Despite the seemingly successful talks between India and US, to make progress on the bilateral Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies (iCET), structural challenges endure in its execution
Local industry officials and military analysts maintain that these impediments pertain primarily to the autonomy of U.S. defence companies with regard to transferring technology, which have been developed at immense cost at Washington’s behest with many companies zealously guarding their intellectual property rights (IPR) over it.
Additionally, the U.S.’s strict export control laws in this regard, controlled by its defence industrial complex, were loath to sharing military technologies via joint ventures, however meaningful they might be to Washington’s wider strategic interests.
U.S. government does not presume to act on behalf of its defence companies that own the IPRs for their sundry wares.
Besides, U.S. defence vendors, were answerable to their shareholders, whose motivations were largely commercially driven.
This, in turn, could adversely impact the quantum of technology they were willing to transfer.
It was precisely these mercantile considerations, weighed down by cumbersome bureaucracies, that led to the failure of the 2012 Defence Technology and Trade Initiative (DTTI) between India and the U.S., and on whose ashes the iCET emerged in June 2023
The DTTI flopped due to technology transfer issues.
The iCET emerged enabled, in turn, by an alphabet soup of organisations including INDUS-X (India-U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem), Joint IMPACT (INDUS-X Mutual Promotion Advanced Collaborative Technologies) 1.0, IMPACT 2.0 and ADDD (Advanced Domains Defense Dialogue).
The iCET also appears to be part of the U.S.’s overall policy, outlined in a recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, which urged President Joseph Biden to address the ticklish issue of India’s close strategic ties with Moscow and particularly its dependency on Russian arms.
The implicit suggestion in the February 2023 report was that India should now begin sourcing its future military kit from Washington, conceivably via the iCET route.
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