Podcasts · In Our Defence

AMCA's Real Challenge Isn't Stealth. It's Management. | In Our Defence | S3 | Ep 53

5 Jun 2026 · 54 min

India's Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft, or AMCA, is usually discussed as a fifth-generation stealth fighter: low observable design, internal weapons bays, sensor fusion, advanced engines, and all the cool stuff that makes defence nerds sit up straighter. But this episode of In Our Defence asks a slightly different question: is AMCA really about building a plane or about building the factory, institutions, and accountability structure needed to make that plane real? The Ministry of Defence's AMCA tender lays out an ambitious plan to rope in a private-sector industrial partner in order to create a fifth-generation aerospace manufacturing ecosystem. But then comes the big gap: who is the real project manager? ADA owns the design. The IAF owns the requirement. Private industry will build and integrate. Certification agencies will certify. GTRE-Safran's engine effort appears, for now, to be running on a separate track. So, if X owns A and Y owns B...Who owns the delay? In this episode of In Our Defence, host Dev Goswami and defence expert Sandeep Unnithan unpack why AMCA needs more than a good airframe. It needs the kind of mission-mode structure India built for the ATV/Arihant submarine programme - one that brings the alphabet soup of agencies together under real authority. We also get into the quirks of India's L1 bidding culture: sensible for many contracts, but possibly dangerous when applied to complex, high-risk, must-succeed strategic programmes like a fifth-generation fighter. Tune in! Produced by Taniya Dutta

The episode on the publisher’s site ↗ (opens in a new tab)