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New Lockheed F-21 Fighter Jet Joins India’s Perpetual Negotiations

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Lockheed has offered India a new F-21 fighter jet.

The F-21 will have some parts and technology from the F-35 and the F-22 stealth fighter.

The F-21 seems to be a modified version of the F-16.

The F-21 will have new AESA (anti-stealth) radar and cockpit electronics that similar to the F-35 cockpit.

There are now seven planes in the running for a possible $15-20 billion order of 110 jets.

F/A-18
Rafale
Gripen E
Typhoon
Su-35
MiG-35
F-21/F-16 Block 70

India has been exploring for about a decade deals to buy the French Rafale fighters and setting up a joint stealth fighter project with Russia.

In January 2012, Dassault’s Rafale was announced as India’s combat aircraft of choice. There were negotiations for two years over a possible 126 Rafale jets. In 2015, thirty-six Rafale jets were declared to be purchased. However, the Rafale jets have not been delivered.

India considered buying Lockheed F-16s before choosing but not buying the Rafale.

The F-21 could be India’s pathway to the stealth F-35 fighter.

SOURCES- Lockheed, Nasdaq, Wikipedia, Youtube, Twitter, Popular Mechanics

Written By Brian Wang. Nextbigfuture.com

53 thoughts on “New Lockheed F-21 Fighter Jet Joins India’s Perpetual Negotiations”

  1. If you want more people to have work, Trump’s policies have succeeded admirably. If you want fewer people to have work, especially young people, support a $15 hour minimum wage.

  5. Not a Republican, but your comment saying the welfare mom lifted herself up by the bootstraps is contradictory. Agree with the rest of the comment and am glad for your acquaintances success.

  6. Their total market is export + domestic. Whether they’re currently serving their domestic market or not (e.g. relying on imports instead), when exports die, so will imports (assuming everyone else stops exports too).

    Then they’ll have to serve their domestic market.

    Yes. Which proves my initial point.

    So their total market won’t shrink that much.

    Wrong. You can’t sell $1,500 Export Goods you were selling to the US to your average Chinese consumer. You can only sell to them the same thing for say, $150 or so.

    You’re confusing volume with value.

    In other countries (except maybe US), the domestic demand is much smaller, so once exports die, there is less to replace them with. So their total market will shrink more.

    Yup.

  8. I may be a bit biased, being an engineer who grew up with relatives in the building trades, but seriously: Plumbing isn’t that challenging most of the time. You can find youtube videos to explain all of it.

    I hired a plumber to install my jacuzzi tub, but that’s because I didn’t fancy trying to carry it through the house at the age of 60. Not because the actual piping and valves were all that challenging.

    Now, mudding drywall joints? That’s a specialized skill, requires practice to do a remotely good job.

  9. Being considered special is subjective and arbitrary. Data scientist are successful(well paid) not because they consider themselves special, but because their labors are in demand. Their “specialness”, real or imagined, is separate from whether they’re actually useful or not.

  10. Yeah, I’ve explained to my son that, while you might be able to launch a rocket that way, it would do a bit more than blow over the pool furniture. 😉

    We still get a kick out of the series, though.

  11. > I don’t get what your beef is.

    It’s specifically regarding the “barking up the wrong tree” in this sentence (from your earlier post):

    > Thus, China is barking up the wrong tree by investing so much in robots to continue to support its exporting industries.

    More details below:

    > WHY would people in Country A import something from Country B when their own robots can make that something?

    No reason. On that part I agree. But now I think I may be looking at a different set of trees than the ones you were referring to.

    I think you may be talking about export vs domestic per se. My previous understanding was robots for export vs robots for domestic products. Then my objection was, since the robots for both are essentially the same, then it’s the same tree, and therefore can’t be the wrong tree.

    Now, if indeed you’re talking about export vs domestic regardless of robots, then please explain how China’s focus on export prevents them from shifting to the domestic market when export dries up?
    And if that’s still not what you’re talking about, then please clarify which “tree” you think China is barking at, which one do you think they should be barking at, and how does barking at the former stop/delay/etc them from barking at the latter when the time comes?

  12. > what does ‘global demand’ have to do with anything?
    > That makes ZERO sense.

    Their total market is export + domestic. Whether they’re currently serving their domestic market or not (e.g. relying on imports instead), when exports die, so will imports (assuming everyone else stops exports too). Then they’ll have to serve their domestic market. And since their domestic market is currently a big chunk of the total global market, it can’t be that much smaller than their current export market. The result is their domestic market will largely replace their export market, so their total market won’t shrink that much.

    Let’s say, for example, if:
    global demand = 100
    china domestic demand = 50
    china production = 60

    Whether currently it’s export = 60, domestic sales = 0; or export = 30, domestic sales = 30; or any other balance, when exports die, it’ll be exports = 0, domestic sales = 50, so their total market would only shrink from 60 to 50.

    Furthermore, their domestic demand can grow by then, and grow further afterwards.
    (I’m not sure if these numbers hold for consumer products, but IIRC energy products and steel were something along those lines.)

    In other countries (except maybe US), the domestic demand is much smaller, so once exports die, there is less to replace them with. So their total market will shrink more.

  13. You are setting up a straw man that doesn’t apply.

    With robots, whether they make 5 million or 5 doesn’t matter much in a world of automated mass customization of orders.

    And enough others would stop taking overseas orders even if you did, thus raising shipping costs. What? They going to charge you the same shipping freight for your container and 400 others on a super container carrier that normally carries 5,000 but can’t anymore because there is no demand?

    THEN follows the politics, as the ‘pro-Cheap Import’ folks at home wither away financially along with their membership.

    Rinse and repeat feedback loop as per above.

  14. So… you can’t be successful just because you are one of the special people. Unless the special person is a data scientist or AI researcher.

    Isnt’ that just a change in who is special?

  15. I sell widgets.

    My local market buys 32 widgets per year. If I set up to make widgets (arrange parts purchase, hire some time on some multipurpose equipment, get a local to pack it all in boxes, get the boxes printed…) it comes out to $300 each.

    But in the republic of central ethnia there is a factory that serves the world and makes 500 000 widgets per year. They have specialized equipment and economy of scale and can make a widget for $100 each.

    Shipping costs are $20 each if I have then sent in a container with 30 widgets that I share with the local wodget distributor.

    So why would I make them locally? Just because there is a chance that in 20 years time a war between Central Ethnia and the North Ethnian Caliphate could disrupt my supply line?

  16. What I fail to see is how is China “barking up the wrong tree” if the robots for export and domestic goods are essentially the same.

    WHY would people in Country A import something from Country B when their own robots can make that something?

    And especially in China’s case, their domestic market accounts for a very big chunk of global demand

    As far as nations satisfying their local demand with local production, what does ‘global demand’ have to do with anything?

    even if exports dry up, their market won’t shrink nearly as much as for other countries

    That makes ZERO sense. Their export market dries up so their export volume dries up right along side it. Ergo, their export market is toast. So what do you mean it won’t shrink nearly as much as for other countries? <– that totally makes zero sense, btw.

    In short, you are making the argument that was in my very first paragraph:

    In the new global automated economy, the winners will be those with the best robots who can serve all their domestic needs, not countries who can develop a marketable specialism in exporting goods. And even if they did specialize, they would still have to move production as close as possible to the target market, ideally co-locate it there.

    So, I don’t get what your beef is.

  17. So why would everyone have to move away from centralized manufacturing centers to moving production closer to the customers?

    Why would everyone continue to ship crâp over 5,000 miles via supply chains that could be so easily disrupted?

  20. Oh, I concur. I toured ESB’s Georgian House Museum in Dublin a few years ago and they made it abundantly clear how, hmm, less than self-fulfilling the servant’s jobs were.

    I’m not advocating we all become servants for the rich folks, not at all. I’m just saying that many people who might afford them (or more of them) are not going to make up the difference in jobs, especially given how expensive a living wage is (which I perceive as, very roughly, what is needed to be able to afford their share of the rent, a balanced diet, transportation, be able to get medical care, and be able to get further their education and training to seek upward mobility). I throw in that last because I once knew a former welfare mom who managed to really lift herself up by her bootstraps.

    And it’s not just servants. There are any number of other things society would like to see people doing, but they are not being done by humans (or as many humans) because, in no particular order, 1) they are a lower priority among many, 2) the expense of supporting a human being to do them, and 3) the increasing functionality and availability of labor saving devices. Only one of those 3 is mitigated by more people being available for other work.

    In fifty years that government building might again have manicured lawns, shrubs, and flowers . . . but only if the automation to do it is affordable. And that’s even if employment levels drop below 50%.

  21. What I fail to see is how is China “barking up the wrong tree” if the robots for export and domestic goods are essentially the same. Where one sells the product has nothing to do with to manufacturing systems, as long as the product is the same. Now, if the product changed, then one might indeed have a problem – depending on how flexible those robots and other systems are.

    (To clarify, I’m referring specifically to the last paragraph of your previous post, the one I replied to earlier.)

    The other problem I can glean from you posts is if the market shrinks. Then they won’t need as many robots. But as long as the market is there, one makes the most of it. And especially in China’s case, their domestic market accounts for a very big chunk of global demand, so even if exports dry up, their market won’t shrink nearly as much as for other countries. So again, I don’t see how are they “barking up the wrong tree”.

  22. So why would everyone have to move away from centralized manufacturing centers to moving production closer to the customers? Are you predicting a rise in political barriers to trade?

    Shipping costs are sometimes mentioned, but they are completely trivial for anything short of furniture. eg. A number I remember is that the cost of moving a pair of jeans from a warehouse in Guangzhou to a warehouse in Sydney is 10 cents per pair. Obviously if you send 1 pair it costs at lot. But a shipping container with 40 tonnes of clothes only costs $3k. At say 1 kg per jeans that’s only 7.5c. A bit of fork lift action at each end and there you are.

    Anyway, it doesn’t take much economy of scale for it to cost less to make a pair of jeans at least 10 cents cheaper at a central location (whatever nation that happens to be) compared to a separate small factory in each city.

  23. So if it’s a Godwin’s law violation that means it’s inevitable as soon as the topic of Mars colonies starts up?
    Or is it inevitable once someone starts talking about Elon Musk. I thought that was Tony Stark?

  26. Why do you specify that the ones in the hinterlands? Why not the ones in the cities?

    Could it be that you find the hinterland poor to be of a political stance that you disagree with? The wrong religion? The wrong race?

  27. I suspect that a big issue is that “a living wage” has seriously changed meaning over the time you are looking at.

    A century ago, a maid was given a room to sleep in (maybe share with the cook), food to eat, and enough money to buy a few treats per week, maybe a new dress every 6 months. You were probably looking at the equivalent cost of $100/week.

    Google “wages of maid 1900” gives me numbers of about 20 pounds/year (=60 USD/week) for England.

    Add in the fact that there was no dishwasher/clotheswashing machines, no vacuum cleaner, and that the maid was saving the employers maybe 40 to 50 hours of work per week, and yes people were willing to pay that.

    With modern machines and chemical cleaners, combined with changes in fashion and furniture design, the maid is saving the employer 5 hours of work per week. And will want $800 per week. (Maybe less if you live with access to 3rd world workers)

    So no maids.

  28. Rubbish. Any sensible adult can replace a washer or float valve with no trouble at all.

    OK, doing a hot water system or something is a much more risky leap into the unknown, but that’s not the “most common tasks”.

  30. There is a huge demand for data scientists and AI researchers etc. The minimum wage folks should stop crying and get an education in a field that is in demand. It’s not reasonable to expect the world roll back to some “golden age” when one could be successful just being one of the “special” people. It wasn’t any better in the past, they were as destitute then as now except there were other people from other “tribes” they could point to who were in even rougher shape-misery loves company.

  31. No free riders. The poorly educated and irrational folks in the hinterlands should be left alone to reap what they sow.

  32. Hahahahahahah!

    I am now thinking of the James Bond movie with the fake caldera opening up for the rockets to take off and land on the Japanese island.

  33. Only the inept tinkers with the pluming in their homes with only “common sense” as backup. The average person can manage a great many tasks given expert advise, direction and access to specialty tools.

  35. You just explained the difference.

    What you don’t seem to see (let me know if misinterpreted you here) is that the market for the latter is going to dry up. THAT is a problem for major exporter countries. At least in the short term.

    In the medium-to-long term, it will create a more pseudo-autarkic world, which will increase the incidences of warfare, actually.

  36. Right. See the rockets on the right side? They fly through the rock ceiling of said enormous underground cavern?

  37. I can see part of the problem out the window. I work near a large public building that has many workers in it. Yet the grounds around it are choked with weeds and vines that have killed off everything but the trees. I’ve seen pictures from the 1950’s when the building was surrounded by immaculate lawns, perfectly pruned shrubs, and carefully planted flower beds. People would like to have it still be that way. The problem being that no one now is willing to pay a living wage to groundskeepers.

    There are a lot of multi-millionaires living near me. Yet, while they might have a maid service every week or two, and someone who swings by to cut the grass, they don’t employ servants, although, a century or more ago, people far less affluent than they are, would have. Modern conveniences mean they don’t need them enough to justify paying a living wage unless they are infirm or become far wealthier than they are.

    Also, unemployed people after automation really gets its teeth in won’t be automation owners. The recent failure evidenced by so many government workers to even have a couple of paychecks squirreled away should prove that. Dystopia? The automation owners might boast some philanthropists, but it won’t be enough, and the government owning the automation directly would be both inefficient and smack of socialism.

    The only way I see jobs being available in the numbers needed will be if man-machine interfaces (perhaps like Musk’s Neuralink) become a big thing.

  38. There are too many people who can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and never get wet.

    Although I do suspect that governments may offer a lot of low cost education, or perhaps even pay people to attend, as much to delay their entry to an increasingly competitive work force as for any other reason.

  40. Explain the difference between “robots to continue to support its exporting industries” and “robotics to produce goods and provide services”. As I understand it, the former can largely be repurposed for the latter. In particular, “exporting industries” and “produce goods” seem the same – the only difference is where you sell the product.

  41. For a while, it’ll indeed be a catch up race between automation and an ever expanding range of jobs and problems. But it has been described as a tide vs a mountain. Perhaps it would be more accurate to describe as a tide vs an erupting volcano, but either way, eventually the tide will overtake.

    The integration and real-world interaction problems do seem difficult, but so did NLP and autonomous driving, not that long ago. Specifically, real-world interaction is roughly where autonomous driving was shortly after the first DARPA driving challenge.

    I think we’re not that far off from a general-purpose humanoid robotic platform with similar dexterity. Once the hardware and OS mature, it’s not too hard to add an API and some libraries. Then companies and people can write their own software solutions for whatever problems they need solving.

    Smartphone apps exploded once the hardware and APIs were capable enough. The same can happen with robotics. That would help solve the “number of experts” problem.

    But my “concern” is reverse. With automation expanding to manufacturing, transportation, etc, we might find not a shortage of jobs, but a shortage of willing workers, once people’s daily needs become far cheaper to fill. I see a few possibilities:
    1. People will work a reduced number of hours to cover whatever needs still remain.
    2. Import and train workers from poorer countries.
    3. Wages may also drop, so people will still need to work just as much.
    4. Profits rise, prices remain.

  43. Seems like we need to make sure there’s affordable education at every level to make sure any displaced person, anywhere in the country isn’t scared away from gaining the skills needed to be effective in the future by exorbitant tuitions. Already I think a lot of the red-state fear is from the lack of affordable educational opportunity.

  44. In the new global automated economy, the winners will be those with the best robots who can serve all their domestic needs, not countries who can develop a marketable specialism in exporting goods. And even if they did specialize, they would still have to move production as close as possible to the target market, ideally co-locate it there.

    So, worldwide international trade of manufactured products characterized by deep and long supply chain networks will shrivel up. This means nations that overly depend upon exports right now for their economies are in for a rougher time in adjustment than those who have net deficits of goods like the US does. (There is no real trade deficit for the US, btw. Every $1 that is spent on stuff imported in is balanced by the sale of investment vehicles paid by money coming back in. In fact, there is a net surplus when you look at it this way.)

    The only thing the robo ships will be shipping will be refined raw materials mostly.
    Thus, China is barking up the wrong tree by investing so much in robots to continue to support its exporting industries. They should be doing what the Japanese, Americans and Euroweenies are doing instead: mostly developing robotics to produce goods and provide services at home.

  48. Under the direction of a functioning brain and a normal household tool box the average person can be a competent plumber for the majority of the most common tasks. And has been since brazing copper pipes stopped being a necessary requirement.
    But 95% of the population can’t be bothered trying, so they call a plumber.

  49. The creative & integrative isn’t as safe as one might think.
    Ex: Under the direction of expert systems and a tool rental shop the average person could be a competent plumber for most common tasks. You might only need an actual plumber for large or edge jobs.

  50. Yeah, it’s possible that AI and robotics move towards a great unification of specialized approaches, resulting in nimbler, more dexterous robots and AI systems.

    Nevertheless, every time we find an algorithmic solution for a real life problem, we find a lot more problems associated to it that have no automatic solution, just by looking at the solution space (e.g. design, validation, manufacturing, maintenance, retirement, etc), plus collateral problems that emerge by using automatic solutions (like security,privacy and governance). These problems aren’t just of abstraction, but of interaction and bodily movements in the real world.

    There is no other general solver for that meta-problem of integrating several solutions into a coherent new one than humans, as limited as we may be.

    We are working at automating more and more things, but as the problems become varied and specialized, so do their particular subproblems, keeping the number of non automated problems much bigger than the number of experts actually solving the problem, or able to automate it.

    The technical debt of automation is enormous and growing. If that situation remains, there simply will be a need for skilled humans for all the foreseeable future.

  51. Robots are getting increasingly nimble, while narrow AI is solving increasingly complex problems. High-end prosthetic hands can now approximate human hands pretty well, and there are prototypes with neuro-tactile feedback. On the AI front, autonomous cars and natural language processing were thought near-impossible just over a decade ago.

    Sure, the “easily automated” jobs will go first, but that line keeps moving. Don’t think the other jobs are safe. They’ll just take a little longer. Even creativity is being tackled by AI researchers, already showing some success.

    But consider the other side of the equation. Mining, manufacturing, and transportation are among the areas most likely to be automated in the near future. They’re already starting to get automated. Agriculture is already a low-human-labor industry, and it’s being automated further. Fuel for energy is basically mining and transportation (other energy costs are more difficult to remove). Some human-facing services are being automated too (particularly food & retail).

    Beyond some automation threshold, even without the more difficult stuff, most daily human needs could be provided with very little human labor. At that point, the need for money for the average folk may be greatly reduced. And with it, the need for jobs. The main need for money that will remain is housing and luxury. When construction gets automated, even housing may become cheap, except for premium locations. But those can count as luxury.

  52. While AI will certainly take a lot of jobs, it will do it mostly in two fronts: easily automated information processing tasks (redundant or mechanic white collar jobs) and easily automated blue collar jobs (factories, truck driving, cashiers, etc.). Creative (e.g. developers, engineers, analysts, researchers), integrative (like plumbers and repairmen), human centric jobs (e.g. managers, customer service and relations) will remain stronger than ever.

    That’s a big chunk of human held jobs nowadays becoming obsolete though, and one has to wonder what the suddenly jobless will do. Probably the same as others have: find something else to do.

    But it won’t be easy, and it won’t be pretty in the meantime.

    Besides robots and AI won’t take all manual jobs either. There are plenty of them that require human motor and mental skills in creative combinations, the “integrative” jobs I mentioned above. Those will remain strong in the foreseeable future, as long as robots are too specialized and unable to not only make the individual parts, but the integration of them in creative ways.

    Finally, robots and automation create opportunities for new, never existing jobs, which can grow as the need of people designing, controlling and fixing the new machines grow.

    In general, a technical solution for a problem becomes another problem on its own, requiring some human creativity and intelligent combination of motor and mental skills.

    So, we’ll remain necessary.

  53. At which point the facade of “futurism” falls away to reveal a gigantic Republican who does free PR for the Party because who wants to actually know things about economics or capitalism, let alone devise solutions that actually work, when the rich will just give you money for blaming the poor for being poor.

    Nevermind the fact no one would ever play a video game where anything approaching poverty was even possible. Plug in to EVE, the capitalist dream game, where everyone starts with free health care, a free space car, free gasoline, 50000 space bucks, and a half-dozen work permits, none of which besides the space bucks the game will let you lose, and even then, there is no debt and no debt collectors.

    I get that the average white kid starts life at age 18 worth over $40,000 but for those of us who daddies didn’t buy us a car, a house, and a college degree, life is a little different. But that’s all irrelevant to the hilariously blockheaded subset of STEM grads who don’t think economics, sociology, psychology, culture, or politics is real because it’s not easy to plug into a graphing calculator.

    Have fun dying of cancer on Mars under the boot of your bipolar union-busting apartheid overlord Elongated Muskrat in his anarcho-capitalist graveyard euphemistically called a colony. Your bodies will make soil for the next colony, which actually has a chance at being a success, as it will not be an attempt to remake Rhodesia on Mars.

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