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India Could Actually Make Russia’s Su-57 Felon Dangerous
I’ve been hard on Russia’s Su-57 Felon for years, and for good reason.
The aircraft Russia markets as its answer to the F-22 Raptor has spent the entire Ukraine war playing standoff quarterback… lobbing long-range missiles from well behind the front line rather than kicking down the door of contested airspace.
That tells you everything you need to know about what the Kremlin actually believes about its survivability against modern air defenses, regardless of whatever the Sukhoi marketing brochure says.
But here’s where it gets interesting.
I made a video on this topic for my YouTube channel and apparently it made a splash in Indian defense circles, so I figured I’d write out a deeper analysis. Here’s the big question: What happens if India buys the Su-57E export variant and replaces its junk Russian avionics with high-quality Indian-developed systems?
What if India brings its own radar, its own electronic warfare suite, its own mission computers, and its own weapons integration to an airframe Russia can’t seem to fully modernize on its own?
The honest answer is that the result wouldn’t be an F-22 Raptor. But it also wouldn’t be the paper tiger the Felon currently resembles in Ukraine. It would be something more specific…
