Pentagon report: Indian Navy's new submarine hunter is ineffective

An unexpected and worrying question mark has been placed over the Indian Navy’s expensive new Boeing P-8I multi-mission maritime aircraft (MMA), which were bought to allow the navy to monitor the Indian Ocean and to destroy enemy submarines that it detected.

According to a Bloomberg news report, the US Department of Defense (Pentagon) has found that the US Navy’s version of the aircraft, the P-8A, is ineffective at both surveillance, and in detecting and destroying submarines.

Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s chief weapons inspector, has reported that the P-8A “is not effective for the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance mission and is not effective for wide area anti-submarine search”, according to Bloomberg, which cites Gilmore’s annual report on major weapons.

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