India's indigenization of military aircraft design and manufacturing: Towards a fifth-generation fighter

India’s desire to transform itself into an international military power has brought about a rapid shift in its approach to procuring military hardware. The indigenization of India’s military manufacturing capacity forms an integral part of the strategic objectives of Indian military services, with its realization being a function of significant government investment in strategic technologies. This has a number of ramifications. An indigenous Indian military capacity, particularly in the field of aviation, forms a key part of India’s ambition of achieving regional air superiority, or even supremacy, and being capable of power projection. This is particularly in response to China’s increasing presence in South Asian airspace. A burgeoning Indian military manufacturing machine based on a comparative advantage in skilled technicians and lower-cost labour, together with strategic collaboration with foreign military hardware manufacturers, may also lead to neighbouring countries looking to India as a source of competitively priced military hardware. In short, this chapter seeks to analyse the rationale behind India’s attempt to become militarily self-sufficient in the field of aviation, discuss the technical, economic and political context in which it is achieving this transformation, and assess the potential outlook of success for India’s drive to achieve self-sufficiency in the arena of military aviation. This chapter will do so by using the case of India’s attempt to develop a fifth-generation fighter aircraft

Remaking the military industrial relationship: A French-American comparison

Defense industrial complexes in leading Cold War nations have downsized and reallocated resources to other productive activities in the 1990s. In this paper, we analyze the experience of two key countries - the US and France. Comparing the two countries, we find similar outcomes in budgetary retrenchment and large firm restructuring but marked differences in the pace of downsizing and diversification among small and medium-sized firms. We hypothesize that three sets of contextual differences may explain these differences: 1) institutional differences in the way that the State bureaucracies - the Pentagon and the French Delegation generale pour l'armement (DGA) - oversee defense industrial matters, 2) differences in military industry ownership and firm size patterns, and 3) differences in the regional distribution of defense industrial capacity and associated regional policies. In closing, we note that the two countries' defense industrial complexes are becoming more alike and speculate on the significance of invidious competition and interactions between them. We address briefly the future of French/American arms industrial competition and cooperation, given the trend towards transnational security arrangements and defense industry globalizationdefense industry, civil/military integration, defense conversion, military procurement,