Defence ministry paves way for faster weapon acquisition

The Defence Acquisition Council will today agree to compress time-lines for capital defence procurement.

Updated on: Mar 20, 2025, 10:24:44 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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New Delhi: The defence ministry today will seek approval from the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) headed by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh to drastically compress timelines for the procurement of defence equipment in an effort to ensure that the country’s ability to defend itself doesn’t fall victim to bureaucratic procedures.

PM Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh (File)

The ministry wants the average time taken for defence acquisition to be cut from the present 96 weeks (two years) to only 24 weeks (six months).

According to at least three top officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, the defence ministry wants the cumbersome capital acquisition procedure, governed by a voluminous Defence Acquisition Procedure (DAP) manual, running into 657 pages across two volumes, to be made more efficient so that acquisition of much-needed platforms is not delayed. The tedious DAP document was last amended in 2020. Over the years, there have been acquisition delays in the procurement of Rafale fighters, Rafale-Maritime fighters (still to be cleared by CCS), additional three Scorpene class submarines, Project 75 I air-independent propulsion submarines and Predator Drones.

HT learns that the proposal before DAC lays down strict timelines for Request for Proposals (RFP), Field Evaluation Trials and Contract Negotiation Committee (CNC), so that the entire process is completed within six months.

According to the officials cited above, the Modi government wants armed forces to get the RFP ready even as they move (or ideally, before they move) the defence ministry for Acceptance of Necessity (AON) for a particular platform to be acquired. Until now, the whole process of RFP by the armed forces started after DAC gave an AON for a particular capital acquisition.

The next step is Field Evaluation Trial of a weapon system, which currently takes years as the armed forces want the system to be tested in polar conditions as well as the desert. Given that conditions can now be simulated, the defence ministry wants the trials to be completed parallelly by testing the capital equipment under simulated conditions

The final step, which involves CNC, driven by top defence ministry mandarins, must also be completed within six months rather than being negotiated with the supplier ad nauseam. It is only after the contract price has been negotiated and approved by the finance ministry, that the matter reaches the Cabinet Committee on Security headed by the Prime Minister.

By compressing the timelines of the capital acquisition process, the defence ministry wants faster decision-making when it comes to the procurement of high-end platforms. It wants to hold both the armed forces and itself accountable in case the price of the platform changes due to delays. (EOM)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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