That wasn't my point dude. Fact is: pick any large Army in the world, they will have their own Country's assault rifles as standard.
US: M4A1
Rus: AK-12
China: QBZ 95/191
UK: SA 80
If you see the bigger picture, arming a large army with phoren rifle isn't very good move by any Govt in the world as a lot of funds are given away which are never gonna return back. Another reason is Self Pride. These are particular reasons why India had chosen to go ahead with INSAS.
Now my question: What did we gain with our learnings??
PHASE 1: India adpots INSAS 1A. 1999 Kargil shows INSAS's shortcomings as a poor quality rifle with myriads of issues.
PHASE 2: INSAS 1B gets created that solves most of the issues with 1A instead of jamming and cracking of mags. Root cause: Poor Polymer used for mags that cannot withstand heavy torturous Army usage, poor quality of M85 Ball ammos created by OFB which mostly resulted in failure to feed and eject.
PHASE 3: Ammo quality is improved by OFB and max INSAS rifles are either repaired or replsced by 1B1. No one talks about how much INSAS improved since Kargil and top Army brass cook their Rotis on a false agenda of INSAS being faulty albeit due to phoren maal ka nasha.
PHASE 4: DRDO and OFB improve on INSAS making Excalibur which has vastly improved over INSAS in terms of functionality. Excalibur performs excellently during test but top brass is not impressed.
Finally INSAS's image is tarnished as a Global failure. Fun fact: most jamming of INSAS was due to poor maintenance practice by users themselves as they had previously used low maintenance SLRs and AKs.
I would like to bring all ya'll notice towards our rival CHINA here:
PHASE 1: China gets their AKM pattern rifle TOT from Soviet. They call it the Type 56. Mass production is made of this rifle and given to entire PLA.
View attachment 99037
This serves well for around 20 years but they do not stop.
PHASE 2: Seeing the shortfall of 7.62x39, China tries to modify the Type 56 to get more range by increasing barrel length of existing design alongwith some other mods like retractable stock. They call this Type 81s and intend to use this as their standard rifle.
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PHASE 3: Again after few years and running a parallel project of 5.8x42mm cartridge(after getting influenced by 5.45x39mm), China tries their hands on a bullpup design rifle using 7.62x39. Idea here is that it should have interchangeable parts with AK like bolt, mags, bolt carrier, etc. They mostly import this to US and get good feedback(be it in limited numbers). This is called Type 86s. The advent of a very popular bullpup rifle.
View attachment 99039
PHASE 4: Norinco goes full scale on QBZ development and the new 5.8x42 mm bullet. All sorts of tests are conducted and finally QBZ-95 gets selected as standard assault rifle for PLA and other forces. Also, a civilian version called T-97 NSR is created that chambers 5.56 NATO. Alongwith this, a sniper of same QB family called QBU-88 gets inducted too.
View attachment 99040
View attachment 99041
PHASE 5: China again does a lot of R&D( espionage) and finally modifies their existing rifle to now use conventional AR design. Not much is known but the rifle is called QBZ-191 and will replace QBZ-95.
View attachment 99043
As you can see, at no point did China abandon their rifle project, neither they got inclined towards Phoren rifles like India is doing.
This has saved them millions of dollars infact.
Had INSAS followed the same route and was supported by Army, we could've saved our money and kept our pride.
