Despite the establishment of ties in late 1991 Israel has rapidly turned into one of India’s top three defence suppliers and sporadically occupies the number one spot. This achievement is all the more remarkable because Israel’s exports to India this far have only been of sub-systems and auxiliary systems. This has meant that Israel has not yet sold India big ticket “high visibility” items like submarines, tanks and combat aircraft but rather has focussed on defence electronics and missiles.

For example Israel has sold India jammers for the Russian Su-30, mated Phalcon radars with Uzbek made Il-76s, and integrated the Barak missiles onto Indian warships. Some standalone systems such as the Tavor assault rifle and the Searcher drones used for the Information Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) role have also been sold. Recently India has chosen the multi-platform Spike missile as its primary anti-armour weapon.

Israel does not make several of the high tech platforms that India seeks – like submarines or combat aircraft, but the very fact that it has become one of India’s top suppliers point to three critical lessons for India.

The first is the extraordinarily high level of value addition that goes into Israeli technology – both in terms of innovation and in terms of precision manufacturing. 

The second is the level of Israel’s integration (and indispensability) into global defence supply chains to the extent that it is hard to point out a single developed country’s military that does not have Israeli manufactured components or sub-systems in their arsenals.

The third lesson is the focussing of a small population and meagre budget into only the absolute necessities of war-winning technologies such as the electronic and “under the skin” revolutions and being content with purchasing platforms from external powers.

The reason that these three lessons are important for India is that we have chosen to focus our indigenisation efforts on hugely expensive big ticket items like the HAL Tejas which have turned into white elephants. Israel presents us with an alternative business model, where a modest budget and a modest-sized workforce can still become world beaters in high technology focussing on small subsystems rather than prestige items. It teaches India the absolute importance of integrating into global supply chains.

From a political angle, for a country that values its strategic autonomy and non-alignment, the Israeli subsystem model is extremely important. It is a proof-of-concept that significant strategic and tactical autonomy can be gained purely through the mastery of sub-systems alone.

India-Israel defence cooperation therefore has the potential to bring about a paradigm shift in the way India thinks and does its defence business. It holds the potential to be able to duplicate and then improve on a high technology model with a relatively short incubation period and in a model that is optimally suited to the small and medium sector. This relationship is therefore unique for India in more ways than one and presents India with its most realistic ticket into the big league.

Abhijit Iyer-Mitra is a program coordinator at Observer Research Foundation.