nvishal wrote:Requests ARE being made to acquire current generation hardware but the americans are rejecting it using the "co-development" counter-proposal.
The purpose of the DTTI is not clear and neither is their designation of india as "major defence partner". I suspect that all this theatricals maybe subterfuge to keep the status quo(the current order of balance).
I don't have much open source data on requests or anything official stating that X has been rejected, and converted to a counter proposal for Y. I don't assume to have seen everything so if there is official evidence to support that conclusion please provide it.
For example, in your first post, you claimed that the request for the Avenger was set aside, and the US Government unilaterally moved to the Sea Guardian. This is not backed by evidence from what I have seen. These two are very different systems, one is a strike/ISR platform, while the other is a Maritime Surveillance system. If the US wanted to set aside Avenger, they would asked the industry to either respond to this request (for the IAF) by either offering an unarmed version of the Avenger, or an alternative ISR variant of the Reaper family. They sure as hell would not have asked to offer a Maritime platform which is of limited use to the IAF. There is a good possibility that either a request from India or requests by US Industry to market/sell the product to India was made to the US Government which then approved it to go forward. Of course, these are just preliminary approvals as they would have to finally go through other procedures of approval and notifications. The current administration, in between its constant churn and turnover, is looking at relaxing drone (including armed drone) export policies and this is at various stages of implementation.
Similarly, as I had pointed out earlier, Boeing offered the F-18 Block III for a known Indian Navy request for information which the MOD sent them. Boeing's leadership is on record, as of a few weeks ago, of confirming that they have officially responded to this request with the SHornet proposal. This too was not a case of "Asked for X and offered Y". As part of its proposals, Boeing is pitching a broader adoption of the SH under MII but that is just marketing that they as a for-profit company are doing along with their chosen local partners.
DTTI is probably slowed down for many reasons but then again it will likely involve smaller projects at first. Both the bureaucracies are notoriously slow so don't expect some rapid movement on that front.
For example, on the carrier front, General Atomics has been cleared to market and sell the EMALS system to India and I believe this request came through at the same time that it did for France so there are most definitely cutting edge systems that are not even operational with the US services, that are being allowed to be pursued. P-8s were also being delivered concurrently etc.