Parrikar to sign strategic pact during US visit later this month

NEW DELHI: The long-awaited sealing of the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Understanding Agreement (LEMOA) that will spur the India-US defence relationship is to

Published on: Aug 15, 2016, 07:45:33 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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NEW DELHI: The long-awaited sealing of the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Understanding Agreement (LEMOA) that will spur the India-US defence relationship is to be accomplished during defence minister Manohar Parrikar’s two-day visit to Washington this month. Parrikar will be meeting his US counterpart Ashton Carter on August 29.

The LEMOA protocol allows both militaries to exchange fuel and supplies routinely during peacetime and with prior clearance during hostilities, and has been hanging fire for over a decade. The final draft was approved during US defence secretary Carter’s visit to India this April. The other two foundational agreements —Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement and Basic Exchange Cooperation Agreement for Geo-Spatial Cooperation — are still under discussion due to concerns of the Indian military establishment.

Parrikar’s visit will possibly be the last high-level engagement in Washington with the outgoing Barack Obama administration and the meeting with secretary Carter will be important as US defence secretaries tend to overlap in the next administration across party lines, like Robert Gates. Secretary Carter is a strong votary of defence ties with India and is all for arming New Delhi with the latest arms.

While India and the US are collaborating in aircraft carrier and jet engine technologies through existing Joint Working Groups, New Delhi is keen to acquire armed pilotless drone technologies, V-22 tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft for special operations as well as multi-role transport tanker for enhancing the range of fighters.

As defence hardware is central to Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” program, defence minister Manohar Parrikar is expected to approach the Union Cabinet for approval in principle to allow manufacturing of fighters for both Indian Air Force as well as exports to third countries. US defence manufacturers like Boeing, Lockheed Martin as well as Swedish SAAB have offered twin engine F-18, single engine F-16 and Gripen NG fighters under the “Make in India” rubric.

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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