Senior international and defence researcher at RAND, Peter Parachini, and Vivek Mishra, Deputy Director of the Strategic Studies Programme at the Observer Research Foundation, recently co-authored an article titled ‘Boosting U.S.-India Private Sector Defense Industrial Cooperation’ published on January 14, 2025. The article explores the evolving defence cooperation between India and the United States. Parachini and Mishra note that India aims to reduce its reliance on traditional defence partners, such as Russia, while pursuing diversification in its defence relationships. The emergence of China as a regional and global power and its implications for both India and the United States have further driven efforts to strengthen defence collaboration between the two countries. Parachini and Mishra call for a particular focus on India’s private defence sector. They, however, also point to significant challenges faced in deepening this collaboration and argue that structural differences between the defence industries of India and the United States currently plague all initiatives. Furthermore, American corporations face regulatory hurdles, while India’s defence industrial sector is characterised primarily by public sector enterprises with little competition engendering a lack of efficiency and pace. Additionally, technology transfer restrictions and concerns over intellectual property have further slowed the pace of collaboration. Despite these obstacles, Parachini and Mishra point to developments in India-U.S. defence trade like the U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology and the India-U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem which could point to steady progress and positive prospects for future cooperation. At the same time, they call for deeper analysis and study of the reasons why collaboration has been slow and faced as many hurdles as it has, compared to other partnerships with states like Israel.
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