India is shifting its arms industry model by importing more US weapons, but that doesn’t mean it wants to rely on it forever, Reuters reports.
Faced with regional challenges, India has been working on diversifying its weapons import sources. During the Cold War, India was almost exclusively reliant on Soviet weaponry, making it closely aligned to Russia despite not being a Communist country itself.
India is the world’s biggest arms importer but almost all of its major weapons purchases now include provisions for joint manufacture or technology transfer, irrespective of which country it is dealing with.
With technology transfers, India is using the same model as China. It can leverage expensive contracts to its advance refine its domestic production.
Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has said that India intends to order weapons from the domestic arms industry worth over $100 billion over the next decade.
With the Russian War in Ukraine, India has had difficulty stocking its supplies and has admitted that it needs Western arms to stay competitive. The purchase of the French Rafael included a large portion on technology trainer, which is what
Having a domestic arms industry and importing a minimal amount of foreign weapons is a key factor in determining if a country is a great power. The US, UK, Russia, France, and Germany all have weapon system produced domestically.
