The Air Forces of the US and India have signed a new agreement to cooperate on the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UVs), according to the Pentagon.
As per the announcement, “The goal is the design, development, demonstration, test and evaluation of technologies, including physical hardware such as small UAVs, avionics, payload power, propulsion, and launch systems through prototyping that meet the operational requirements of the Indian and the US Air Forces.”
The over $22 million price tag for the effort will be split into half, in what the Pentagon bills as the “largest-ever” RDT&E effort between the militaries.
“The United States and India share a common vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Kelli Seybolt, Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force for international affairs, was quoted as saying.
The effort falls under the aegis of the US-India Defense Technology and Trade Initiative, or DDTI. That effort dates back to 2012, and was a pet project of then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. When Carter became secretary in 2015, he reinvigorated the effort; Ellen Lord, who ran Pentagon acquisition for the majority of the Trump administration, was also a major supporter of closer development ties with India.
In fact, Lord pushed in 2019 an initiative to co-develop a small unmanned system that could be launched from cargo aircraft. While nothing appears to have come directly out of that, it’s hard not to see linkages between the 2019 plan and what was announced last week.
“The DTTI has struggled to maintain momentum in recent years, but this new project may signal a renewed mutual interest in substantial progress for capability benefits,” Bassler, who previously led international military technology and capabilities cooperation both at the Office of Naval Research and in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV), was quoted as saying.
India’s procurement cycle is famously slow and often changes mid-stream — the biggest example of this being its fighter contest, which featured years of delays and restarts after it had made its selection of the Dassault Rafale in 2012 — and its own internal technology development efforts have often floundered.
