Defence tech: A case for collaboration with India's industry base

India needs to identify its choice of advanced tech, which can serve military and commercial applications. More importantly, India should aspire to become a creator of tech

Seven decades into Independence, India continues to fix its defence-technology base. Though the country’s relatively dated defence industry is catching up, reactive responses to indigenisation efforts make import the only viable solution. While the Indian Air Force’s depleting aircraft number is drawing much public scrutiny, the readiness levels of other major platforms such as tanks, guns, and air defence systems are no better. A recent report on the procurement of T-72 tank engines from Russia’s Rosoboronexport highlights India’s high reliance on imports, despite having operated this platform for over three decades now.

What explains India’s inability to transform its defence technology base, when global trends in military technology are increasingly focused on developing highly agile weapon platforms, improvements in lethality and survivability, and providing an asymmetric edge on the battlefield?  Two aspects stand out: Escalating costs and the accelerating pace of technological changes dictate that advanced weapon technology projects cannot be initiated wholly through government efforts. Therefore, exploring avenues for industrial collaboration, with other forms of international cooperation, to develop India’s defence technology base is imperative.

 

The missing piece 

From a strategic perspective, India has consistently struggled to balance its defence technology needs with its broader national socio-economic imperatives. While this debate is best addressed by an economist or a technologist in the national planning space, it is pertinent to note that interaction between the policy planning principles has been missing in the Indian context. Consequently, technology investments in the defence industry, which could have wider applications in the national developmental plans and vice-versa, never found a place in our strategic thinking and planning. 

For instance, could a T-72 tank engine have been used to share a common design, or components, with other engines required in short-haul shipping and inland water barges, mining industry and earth-moving equipment, and other industrial tasks? Had BEML taken this approach to producing engines decades back, we would have been manufacturing high-performance tank engines by now. The collaborative development of the DATRAN 1500 engine by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and BEML possibly offers this opportunity. Similar collaborative opportunities in areas of communications and surveillance, sensors and processors, and advanced alloys could have been derived. This lack of institutionalised interaction between the civil and defence industry has been a key factor behind the less-than-satisfactory development of India’s defence technology base. 

This has also led to a situation that does not foster the growth of dual-use technologies, cross-fertilisation of ideas, exchange of research expertise, and integration of scientific and technical skill sets across the national industrial spectrum. Consequently, India has lagged in adapting strategies to advance collaborative strategic research and the development of a national technological base to the benefit of all users, including the civilian and military, and academia and industry. 

A case for convergence 

A Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) publication, titled Arms Procurement Decision Making 1998,

illustrates how different countries with different capabilities harmonised their national industrial infrastructure with the military’s perceptions of its capability needs. In the 1980s, China’s military transformation was driven by this shift in its strategic thinking, by refocusing its industrial capacities to serve both national defence and national economy. Similarly, Israel’s defence industry has been instrumental in accelerating technological growth in other industries by leveraging the scientific and technical skills that have matured within the military. The South Korean defence industry, which was once endangered by the small size of its domestic arms market, has significantly benefitted from its industrial convergence. 

Today, China is systematically pushing industrial convergence to achieve dominance in advanced war-fighting technologies. Their concept of civil-military fusion is instructive: The idea being to incorporate more and more civilian technology leaders into China’s arms industry to improve weapon capabilities and create unique advantages for the People's Liberation Army (PLA). From autonomous systems to hypersonic platforms to warships, it is leveraging the strategy of civil-military fusion to build an impressive war-fighting capability. In future, this trend may intensify to compensate for China’s current difficulties in producing technologically superior and cost-effective weapon platforms. 

At yet another level, China’s major defence companies are generating most of their revenue from non-arms sales, with the added benefit of the crossover of technologies and greater economies of scale. Among China’s top defence companies, the highest share of revenue derived from arms sales is around 44 per cent, and the lowest ranges from 25 to 32 per cent. For instance, Norinco, China’s largest arms-producing conglomerate, receives only 27 per cent of its revenue from arms sales. To compensate for the weak profits from arms sales to the PLA, Norinco is involved in other trans-continental business ventures, such as securing key resources like energy, minerals, and materials for national security. 

Like Norinco, several other major Chinese arms manufacturers also get only a minor share of their revenue from arms sales. On the contrary, among the US companies, the lowest share of revenue derived from arms sales is around 44 per cent at Boeing, while the highest share is 90 per cent at Lockheed Martin. Likewise, the European arms manufacturers are dedicated in equal measure to arms production and dual-use commercial applications. The rise of artificial intelligence, which presents a plausible challenge, heightens the need for close collaboration between the government and private defence industry.

  Fostering convergence 

Fostering industrial convergence would require an industry-wide government initiative to study the technology trends, national production capacities and possibilities of integrating processes across the civil and defence industry. Like China, which seeks to maintain global competitiveness in 25 key emerging technologies with dual-use applications, India needs to identify its choice of advanced technologies, which can serve military and commercial applications. More importantly, India should aspire to become a creator of technology, rather than being a follower of technologies. 

Former SIPRI expert Ravinderpal Singh, in his paper titled National Security Resilience and Capacity Building: 2023-2047, lists 16 such technologies for India, which, besides military use, could serve wider commercial applications. These include sectors such as propulsion systems, sensors and micro-electronics, metals and composites, hyper-velocity projectiles, etc. The use of advanced military technologies for commercial applications will also help reduce risks due to low demand and rapid obsolescence in military applications. 

The answer lies in finding the right policies, planning guidelines, and methodologies to integrate the defence industry with the national civil-industrial base. Three aspects are pertinent: First, this civil-military convergence approach would call for a serious rethink on the implications of co-development, co-production, licensed production, sub-contract production and other forms of collaboration for building India’s defence-technology base. In this context, India’s policy makers will have to examine the changes required in the government’s relationship with the civil and defence industry. 

Second, the convergence in production processes would carry implications for public and private ownership of companies. Determining the extent of public or private control will require leadership, which is bold and open-minded, and willing to make structural readjustments for privatisation of government defence companies, expanding foreign collaboration and joint ventures for defence research, design, development and production. 

Third, this would also imply giving greater say to the private sector in the shaping of India’s arms procurement decision-making process.  The current milieu, perhaps, inhibits such free thinking and policy formulation on civil-military industrial convergence for meeting India’s long-term defence technology developmental needs. 

Suffice to say that integrating India’s defence technology needs into its national industrial base is the need of the hour. By doing so, the twin problems of escalating cost of research & development and the pressure to reduce defence imports can be substantially addressed. 

The writer is a former corps commander