously involved in ambitious naval construction programmes, building their respective new classes of air-defence destroyers.
These efforts combine not only the best naval design and shipbuilding capabilities as available in each country, but also deeply involve their respective most advanced defence industries in the manufacture, integration and in some selected cases even development of highly sophisticated weapons systems, that are intended to open up new operational scenarios to the national naval forces. As such, the current situation in Asia could well be compared, both in technological terms as well as in view of its political and strategic implications, to the "dreadnought race" that swept across Europe and the US in the first decade of the past century. Indeed, a strikingly similar aspect is the overall forward-oriented (some would perhaps say technologically frenzied) approach, whereby the completion of a new small class of relatively few modern vessels is immediately followed by the construction of a further improved design, and so on. This approach stands in very strong contrast to current Western practices, whereby on the average there is an interval of at least ten-twelve years between the commissioning of the last unit in a class, and the delivery of the first unit of the follow-on class.
The following sections provide an overview of the current status of the major regional programmes.
India
During the late '90s the Indian Navy completed the first batch of the DELHI-class destroyers (a.k.a. Project 15). This project actually dates back to 1977 (!), when it was first authorised by the Government; it then took ten years to lay down the first hull and another ten years to commission her (1997), while the third and last vessel joined the fleet in early 2001. Most of this significant delay was due to the dissolution of the Soviet-era industrial base, which was expected to supply a large part of the components.
The three ships, built by Mazagon Dock in Bombay, were designed with Russian assistance by the Severnoye Design Bureau, and their hull lines thus bear some resemblance with both the RAIJPUT-class ("Kashin"-mod) destroyers...