In the run-up to US President Barack Obama’s two day trip to the Capital in January, Washington is sending a nine-member delegation headed by Puneet Talwar, assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs in December to finalise a set of “transformative defence technologies” for India under the Defence Trade and Technology Initiative (DTTI).
In the run-up to US President Barack Obama’s two day trip to the Capital in January, Washington is sending a nine-member delegation headed by Puneet Talwar, assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs in December to finalise a set of “transformative defence technologies” for India under the Defence Trade and Technology Initiative (DTTI).
Talwar will be in Delhi between December 1-4. South Block officials say India is interested in long-duration unmanned aerial vehicles like Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk, which can scan 100,000 sq km area in a day and has an endurance of 28 hours.
The plan is to use these UAVs for monitoring the 3,488km Line of Actual Control (LAC) with the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China. India wants the technology to produce the Ottawa Protocol compliant landmines that are used only on military vehicles and not used to target humans.
While the DTTI was launched last year under the UPA regime, the initiative is mired in red-tape as South Block is yet to identify the technologies that it wants through the government to government route instead of the usual Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) way. Talwar, accompanied by two deputy assistant secretaries of state and foreign policy advisor to US Pacific Command, will prepare the ground work for the visit of Frank Kendall, US under secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, on February 26 for a possible agreement.
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Concerned at the bureaucratic delay, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked the defence ministry to ask the three armed forces and DRDO to submit a wish list of two technologies each so that at least two defence items could be finalised under the DTTI route by end-2014.
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Concerned at the bureaucratic delay, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has asked the defence ministry to ask the three armed forces and DRDO to submit a wish list of two technologies each so that at least two defence items could be finalised under the DTTI route by end-2014.
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Although both sides short-listed 17 technologies for transfer, co-development or production, the list was cut to five items due to delay in licences from Pentagon. It was perhaps on account of this confusion that Kendall had to postpone his November 21 visit to India.
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.
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