India’s defence acquisition debate has long centred on the Ministry of Defence—where buyer, regulator, and supplier coexist within the same ring. Orders largely flow to its own entities: Defence Research and Development Organisation for design, Defence Public Sector Undertakings for manufacture, and the Armed Forces for use and maintenance.
Structured for integrity, it has evolved into a monopolist–monopsonist ecosystem insulated from competition and innovation. Checks abound but yield little efficiency. The system prizes procedure over performance—ensuring not that something is done right, but merely that no one does wrong. As calls for reform grow louder, this article seeks reflection on a subject of enduring national importance.
At the centre of this edifice sits the Defence Finance establishment—enforcing probity yet detached from the strategic logic of capability creation. Steeped in rules rather than outcomes, finance officers wield veto power over processes they seldom see through to delivery. The result is compliance without purpose, where procedural perfection substitutes strategic effect.
Procurement remains trapped in oversight and must evolve into a system linking doctrine, contracts, and capability. Procurement is buying—paperwork, approvals, payments—while acquisition spans planning, training, integration, and long-term support. When the two blur, systems chase transactions, not outcomes; progress is measured by files cleared, not capability built.
But inefficiency is not the MoD’s monopoly. The Services mirror these patterns—bureaucracies in their own right, each a federation of directorates aligned with combat arms and support services, where hierarchy and subcultures often outweigh logic.
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Learning by design
Directorates such as Naval Plans once spent more time reconciling proposals within budgetary limits—spreadsheets becoming the new manna from heaven—than shaping long-term capability. Frameworks like the Integrated Capability Development Plan (ICDP) and Integrated Capability Acquisition and Development System (ICADS) attempt to move beyond this culture, linking plans to budgets through data-driven, joint, and fiscally realistic processes. Yet the analytical depth and accountability they require remain unevenly absorbed within Service directorates. Budgetary intent has improved, but without assured multi-year funding, binding or no fiscal tracks, these plans risk staying on spreadsheets of aspiration. India still works through a “case-worker” model, where files move more than projects; proposals wind through layers of committees and departments, with diffused accountability and timelines stretched into decades.
As I noted in Force (June 2023), advanced defence ministries, such as the UK’s, employ Operational Requirements Staff systems to test necessity, cost-effectiveness, and design feasibility. One directorate that came closest to this ethos was the Directorate of Aircraft Acquisition (DAA) under the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Air). Tracing its lineage to the Sea Harrier Project of the 1980s—the Navy’s first integrated project team for design liaison and induction—it marked a shift from the monolithic Directorate of Naval Air Material toward clearer separation between fielded operations and headquarters-level modernisation, a logic now echoed in the submarine arm.
All three Services have since pursued similar reform, but without shared analytical systems, stable project offices, and long-tenure professionals, change risks remaining procedural rather than transformative.
When process overrides purpose
By the time a case reaches MoD (Finance), its purpose is often buried under compliance. I learnt this as Director Naval Air Staff when a proposal for an Underwater Escape Trainer (UWET)—to teach aircrew to survive a ditching at sea—became mired in delay.
The file returned covered in queries. In reply, I attached a list of aircrew lost at sea and noted that the next such drowning would rest equally on the conscience of Defence Finance—and officers like me—if we continued to treat life-saving equipment as paperwork. The response was curt, “Do not get emotional.” We were asked to obtain the approval of the Naval Equipment Procurement Committee (NEPC)—a body so large that convening it often took months, and required the biggest conference hall in Sena Bhavan. Six months later, the trainer was approved. Today, the UWET at Kochi stands as a quiet reminder that foresight, not paperwork, saves lives—and that diligence must mean more than gatekeeping probity.
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From safeguards to capability
India’s acquisition framework has become a structure of safeguards rather than foresight—designed to prevent wrongdoing rather than deliver outcomes. Its manuals avert audits, not enable advantage.
At the Defence Services Staff College, I saw this firsthand: The Naval Wing’s Acquisition Capsule, meant to build understanding of acquisition, became a guide to navigating the Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP). Each edition (and amendment) added complexity, reinforcing reflexes over reasoning.
Unlike advanced militaries, India has no structured course to develop acquisition professionals. Officers learn on the job—fluent in paperwork but untrained in cost–capability trade-offs, life-cycle management, or contracting strategy. The quieter pillars of capability—people and infrastructure—seldom receive scrutiny. Yet trained personnel and well-managed bases, docks, and test ranges determine whether systems become enduring capability or expensive inventory.
No acquisition system matures without professionalised human capital. Advanced militaries sustain dedicated cadres blending engineering, finance, law, and logistics. India, by contrast, relies on short-tenure, rotational staff—treating expertise as experience rather than cultivating it as a profession. The Agniveer scheme, though innovative in manpower logic, illustrates this imbalance: Advanced platforms and networked systems enter service even as personnel modernisation remains transactional. Technology advances; human integration lags.
From obsolescence to learning systems
Early in my career, a British vendor reported obsolescence in a Westland Sea King helicopter subsystem and proposed a Performance-Based Contract (PBC) guaranteeing equipment availability rather than spares—a new idea for us at Naval Headquarters.
Globally, such outcome-based models—Performance-Based Logistics (PBL), Availability-Based Contracting, and Through-Life Support—are standard practice. The US Department of War, UK Ministry of Defence, and Japan’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency (ATLA) align contractor incentives with operational uptime, not part sales.
The concept was novel in India then but is now visible in the P-8I and Coast Guard (CG) ALH Mk III frameworks, where vendors bear bounded responsibility for fleet readiness. Yet maintenance and upgrades still remain periodic procurement exercises, not life-cycle responsibilities. The absence of a dedicated Project Management Office to manage capability from design through sustainment compounds this gap.
HAL’s PBL contract with the CG marks progress: Payments now link to aircraft availability, not spare parts. Yet accountability remains blurred. HAL, as designer, manufacturer, and maintainer, cannot easily separate design from maintenance faults. The Naval Aeronautical Quality Assurance Service (NAQAS) provides internal oversight but lacks the statutory independence and audit reach of agencies like the US Navy’s NAVAIR or the UK’s DE&S. The result is better serviceability but limited accountability—a managed service without true risk transfer.
As a former Commander-in-Chief and ex-ACNS (Policy & Plans) remarked to me, India still lacks the contracting norms to sustain such models. PBCs are no magic cure; they work only when supported by independent quality assurance, transparent audit, and professional contract management—and within a system where even the Ministry can be held to account. Australia’s post-2005 Sea King helicopter crash inquiry set this benchmark, tracing responsibility up the chain to failures in policy and oversight. India’s frameworks still stop short of such whole-of-system accountability.
Performance-based contracting institutionalises continuity, making industry a partner in capability rather than a vendor of consumables. Until such models take root, India will keep replacing platforms faster than it can sustain them—building inventory, not readiness.
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Toward professionalisation
India’s acquisition challenge lies not in policy but in professionalisation. The Services need cross-functional project teams blending operational insight with financial, legal, and engineering literacy. Without institutional continuity, each reform merely resets the learning curve.
This is not about separating the uniformed and civilian streams but integrating them into a common professional track. France’s Direction générale de l’armement (DGA), Japan’s ATLA, and the US Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L) community show how integrated cadres turn acquisition from a sequence of clearances into a collaboration of competencies.
India could adopt a similar model, drawing uniformed officers and lateral civilian professionals into long-tenure acquisition roles—possibly as a second specialisation—under a unified charter. Empowered Project Directors, styled as Directors General—a semiotic flourish, perhaps, but a meaningful one—with embedded financial advisers, as seen in Seabird and Varsha, already show that integrated leadership delivers results when authority and accountability align.
In advanced systems, contracting frameworks link design, integration, and sustainment as continuous obligations. The Fédération Internationale des Ingénieurs-Conseils (FIDIC)—the International Federation of Consulting Engineers—codifies this principle through its Red, Yellow, Silver, and Gold Books, each balancing design responsibility, construction risk, and life-cycle accountability. The US federal “design guidance” regime under acquisition law mirrors this logic. Agencies such as the Department of War, General Services Administration, and Federal Highways Administration employ design-build and performance-based contracts that embed risk ownership, single-point design authority, and enforceable life-cycle specifications—from flood resistance to acoustic and electromagnetic control. Both frameworks rest on a shared idea: That responsibility for quality must run unbroken from blueprint to upkeep.
India’s experience with Project Seabird showed that disciplined project management can deliver quality, transparency, and accountability when infrastructure is treated as capability acquisition, not mere construction. Yet the logic that built Seabird finds little echo in the CDS–DMA model, which appears to favour the traditional hierarchy of the Engineer-in-Chief (E-in-C)—the Army’s top engineering authority overseeing works across the armed forces—over decentralised acquisition frameworks such as FIDIC or France’s DGA, where design authority and financial control are institutionally separated. The instinct to command too often precedes the discipline to control—perhaps it should be control and command. The result, seen in flooded air stations and operational blocks that remain noise-hazard zones despite crores spent to correct them, is a system where design accountability is retrofitted rather than built in.
Vivek Rae Committee report
The need for such professionalisation was recognised but never realised, as the Vivek Rae Committee found during former defence minister Manohar Parrikar’s reform drive. Constituted to restructure the MoD’s Acquisition Wing, it examined global models and proposed a Defence Procurement Organisation (DPO) with decentralised procurement under specialised agencies, leaving policy to the Ministry. Drawing on France’s DGA and the US AT&L systems, the committee favoured autonomy and continuity over central control—a view that clashed with the government’s preference for a single, centralised structure. Rae eventually resigned, yet his report remains among the most articulate blueprints for professionalising India’s acquisition system, highlighting deficiencies that persist today: Fragmented authority, weak accountability, and the absence of dedicated acquisition cadres.
From FMS to formal learning
Ironically, India’s most disciplined acquisitions have often occurred outside its own system—as in the Sea Harrier programme and later through the US Foreign Military Sales (FMS) route. Each FMS deal follows US acquisition law—the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR)—where the US Government, not the vendor, is the contracting party, ensuring cost justification, audit trails, and enforceable sustainment.
Under the FMS “Total Package Approach,” each sale includes life-cycle logistics, training, and spares—the very accountability India’s own DAP still struggles to institutionalise. Administrative charges fund quality assurance and through-life contract management. India’s audit system performs reactively. While FMS limits price negotiation, it imports process discipline. The paradox endures: India’s most reliable acquisitions often follow another nation’s procurement law.
A final reflection comes from my time on the IN–Rafael Contract Committee for the Derby missile. The Israeli lead noted that the missile’s performance hinged on the linked IN–HAL–IAI contract, even offering to post a contracts specialist in Delhi—an offer our rules forbade. Original Equipment Manufacturers see interdependence; we enforce compliance.
Encouragingly, initiatives such as the National Law School of India University (NLSIU)–Army Training Command (ARTRAC) collaboration on Procurement Law mark progress toward professionalising India’s acquisition ecosystem. Yet defence procurement, with its sovereign obligations and classified environments, needs a dedicated Defence Acquisition Course—combining legal rigour with operational and technical understanding. Without such cross-domain learning, reform risks remaining procedural rather than professional.
As visiting faculty at NLSIU, I have tried to bridge that gap, though a few classroom sessions are, at best, a drop in the ocean. True reform demands sustained institutional learning—integrating law, finance, engineering, and command responsibility—so that procurement becomes not merely compliant but competent.
The lesson is clear: accountability and integration need not await imported frameworks; they must be built into our own. When systems are designed for transparency, capability—not paperwork—becomes the true deliverable.
Rear Admiral Sudhir Pillai (Retd) is a former Flag Officer Naval Aviation and Chief Instructor (Navy) at the Defence Services Staff College, Wellington. He is Visiting Faculty at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) and a Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at the Centre for National Security Studies (CNSS), Bengaluru. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)