Benefits to Foreign Policy Goals

Enhancement of Security in the Immediate Neighbourhood: Measures to build capacity and enhance capability have helped tangibly in improving combined ability to respond to natural disasters and mitigating turbulence in neighbouring countries like Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. Such activities with littoral states like Maldives, Seychelles, and Mauritius have not only also benefited India in enhancing its surveillance capability over its Extended Economic Zone but have also helped in significantly countering the sea ward threat from piracy.

• Strengthening India’s Regional and Broader Global Links: Defence cooperation activities, by building mutual trust and understanding, have played a key role in strengthening India’s linkages and building ‘Bridges of Friendship’ with countries in its neighbourhood as also with key global powers.
• Capacity Building of Own Armed Forces: Exposure to technology, organisations, doctrines, concepts, skills including Special Forces culture and working ethos of countries with wide spectrum of technology, sharing combat experience, such as through interaction with US CENTCOM experienced military leaders, and peacekeeping experience, especially of NATO countries, are important areas which enable capacity enhancement of own armed forces.
• Boost to Defence Industry: Military-technical cooperation combining provisioning of arms and equipment to partner nations, technology access and investments are important in inter-state relations Military-technical cooperation encompassing provisioning of arms and military equipment to partner nations, access to technologies and investments in the defence sector are becoming very important in inter-state relations. Export and import of defence equipment has both security and commercial dimension. The scope of cooperation with Russia has expanded with start of large scale Sukhoil icence production programme, under which HAL was to 55 make 140 Su-30MKIs in India.
• Support to Joint R&D Projects: Given our woefully inadequate R&D base, we shall continue to suffer from lack of contemporary and state-of-the art technology. To this extent, we must establish meaningful bilateral relations with developed nations especially the comparatively apolitical ASEAN region, Japan and South Korea. Thus, we can not only duplicate our technology intake from the West but also establish a related indigenous R&D infrastructure for the future.
• Confidence Building and Deterrence: Defence cooperation activities signal our political commitment to develop cooperative relations, promote military transparency, reduce misperception and promote perception of common interests. Consequently, defence cooperation becomes instrumental in dispelling mistrust, providing transparency, building confidence and 63 helps to prevent conflict. Defence cooperation activities undertaken with China have helped to reduce the peer conflict to building mutual trust.Conduct of multilateral joint exercises by Indian Navy with navies of US, Australia and Japan have amply showcased feasible trends in partnerships with India, which could emerge as and when needed, and thus may act as a deterrence to our potential adversaries like China.