India-United States defence cooperation has acquired an unenviable reputation in strategic circles for generating ambitious political announcements that fail to translate into industrial outcomes. Over the past two decades, successive administrations in New Delhi and Washington have unveiled defence technology partnerships and industrial collaborations promising to transform bilateral military ties, only for them to become bogged down in protracted negotiations, export-control restrictions, technology-transfer disputes and differing commercial expectations.
The irony is that the relationship itself has expanded considerably. Since 2002, India has acquired over $22 billion worth of U.S. defence equipment, including Apache and Chinook helicopters, C-17 and C-130J transport aircraft, P-8I maritime patrol aircraft, and M777 howitzers. While the US has become a major defence supplier, meaningful co-production and technology transfer remain elusive.
The recent impasse over General Electric’s (GE) F414 fighter engine, once hailed as the centrepiece of bilateral defence cooperation, is merely the latest — and arguably the most significant — illustration of the gap between political declarations and industrial outcomes. The estimated cost of each F414 engine has reportedly nearly tripled, rising from around ₹70 crore-80 crore to over ₹200 crore. GE has also sought an Indian investment of around $800 million (₹7,576 crore) to establish a dedicated production line.
Disagreements over technology transfer, intellectual property and export controls have further complicated negotiations. Hindustan Aeronautics Limited is negotiating procurement and licensed manufacture of the F414 for the Tejas Mk-II, while the Defence Research and Development Organisation and Aeronautical Development Agency are separately engaging GE over the same engine for the proposed Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA) and the Indian Navy’s Twin-Engine Deck-Based Fighter. The result is a web of interlinked negotiations proving difficult to resolve.
The F414 programme was unveiled during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 2023 Washington visit as the flagship achievement of the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET), intended to symbolise a shift from a buyer-seller relationship towards genuine defence-industrial collaboration. Instead, it has become another illustration of the enduring gap between political ambition and industrial reality. Nor is this an isolated instance.
The first serious attempt to institutionalise defence cooperation came in 2012 with the Defence Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI). Conceived to promote co-development and co-production, it generated years of meetings but delivered no significant military capability before fading into irrelevance.
Its successor, iCET (2022), expanded the agenda to semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies, telecommunications, space, biotechnology, drones and resilient supply chains. Among its principal defence initiatives was the GE F414 programme, whose unresolved negotiations have become emblematic of the wider difficulty in translating political ambition into industrial outcomes.
The India-United States Defence Acceleration Ecosystem (INDUS-X), launched in 2023 to link defence start-ups, academia and industry, likewise generated enthusiasm but has yet to produce noteworthy co-development outcomes. Other prospective collaborations have fared little better. Discussions on co-producing the Javelin anti-tank guided missile have remained unresolved for more than a decade, while the proposed collaboration on the General Dynamics Stryker infantry combat vehicle has suffered a similar fate. Both now appear increasingly likely to be shelved quietly.
Even India’s 2024 acquisition of 31 MQ-9B SkyGuardian and SeaGuardian remotely piloted aircraft from General Atomics through the U.S. government’s Foreign Military Sales route for around $3.5 billion has resembled a purchase rather than the industrial collaboration originally envisaged. Its promised package — including local assembly, partial manufacture and a domestic maintenance, repair and overhaul ecosystem — has yet to materialise.
Taken together, these outcomes reveal a pattern that is difficult to ignore. Successive India-U.S. defence initiatives have been heralded as “historic”, “transformational” or “game-changing”, yet implementation has repeatedly fallen well short of the rhetoric.
At the heart of this disconnect lie fundamentally different philosophies underpinning the two countries’ defence sectors. India views defence partnerships as a means of acquiring advanced technologies, strengthening indigenous manufacturing and reducing dependence on imported matériel.
The U.S., by contrast, regards advanced defence technologies as strategic assets governed by stringent export-control regulations, particularly the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), under which the release of technical data and manufacturing know-how remains subordinate to broader security considerations.
The unresolved F414 negotiations illustrate this divide. India has sought manufacturing expertise and intellectual property to build long-term domestic capability, while the U.S. remains constrained by export-control regimes regardless of Washington’s broader strategic objectives. The consequence is a defence relationship that has matured as a procurement partnership but far less as a mechanism for transferring capability and strengthening India’s atmanirbharta.
Despite the undeniable expansion of India-U.S. strategic ties — marked by increasingly sophisticated military exercises, logistics agreements and enhanced interoperability — the industrial dimension of the relationship has yet to keep pace. The alphabet soup of DTTI, iCET and INDUS-X has largely disappointed, leaving officials in both countries looking to the proposed Reciprocal Defence Procurement Agreement (RDPA) as the next test of industrial cooperation.
The U.S. believes that the RDPA could reshape bilateral defence trade by granting reciprocal access to each other’s procurement markets. Yet, that reciprocity could expose India’s still-nascent defence manufacturers to direct competition with America’s larger, wealthier and technologically more advanced defence giants. Whether this creates genuine balance or simply institutionalises unequal competition is another matter altogether.
Rahul Bedi is a defence reporter and analyst based in New Delhi and Chandigarh
Published - July 15, 2026 12:08 am IST