Twenty-two billion dollars in Apache helicopters, C-17s, howitzers and drones bought since 2002 - and after three successive frameworks meant to change that, India still cannot license-build a single fighter engine on its own soil.

The Difference Between Buying a Fighter Jet and Building One India has spent over $22 billion on American defence equipment since 2002 - Apache gunships, C-17 transporters, P-8I patrol aircraft, M777 howitzers. That is not a small relationship.

And yet, after the Defence Technology and Trade Initiative in 2012, the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies in 2022 and INDUS-X in 2023, India still cannot point to a single flagship co-produced defence system built with genuinely transferred American technology.

The GE F414 engine deal, unveiled with real ceremony during PM Modi's 2023 Washington visit, remains unresolved. That gap - between two decades of purchases and almost no industrial capability gained - is the actual story here, not just one delayed engine contract.

The Case for Staying the Course There is a real argument that the buyer-seller relationship, even without full technology transfer, has already delivered enormous value. India's armed forces now operate genuinely advanced American platforms that materially strengthen deterrence today, not in some hypothetical indigenised future.

Every acquisition also deepens interoperability with a partner increasingly central to Indo-Pacific security cooperation. And crucially, American export-control law - the International Traffic in Arms Regulations - is not a negotiating posture that will soften with more patience; it is a structural constraint tied to U.S. national-security law itself.

Pushing for co-production terms Washington cannot legally offer risks stalling deals that already deliver real capability, in pursuit of a transfer that may never come regardless of how the partnership is structured. The Case for a Different Kind of Partnership The counter-argument is that continuing to treat this as primarily a procurement relationship guarantees India remains dependent indefinitely.

A purchase, however large, transfers a platform - not the manufacturing know-how, metallurgy or design authority that would let India build, upgrade and export its own systems. Twenty years of "historic" and "transformational" framework announcements that produced almost zero delivered co-production is not evidence of bad luck; it is evidence of a structural mismatch between what India is asking for and what the U.S. system is built to offer through its existing channels.

If Atmanirbharta in defence means anything, India needs to stop measuring the relationship in dollars purchased and start measuring it in capability actually transferred - which may mean smaller, more targeted technology-sharing arrangements rather than headline platform announcements that were never going to survive ITAR intact.

Where This Leaves Us The second argument should prevail - but not by walking away from procurement. India should keep buying platforms it genuinely needs for near-term deterrence, while explicitly stopping the practice of dressing straightforward purchases as "transformational" technology partnerships.

The proposed Reciprocal Defence Procurement Agreement is the moment to test whether Washington will offer narrower, legally realistic technology-sharing terms - component-level co-manufacture, not full IP transfer - rather than repeat the F414 pattern of grand unveiling followed by years of stalled negotiation.