US-India Defense Cooperation – A Short History
Given their background, relations in the defense arena are likely to move forward slowly.
New Delhi is expected to procure arms worth $100 billion over the next decade. India became the world’s biggest weapons importer in 2010, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and it could potentially be a large future market for American defense contractors. In 2013, India imported $1.9 billion worth of U.S. military equipment, with the U.S. displacing Russia as India’s biggest arms seller for that year.
A short review of American attitudes towards propping up India’s military suggests that the U.S. desire for closer defense ties has ebbed and flowed, depending on how much strategic value different presidential administrations have assigned to New Delhi. Thus, closer defense cooperation – despite an increase in arms sales – between the United States and India is far from certain.
At the beginning of the Cold War, the Truman administration maintained a lukewarm relationship with India and refused an increase in economic and food aid. President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a closer relationship with then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and U.S. foreign assistance to India was doubled during the Eisenhower administration, yet this was overshadowed by the United States’ mutual defense agreement with Pakistan in 1954. Eisenhower’s successor John F. Kennedy also agreed to increase aid to India, although, like his predecessors, he was particularly irritated over Nehru’s non-alignment policy.
Nevertheless, the Kennedy/Johnson administration also briefly sought in India an ally against communist China and even considered encouraging an Indian nuclear program. The U.S. began to hand out generous helpings of grant military assistance, arms sales, and military production facilities (the details are still classified to this day) during 1963 and 1964. However, with Nixon’s new China policy in the 1970s, closer U.S. ties with Pakistan, and the signing of an Indo-Soviet friendship treaty, New Delhi was again delegated to the second tier of U.S. foreign policy priorities.
The Carter administration openly opposed India’s nuclear program and this U.S. policy continued until 1998, when India tested nuclear devices, in response to which the United States imposed economic sanctions. The event that transformed Indo-American defense relations was U.S. President Bill Clinton’s decision to publicly support India’s position during the Kargil War in Kashmir with Pakistan in 1999. This opened the way to the first serious military-to-military dialogue between the two countries since the 1960s.
The administration of President George W. Bush continued to forge closer military ties and in 2004, Bush and Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee agreed to Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP), which led to expanded military-to-military training and exercises, although the only formal military component of the agreement was cooperation on missile defense. The NSSP acted as a catalyst for the U.S.-India nuclear agreement of July 2005, in which Washington accepted India as a de-facto nuclear weapons state.
In June 2005, India and the United States signed a ten-year defense framework that called for collaboration in multilateral operations, expanded two-way defense trade, increased opportunities for technology transfers and co-production, expanded collaboration related to missile defense, and the establishment of a bilateral Defense Procurement and Production Group. Yet the agreement did not quite meet expectations and India and the United States neither significantly deepened their defense cooperation – despite some advanced weapons transfers such as maritime patrol aircrafts – nor did they become closer strategic partners.
As Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta note in their book Arming Without Aiming – India’s Military Modernization.
Over an eight-year period there were four tests of the Bush administration proposition that India and the United States could be strategic partners and that India ought to be encouraged to be more strategically assertive, with American assistance. In three cases, one side or the other decided that cooperation was riskier or less important than going it alone, and the two countries took turns in saying no (…)
Despite the rhetoric, the core of the problem was that India and the United States did not share any common strategic vision. The United States was consumed with its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as a consequence placed a premium on its relationship with Pakistan. Additionally, the U.S. military bureaucracy made cooperation during those years more difficult. There are two American global commands that deal with South Asia, CENTCOM and PACOM. They respectively have vested interests in either putting the relationship with Pakistan (in the case of CENTCOM) and India (in the case of PACOM) first. Because of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, CENTCOM’s views, since it was the combat command nominally in charge of both conflicts, often prevailed in arguments, further isolating India.
This lack of joint strategic vision is still evident during the Obama Administration, although ties have somewhat improved, particularly given the winding down of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan and the somewhat reduced strategic importance of Pakistan for the United States. During the October 2014 visit of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Washington DC, both sides agreed to, “expand military-to-military partnerships, including expert exchanges, dialogues, and joint training and exercises.” The U.S. also pledged to help India with its plan of founding a National Defense University.
While in India in January 2015, U.S. President Barrack Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi agreed to pursue “stronger and expanded bilateral defense cooperation,” and also renewed the ten-year Defense Framework Agreement. As part of this framework New Delhi and Washington agreed to the joint production of low-end weapons. Arms sales constitute a major component of how the United States envisions a future strategic partnership with India.
Weapons sales have indeed increased over the last couple of years. From 2005 to 2008, New Delhi acquired military equipment worth $3 billion. From 2009 to 2013, that amount rose to $11 billion. The United States is now India’s third largest defense supplier, behind Russia at nearly $30 billion, and France at $20 billion. However, India’s arms procurement process, which requires offsets and technology transfers, will make it difficult for U.S. defense contractors, since they generally restrict such transfers.
In sum, with India’s desire to modernize its armed forces and to acquire modern weapons technology (such as UAVs and cyber warfare capabilities), U.S.-India arms sales will certainly grow in the years ahead. However, given India’s slow moving bureaucracy, and a long and weary arms procurements process, paired with a general Indian suspicion – deriving from historical experience – of the United States intentions, defense cooperation between the two countries is more likely to follow a slow evolution rather than a revolution.