BackDefence deal: India, US to cooperate on weapon systems
The two nations will speed up talks on working together on design and construction of jet engines and aircraft
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India and the US will look at cooperation in jet engine and aircraft carrier design and construction besides co-development and co-production of weapon systems, an Indian foreign ministry statement said on Thursday.
The statement, issued at the end of the three-day visit to India by US defence secretary Ashton Carter, said that Carter and defence minister Manohar Parrikar discussed the strategic partnership between the two countries and ways to deepen their defence relationship.
On Wednesday, India and the US renewed their 10-year defence cooperation pact, first signed in 2005, for another decade. The pact was signed by Parrikar and Carter.
It “builds upon the previous framework and successes to guide the bilateral defence and strategic partnership for the next 10 years. The new framework agreement provides avenues for high-level strategic discussions, continued exchanges between armed forces of both countries, and strengthening of defence capabilities", the statement said.
Carter and Parrikar also “reviewed the existing and emerging regional security dynamics", the statement said without elaborating.
Carter, who is on his first visit to India after taking office in February, arrived in India’s eastern port city of Visakhapatnam on Tuesday from an annual Asian security dialogue in Singapore organized by the International Institute of Strategic Studies think tank.
During his Singapore visit, Carter had expressed concerns about China’s land reclamation or island construction project in the South China Sea that he said would increase “the risk of miscalculation or conflict", according to Reuters. China and many of the countries in South-East Asia dispute maritime borders in the South China Sea. The US has announced a rebalance towards Asia to counter the rise of China and is looking at alliances in Asia to strengthen its strategy.
Former US defence secretary Leon Panetta had described India as the “lynchpin" of the US rebalance strategy during a visit to India in 2012 which received a cool response from India.
According to the Indian foreign ministry statement, Carter and Parrikar “agreed to expedite discussions to take forward cooperation on jet engines, aircraft carrier design and construction, and other areas."
“The two also agreed to pursue co-development and co-production projects that will offer tangible opportunities for American defence industries to build defence partnership with the Indian industries including in manufacturing under Make in India," the statement said.
During the January visit to India by US President Barack Obama, officials of the two countries agreed to set up a “working group to explore aircraft carrier technology, sharing and design, and also development of jet engine technology".
In an article that was published by many Indian newspapers in April, Ashley Tellis, senior associate at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, argued that collaborating on an aircraft carrier “would not only substantially bolster India’s naval combat capabilities but would also cement the evolving strategic bond between the US and India in a truly spectacular fashion for many decades to come."
“If the United States were to partner with India now in developing its next large-deck carrier, tentatively christened Visha... it will have contributed mightily to helping the Indian Navy meet the emerging Chinese naval threat while simultaneously becoming a net provider of security in the Indian Ocean.
“US assistance would also send a powerful signal to China and to all the other littoral states that US-Indian defence cooperation is intended to advance their highest mutual national interests, including preserving, as former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice once phrased it, an ‘Asian balance of power that favours freedom’," Tellis wrote in the article titled Making waves: Aiding India’s Next-Generation Aircraft Carrier.
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