<< Secretary of Defense Ash Carter is welcomed to India's Ministry of Defense by India's Minister of Defense Manohar Parrikar in New Delhi, India, June 3, 2015. DoD Photo by Glenn Fawcett (Image: Flickr User - Ash Carter)
By Franz-Stefan Gady
The U.S. Defense Secretary is visiting India hoping to forge closer strategic ties between New Delhi and Washington.
Today, while on a two-day visit to India, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced that New Delhi and Washington agreed on two small technology co-development projects at a total cost of $1 million, to be split evenly by the two countries over a two year period.
The two projects, led by India’s Defense Research and Development Organization and the Pentagon research labs, will focus on the joint development of a next generation solar generator and a new protective chemical-bio suit, the Wall Street Journal reports.
“We have big ambitions. Some of the projects that we’re launching just now are in part intended to blaze a trail for things to come,” Carter told reporters while in New Delhi. However, he also cautioned: “There is a legacy, and historical burden, of bureaucracy in both countries, and it is a constant exercise in stripping that away. It’s just the burden we carry forward from the fact that we were two separated industrial systems for so long during the Cold War. It just takes time to get the two [systems] together.”
The two projects are part of the Defense Trade and Technology Initiative (DTTI), which the defense secretary helped negotiate in 2012. In Carter’s words, “The heart of [DTTI] is to create cooperative technology and industrial relationships which are not just the buyer-seller kind. We obviously have those kind of relationships, but both we and the Indians want to move beyond that.”
Read the full story at The Diplomat