“India’s Defence Tech Dilemma: Friends Who Share—and Friends Who Sell”
(Rafael Multirole Comabt Aircraft) India’s defence procurement history is a useful laboratory for understanding different exporters’ approaches to technology transfer. Over seven decades New Delhi has received everything from fully licensed Soviet production lines to buy-and-offset Western packages. Two broad patterns stand out: Russia (and earlier the Soviet Union) has been prepared to give India deep access, local assembly and licensed production; France has often accepted industrial partnerships and meaningful offsets (and, more recently, parts-making in India); the United States, by contrast, has favoured controlled sales, foreign-military-sales (FMS) frameworks and strict export controls that limit transfer of the most sensitive technologies. Below I unpack why those differences exist, and use concrete Indian examples — MiG, Su-30, Mirage, Rafale and T-90 — to illustrate the political, industrial and legal drivers. 1) Histori...