Wars are won by supply chains, and India is rightly building its defence edge 

History reveals that most battles are won or lost not so much because of the bravery of individual soldiers but because armies run out of the wherewithal to conduct wars of attrition. Examples from World War II provide lessons.

In the early stages, both Britain and France sought US help to manufacture certain types of aircraft to overcome attrition and domestic manufacturing limitations. They sourced fighters from the US and often customised them using their own guns, gauges, engines and radio communication systems.

This is an example of defence industrial cooperation between the leading powers of the time without the US at that stage formally entering the war.

Today, NATO’s weapons supply chains continue to run through dozens of countries, with several contributing to component manufacturing and to systems integration, without any NATO member joining the US war with Iran.

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Supply Chains

The key question in creating reliable defence supply chains is one of trust – of the sanctity, integrity and security of critical platforms, equipment, parts and ordnance. Defence Industrial Cooperation, therefore, presupposes a high degree of trust between partners joined together by supply chains.

Ironically, there are examples of defence industrial cooperation even between potential adversaries such as the US and China. The US transferred key defence technologies, including for munitions, to Beijing in the aftermath of the Sino-US rapprochement in the 1970s, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. US firms continued to supply key space technologies even after the future caused by the Tiananmen military crackdown on students in 1989.

More recently, the policy shift framing China as an adversary did not immediately stop the flow of American technology. Through legal workarounds and complex third-party trade routes, prominent US firms continued to provide critical technologies, ranging from advanced AI GPUs to dual-use aerospace components, that directly aided China's tech and military sectors.

Conversely, China has supplied certain types of chips and rare earths which are integral to US and NATO weapons, especially missiles.

Today, in a world full of conflict and mistrust, some of the mutually exclusive supply chains developed by competing powers are being leveraged. If the US denies China advanced semiconductors, the Chinese leverage their considerable monopolies over rare earths.

Maintaining stability in such supply chains was part of the agenda during Donald Trump’s recent summit with Xi Jinping. In fact, the US has recently lifted some restrictions to pave the way for the export of NVIDIA's H200 AI chips/GPUs to China.

It is the nature of globalisation that determines why even adversaries are often engaged in defence industrial cooperation. Simply put, countries do not and often cannot make everything that they need.

Defence industrial complexes tend to emerge and specialise in certain geographies depending on unique local advantages in R&D, manufacturing or human resources and talent. It is rare to see full-stack manufacturing in a single country. This is true of the “capitalist” defence establishments in the West as well as for centralised state-dominated systems in Russia or China. Whereas the US and its Western allies have evolved highly interdependent and mutually trusted supply chains for defence industrial cooperation, the non-Western models of Russia and China tend to favour greater self-reliance largely due to external sanctions, export controls and denial regimes. During the Cold War, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom) restrictions forced communist countries to strengthen domestic ecosystems and collaborate with similar regimes.

Dual Use Leads and Global Ecosystems of Interdependence 

Some of the core difficulties in forging a transparent and trustworthy model for defence industrial cooperation revolve around the inescapable fact that products cannot be easily classified as purely defence or civilian use in nature.

The dual-use nature of products and technologies makes it difficult to seek 100 per cent sanitisation of the adversary from one’s own critical supply chains. The internet, a product of defence research, is the greatest example of a fungible dual use medium. As the Ukraine War has revealed, the same chips that go into washing machines in China also power Russian missiles. Now, more than ever, efforts are on to sanitise supply chains in order to reduce vulnerabilities. The Trump administration has barred Chinese electronic chips from US weapons and federal procurement, with the sweeping ban officially to kick in by December 2027. China, on its part, is using current US export restrictions to rapidly develop self-sufficiency in high-end semiconductors even as Western companies continue to retain monopolies, for instance, NVIDIA in chips, ASML of Netherlands in lithography systems and Taiwan’s TSMC in semiconductors.

Talent

The availability of abundant talent is often key to the successful participation of smaller states in defence manufacturing and participation in global value chains. Qualified human resources are generally a fungible resource. There is a view that German talent and know-how helped the US with its Manhattan Project for atomic weapons. After World War II, the US reportedly used German talent in Operation Paperclip to develop its missiles. When the Soviet Union collapsed, some of its best scientists and their knowledge were soaked up by other nations. Israel is a good example of a small state with limited resources whose defence industrial complex is driven by talent, both local and from its global diaspora.

Emergence of Small Countries 

It is not easy for small countries to emerge as major players in defence industrial manufacturing unless they are extremely wealthy and have the necessary capital and industrial base.

Smaller nations that are well-established in defence manufacturing require mitigation of risk through global partnerships. A country like Israel, with a small landmass, cannot afford to concentrate its entire defence industrial complex on its own territory. It is logical to spread the risk by relocating its supply chains in trusted partner countries. This could be equally true of Japan as it gradually begins to shed its traditional hesitance on defence issues.

India’s large and emerging defence industrial base offers a good fit for collaboration to Japan's military industrial complex in its journey to come of age.

There are some successful examples of smaller countries having done well. Apart from Israel, which has used its special R&D and startup ecosystem to become a frontrunner in avionics, Sweden specialises in fighter aircraft and Norway in autonomous underwater systems. South Korea has emerged as an important player during the Ukraine war by supplying artillery shells and howitzers, among other things. Even North Korea exports 155mm artillery shells to Russia.

The drone era has provided new opportunities to several countries to specialise in niche areas. Turkey made a name for itself in the Armenia-Azerbaijan war with the performance of its Bayraktar drones. Iran deployed Shahed drones with telling effect in the recent war. The enduring war in Ukraine has seen Kyiv emerge as a key player in counter-drone technologies.

India’s defence industrial complex is vast. It has witnessed rapid growth in recent years. Aatmanirbharta (self-reliance) in defence manufacturing is a major national goal aimed at ensuring strategic autonomy. However, it is not an autarkic concept. There is much scope, for partnerships and collaborations. Alongside atmanirbharta, India’s defence industrial collaboration has been strengthened in recent years with key partners such as the US, Israel, France, the UK, the EU, Japan and Australia.

(The author is the Director General of the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)