Chandigarh: It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that not a single major military acquisition undertaken by India’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the three services over the past several decades has ever been concluded within even its own self-imposed deadlines; delay, not delivery, has been the only constant.A cross-section of defence industry and military officials and security analysts declared that not even once had any regime, including that of prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led administration, which prides itself on efficiency and being muscular in security matters, effected the acquisition of prime military kit within the officially prescribed period.Even defence secretary Rajesh Kumar Singh had publicly conceded that the MoD’s procurement system was “broken” and chronically delayed. Speaking at the 21st Subroto Mukherjee Memorial Seminar on Atmanirbharta in Aerospace: The Way Ahead in New Delhi in January 2025, Singh acknowledged that India’s military acquisition framework had long been damaged.“The timelines we’ve given ourselves are too luxurious,” he was quoted by Business Standard as saying, admitting that even routine steps – such as drafting Requests for Proposal (RFPs) before seeking Acceptance of Necessity (AoN) approval – had become effectively “inoperable.”Similar frustrations were voiced by Chief of Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan, who, at multiple forums last year-including the United Service Institution and a “Brainstorming Session 2.0” at the Manekshaw Centre – criticised repeated vendor delays, during even emergency procurement cycles. Urging industry to demonstrate greater “nationalism and patriotism,” Chauhan implicitly highlighted how even fast-track acquisition mechanisms were faltering under systemic inertia and execution failures.Timelines rarely work in practiceAlongside successive parliamentary defence committees, the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) and other government watchdog bodies had, over decades, consistently excoriated these delays, but to no avail. An array of MoD and industry officials, too, privately admitted that other than the hidebound bureaucracy inherent in the system, the slew of tortuous procurement manuals, running into hundreds of pages, which defied comprehension even for insiders, were largely behind these enduring delays, which were far too long to tabulate in detail, but adversely impacted all three services.According to the DAP-2020, which has superintended all military buys since that year, multi-vendor purchases are required to be completed between 62 to 86 weeks of their tenders being dispatched, while those involving a single vendor need to be processed between 74 and 106 weeks. An additional 12-week extension is permissible if the equipment under purchase includes winter trials.However, in practice, these timelines have rarely, if at all, been met.Most major acquisitions have overrun these schedules by years, sometimes decades, through repeated extensions, re-tendering, and procedural resets. There is no penalty for missing deadlines, no accountability for delay, with postponement having routinely emerged as a default option, industry officials said.The deadline in the DAP-2020 for awarding contracts via the eponymous Fast Track Procedure (FTP), on the other hand, from the time the acquisition proposal was initiated was 122-216 days (17.4-30.8 weeks), followed by deliveries, which needed to be completed between 3-12 months after the deal was signed.But even here, schedules were hardly ever adhered to. Several recent FTP tenders, being processed as ‘Emergency Procurements’ to meet immediate operational requirements, especially after Operation Sindoor, also remained in ‘animated suspension’ for extended periods, before either being arbitrarily terminated or delivered in dribs and drabs.What was originally conceived as a rules-based materiel procurement architecture, designed to ensure probity, competitiveness, and value for money, has, over time, hardened into a self-defeating system, in which procedure overwhelms purpose. Timelines to conclude purchases exist largely as notional markers, routinely breached with impunity, while accountability for delay remains absent.To cite just a handful from a multitude of cases spanning decades: fighter aircraft procurements initiated nearly a quarter-century ago continue to drag on; artillery modernisation has lurched from scandal to stasis to truncated induction; and conventional submarine construction timelines have stretched so dramatically that replacement vessels are being conceptualised before the final units of the preceding class are fully inducted.Even relatively uncontroversial and less complex acquisitions and leasing of transport aircraft, helicopters, or support enablers like Multi Role Tanker Transports (MRTTs) have been subjected to prolonged evaluation loops, re-tendering, and contractual resets.In each case, deadlines quietly dissolve, replaced by revised schedules that soon lose meaning as procurements drag interminably on in a timeless system where the word for ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’ (kal)–is paradoxically the same; and where the supposed time limits of purson and turson – the day after, the third day, or thereabouts – remain equally nebulous.So much so that, in many instances, by the time contracts are signed, the technology or materiel being acquired is obsolete, costs have escalated, and the original threat scenario has shifted, rendering the acquisition infructuous. What remains steadfast is the official appetite for procedural caution, and by the time the files are finally processed, the enemy has already rewritten the rules of engagement for that platform or that particular equipment.An institutional culture that encourages risk avoidance over operational urgencyThe root of this dysfunction in the MoD, as well as the three respective services, lies not in a lack of expertise or awareness or even lack of finances – as many wrongfully think – but in an institutional culture that encourages risk avoidance over operational urgency. Procurement officials and the organisations they head are structurally incentivised to delay rather than decide; in the MoD and the military, caution is not a virtue, it is a survival strategy.Parallelly, India’s defence procurement system is paralysed by fear – fear of allegations; fear of inquiry by investigative agencies, parliamentary committees, or the media; and, for many officials, a lingering fear of retrospective judgment, where decisions taken in office can be revisited years after retirement, when the individuals concerned are professionally unprotected and hugely vulnerable.At the heart of this dysfunction lies a toxic legacy of corruption scandals stretching from the Bofors affair of the late 1980s –which discredited the Congress government and contributed to its electoral defeat in 1989 – to many more recent controversies. Consequently, the lesson internalised by civil servants and senior military officers alike has been brutally simple: taking decisions is risky; avoiding them is safe.They all seem to have realised that files that move swiftly through the corridors of South Block or respective service headquarters can invite scrutiny on grounds of ‘personal interest’. On the contrary, files that remain static stay invisible –below the radar – conferring immunity upon their custodians. Over time, this has entrenched an unwritten rule in official India: no one is penalised for not doing their job or task; the chances of them being penalised for doing it, on the other hand, are high.“Across the entire spectrum of India’s materiel procurement establishment, corruption is feared more than conflict, and suspicion outweighs urgency,” said a three-star Indian Army veteran. This is not to suggest that corruption has been eliminated – far from it, it persists – nor that vigilance is unnecessary, he clarified, requesting anonymity. But the real damage lies in how this pervasive paranoia has frozen the system, paralysed decision-making, and repeatedly deferred military modernisation, he added.In the Indian Air Force (IAF), these shortfalls included the 114 Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft, additional MRTTs, early warning and control (AEW&C) platforms, a new basic trainer to fully replace the HPT-32, light utility and heavy-lift helicopters, precision-guided munitions, and networked Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) assets – many of which have been acknowledged requirements for ages.The Indian Army (IA) reflected similar paralysis, with the Future Infantry Combat Vehicle programme stalled since the early 2000s, artillery modernisation limping along, and critical systems such as the Tactical Communications System, Battlefield Surveillance System, and air-defence modernisation repeatedly reset or delayed. It was only in August 2025, for instance, some 20 years after IA had operated without a close-quarter battle carbine, did the MoD sign a deal with two domestic vendors for this weapon system, in what is merely just one of innumerable extended and torturous buys.The Indian Navy (IN), ostensibly the most efficient at inductions, too, fared poorly. Its nearly two-decade-old Project-75(I) to locally build six conventional submarines remains mired in indecision, as does its equally vital Mine Counter-Measure Vessel programme that has been repeatedly scrapped despite their urgent requirement for decades. Carrier-borne fighters for the aircraft carrier INS Vikrant too were delayed until long after its commissioning, and naval utility helicopter acquisitions have cycled repeatedly through cancellation and re-tendering. Even the leasing of select platforms, intended as a ‘bridging measure’, has failed miserably to translate into timely operational capability.Taken together, these instances – among countless others – expose a cross-service and MoD dysfunction in which acknowledged capability gaps are allowed to fester, as procedural caution consistently overrides operational necessity. Worse, this chronic dysfunction has become institutionalised, turning delay into a safe default, even when it adversely weakens deterrence, warfighting credibility, and above all, national security.“A mood of detachment pervades the entire defence procurement process, in which urgency is of little or no consequence, despite serious security challenges emerging in recent years along India’s disputed borders with collusive nuclear-armed neighbours, China and Pakistan,” said Amit Cowshish, former MoD acquisitions financial advisor. Rarely, if at all, had purchases of key platforms and other important defence equipment in recent years ever adhered to authorised schedules, he confirmed.India’s 12-stage materiel procurement system, as detailed in the Defence Acquisition Procedure-2020, the latest edition, in a series of similar voluminous manuals since 2002, is cumbersome and clumsy and liable to be derailed at multiple stages.It kicks off with the respective services issuing a Request for information ( Rfi) to vendors-local or overseas, or, at times, even both, for assorted items, following which the service qualitative requirements or SQRs for them were formulated. An AoN is then accorded for their purchase by the MoD’s Defence Acquisition Council- in effect merely a procedural move by the MoD to kick-start the acquisition, but one that excites inordinate official and media attention, creating, for the uninitiated, the mirage that the particular procurement was well underway.Nothing, however, could be further from reality, as the interminable heavy lifting is yet to begin.Lack of professionalismThis commences with the issuance of a Request For Proposal (RFP), succeeded by a technical evaluation of the responses from respective vendors. Field trials follow, and a technical oversight committee then assesses their outcome, shortlisting the participants, after which the commercial bids submitted at the time of tendering for the contract are opened and negotiations launched with the L1, or lowest priced of the selected bidders.Thereafter, contract approval by the Competent Financial Authority is secured, and in purchases of Rs 3,000 crore and above, the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), headed by the Prime Minister, sanctions the buy, after which the deal is formally signed.The matter, however, does not end here, as the purchase is monitored by the respective service headquarters, leading to further delays. The involvement thereafter of several associated departments like the Director General of Quality Assurance (DGQA) for the Army, and analogous organisations for the IAF and IN, only adds to the prevailing miasma, further perpetuating delivery postponements.Procurements were further hamstrung by a lack of professionalism in all three services in drawing up their equipment QRs or specifications.On this aspect, the late Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had mockingly referred to these QRs as being ‘straight out of Marvel comic books’, as the technologies and capabilities demanded by all three services, especially the IA, were simply non-existent globally. But Parrikar’s admonishment has fallen on deaf ears, as the military’s affinity for ‘Marvel-esque’ weaponry endured.QRs were formulated in response to Request for Information (RFIs), ahead of issuing detailed RFPs for the concerned equipment or project. They began with the draft document, travelling steadily up the chain of military command, and at each stage gathering supplementary parameters, with each officer feeling compelled to suggest additional accompaniments, in an endeavour to display industry. Deletions were rarely made, and the final QR at times emerged as a utopian wish list –specifications that simply did not exist in reality, reminiscent of Parrikar’s Marvel-esque analogies.Accordingly, materiel labelled ‘urgent’ by the services can disappear into an evaluation cycle measured in years rather than months, a timeframe more suited to peacetime indulgence than operational necessity in a milieu where paperwork at numerous desks in the MoD and service headquarters is treated as a risk greater than the battlefield.