South Asia and Beyond

The See-Saw Of Defence Deals: How India Balances It

NEW DELHI: A trade deal may not quite be on the horizon during U.S. President Donald Trump’s upcoming India visit but he can expect a couple of high-value defence contracts. The Indian government has cleared the purchase of 24 MH-60 Romeo multi-role helicopters worth nearly $2.6 billion—a longstanding requirement of the Indian Navy. Another deal for six more Apache attack helicopters for the Indian Army could come through. Over the past 15 years, India has imported defence deals/platforms worth $20 billion from the United States. If strategic ties with the U.S. have risen to a new level, India has kept one of its old allies—Russia—happy too. Defence acquisitions from Russia have been to the tune of $16 billion in the last decade or so. India also buys defence items from Israel and France (the Rafale fighter jets). In this episode of ‘Simply Nitin’, StratNews Global Editor-in-Chief Nitin A. Gokhale explains how India keeps balancing the see-saw to keep key global defence players engaged.

Nitin A. Gokhale

Author, thought leader and one of South Asia's leading strategic analysts, Nitin A. Gokhale has forty years of rich and varied experience behind him as a conflict reporter, Editor, author and now a media entrepreneur who owns and curates two important digital platforms, BharatShakti.in and StratNewsGlobal.com focusing on national security, strategic affairs and foreign policy matters. At the beginning of his long and distinguished career, Gokhale has lived and reported from India’s North-east for 23 years, writing and analysing various insurgencies in the region, been on the ground at Kargil in the summer of 1999 during the India-Pakistan war, and also brought live reports from Sri Lanka’s Eelam War IV between 2006-2009. Author of over a dozen books on wars, insurgencies and conflicts, Gokhale relocated to Delhi in 2006, was Security and Strategic Affairs Editor at NDTV, a leading Indian broadcaster for nine years, before launching in 2015 his own digital properties. An alumni of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Hawaii, Gokhale now writes, lectures and analyses security and strategic matters in Indo-Pacific and travels regularly to US, Europe, South and South-East Asia to speak at various international seminars and conferences. Gokhale also teaches at India’s Defence Services Staff College (DSSC), the three war colleges, India's National Defence College, College of Defence Management and the intelligence schools of both the R&AW and Intelligence Bureau. He tweets at @nitingokhale

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