Submission Statement: For decades, the United States and India circled each other as potential defense partners—aligned by democratic values and shared strategic concerns, yet separated by Cold War legacies and divergent procurement cultures. Now, a proposed Reciprocal Defense Procurement Agreement (“RDPA”) promises to open each country’s military marketplace to the other’s defense firms. But the road to completion of the agreement is neither short nor smooth.
At its core, an RDPA is a binding government-to-government agreement in which each country agrees to treat the other’s defense industry as a trusted partner—reducing procurement barriers so that each can buy defense goods and services from the other’s suppliers on reciprocal terms. The United States has concluded such arrangements with 28 qualifying countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Israel, France, and Germany. India already collaborates closely with several of these qualifying countries in the Indo-Pacific region, including through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), which brings together India, Japan, Australia, and the United States.
For U.S. government contractors, an RDPA would open the Indian defense market and simultaneously allow greater sourcing from India for U.S. defense procurements. On the U.S. regulatory front, the operative change is one of status. Conclusion of an RDPA would make India a “qualifying country” within the meaning of DFARS 225.003—a designation that carries specific benefits for defense procurement.
The practical upshot is that Indian vendors would compete for U.S. DoW business on a footing much closer to their American counterparts, and American defense firms could leverage Indian sources of supply in a much more significant way.
DoW is seeking to replenish its munitions stockpiles through cost-effective, scalable sourcing strategies. Operation Sindoor—India’s five-day May 2025 campaign against key military installations in Pakistan—demonstrated that India’s relatively inexpensive, domestically adapted systems could blunt Pakistan’s more sophisticated and costly Chinese-sourced hardware. That lesson resonates with Pentagon leaders who are increasingly focused on proving that battlefield effectiveness need not carry a premium price. An RDPA could enable the United States to capitalize on India’s growing defense industrial capacity in much the same way that European manufacturers have leveraged Indian production capabilities to support the reindustrialization and scaling of Europe’s defense sector.
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