Chandigarh: The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is adept at the fabled Indian rope trick. Its latest act came on October 26, when the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), chaired by defence minister Rajnath Singh, accorded Acceptance of Necessity (AoN) to capital acquisition proposals worth Rs 2.12 lakh crore, which included equipment for all three services, from field artillery systems and helicopters to air-defence weapons, surveillance and kamikaze drones, and naval platforms. This staggering sum announced for these proposed acquisitions made impressive headlines, leaving the impression that equipment has been ordered and the armed services are modernising at a furious pace. The celebratory headlines and laudatory media coverage miss the fact that an AoN means only that an acquisition has been accepted in principle. Nothing more. The stark reality is that many of these proposals could take years to emerge from the MoD’s Byzantine procurement maze, assuming they survive it at all.“The AoN is merely a formality mandated by the MoD,” said former defence ministry financial adviser on acquisitions, Amit Cowshish. The real, accident-prone journey, he added, begins thereafter, during which materiel procurements or related projects can be delayed interminably, severely modified or even scrapped for innumerable bureaucratic reasons.Other defence analysts concurred, pointing to the cumbersome procedures that stand between an AoN and an actual acquisition. They maintained that the 681-page Defence Acquisition Procedure (DAP) 2020, which regulates capital defence procurement, has done little to simplify the process; its sheer bulk has done little to render materiel procurements more agile, transparent or responsive to the armed forces’ operational needs.Also read: ‘Make in India’ Risks Becoming Foreign Tech Assembled at Home as Questions Loom Over India’s Fighter JetsThe MoD also announced that around 82% of these proposed procurements would be sourced from Indian industry. Yet, the latest figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) still rank India as the world’s second-largest importer of major weapon systems, accounting for 8.2% of global imports in 2021–25, behind war-ravaged Ukraine. The uncomfortable question for the MoD is also how long it can continue proclaiming Atmanirbharta, or self-reliance in defence equipment, while India remains so heavily dependent on overseas suppliers to provide it or is not significantly involved in locally developing it.The problem is not merely that India continues to import a large proportion of its military needs, but that its procurement process intended to promote domestic manufacturing often fails to progress beyond the initial announcement. In late 2019, for instance, the MoD informed the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defence (SCoD) that it had approved 218 AoNs worth Rs 4 trillion over the preceding five years to promote domestic manufacturing, but provided no further details. Industry officials subsequently said that a large proportion of these approvals had lapsed, with requests for proposals (RfPs) or tenders either never issued for many of them or simply withdrawn later for a myriad of reasons, including unworkable requirements and procedural complications.The procurement nightmare begins soon after as the AoN is merely the starting point, not the finish line. The heavy lifting comes thereafter, spread across 11 complex stages of the acquisition process, each capable of delaying or derailing a project indefinitely. The MoD, for its part, does little to correct this misconception, allowing an in-principle AoN to be mistaken for tangible progress in equipment procurement and military modernisation. Decades of procedural tinkering have done little to change this dismal reality.Ball remains in play till the QRs are approvedThe MoD’s procurement process can, and often does, take twice or even three times as long as the 74–118 weeks stipulated in successive Defence Procurement manuals for completion after an AoN has been granted. “A large proportion of AoNs routinely fade into oblivion, with just a handful being subsequently revived,” said a two-star Indian Army officer, declining to be identified. Securing AoNs, he added, is little more than an opening bureaucratic gambit or manoeuvre in a prolonged game of chess played by the MoD to signal its intent.But even the run-up to the AoN is not without hurdles and time-consuming obstacles, fabricated collectively over decades by all three armed forces themselves.The services kickstart the acquisition processes by issuing either a domestic or global request for information or RfI, to elicit information required for formulating the eventual qualitative requirements (QRs) or specs for the proposed equipment or project under consideration.Though seemingly straightforward, this too takes an age, as in their bid to demonstrate diligence, service officers collate all available literature and information on the proposed kit or undertaking, to include as many features as possible, irrespective of either their practicality or, at times, even their operational necessity in India’s eventual security environment.The draft then travels up the chain of military command, gathering supplementary parameters; each concerned officer feels compelled to suggest additional accompaniments in an endeavour to display industry. The ball remains in play till the QRs are approved by the service-specific equipment policy committees, headed by the respective deputy or vice chiefs of staff, after an inordinate amount of time. A former one-star army officer associated with such activity said rarely were deletions ever made to QR specifications. In many instances, he averred, declining to be named, what eventually emerged was a ‘well-complied wish list of utopian dimensions’. He also confessed that poorly conceived, formulated, and drafted QRs frequently ended up creating confusion, resulting in the entire acquisition being either delayed or aborted, or in some cases even both.Successive reports by parliamentary committees and the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) had severely castigated the withdrawal or termination of diverse materiel procurement tenders due to ‘implausible’ QRs. Even late Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had mocked the services at a public function in Delhi in 2015 for fashioning fanciful and phantastic QR’s which he claimed could trace their antecedents to ‘Marvel comic books’.Also read: Three Big Decisions That New IAF Chief Must TakeLimitations of editorial space prevent a comprehensive tally of innumerable such instances, but the Army’s assault-rifle tender, launched in 2011, is one such glaring instance. It was ultimately scrapped in June 2015, some five years later, after exhaustive trials as none of the competing weapons met its QRs of unbelievably switching between 5.56x45mm and 7.62×39 mm ammunition, simply by changing barrels and magazines.The Indian Air Force (IAF) too was hardly immune from this QR overstretch. In its 2019 audit, the CAG had pinpointed that buying standard Doppler weather radars was ‘bogged down’ by a checklist of 166 different quality requirements, indicating how ‘overcomplicating’ QRs had stalled the purchase of even routine hardware. The Indian Navy (IN), has also been complicit in its QR overreach that has contributed to the nearly two-decade delay in its Project 75(I) tender for six advanced diesel-electric submarines, equipped with air-independent propulsion (AIP) systems and land-attack capability. In 2022, Russia’s Rubin Design Bureau had deemed the IN’s QRs and the stipulated P-75(I) timelines unrealistic, arguing that no shipbuilder had such a platform with all the complex capabilities demanded by the IN. Other overseas submarine makers from Japan and Sweden also declined to participate in the P-75(I) programme, citing demanding specifications and ‘impractical and unworkable’ project conditions.Once the QR’s have been finalised and the RfP, or tender document based on them, issued, technical evaluation of the vendors’ responses follows by the concerned service. This is succeeded by equipment field evaluation trials on a ‘no-cost-no-commitment basis ’ in which rival original equipment manufacturers (OEM) invariably end up spending vast sums to transport their equipment and personnel accompanying it to, and within India, often to different locations, where try-outs were executed by multi-disciplinary teams.The six competitors, for instance, who fielded their respective fighters in response to the IAF’s 2007-08 tender for 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft (MMRCA), are believed to have spent upwards of $300 million each on trials across varied terrain lasting almost two years, during which the platforms were tested against over 600 operational parameters. The MoD eventually scrapped the tender in 2016, importing 36 Dassault Rafales directly from France instead of the originally envisaged 126 MMRCA. Presently, the MoD is negotiating for another 114 Rafales, effectively revisiting the earlier requirement after nearly two decades, but at a substantially higher acquisition cost of over $36 billion. The MMRCA competition was an extreme illustration of a wider problem: equipment trials across the Indian military are often lengthy, at times taking several years. This is particularly true of the Army, which tests much of its equipment, from small arms to howitzers, across widely differing terrain and climatic conditions—from Punjab’s plains and Rajasthan’s deserts to the north-eastern jungles and the Himalayan regions of Ladakh, Kashmir and Sikkim.Staff evaluation by the respective services follows trials, after which, in select cases, the technical oversight committee presents its report to ensure that all equipment parameters are in consonance with the stipulated QRs. This too is arduous and can take a long time to complete, as the scope for ‘subjective’ evaluation is vast, said industry officials. It also elicits a flurry of objections from competing contenders, with frequent complaints over ‘unduly favouring’ rival systems, adding delays to an already cumbersome process.Meanwhile, in a rare recognition of its own shortcomings in procurements, the MoD appointed an eight-member committee in 2016, headed by Pritam Singh, formerly of the Indian Institute of Management in Lucknow, and comprising serving and retired two- and three-star service officers, and financial and technical experts, to recommend ways of speeding up materiel acquisitions. Over seven months, it consulted the Indian military, defence equipment procurement officials from France, South Korea, the UK and the US, as well as industry, think tanks and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). The committee eventually proposed a Defence Capability Acquisition Authority (DCAA) of around 900 personnel, operating outside the MoD – distant from its present location in Lutyens’ Delhi – but under its overall control, to manage all aspects of procurement and curb cumbersome procedures, inter-service rivalries and corruption scandals.Also read: The IAF is Short of Fighters, Still Long on PromisesIts practicable suggestions included dividing the DCAA into seven ‘vertical’ units dealing with land, air, maritime, science and technology, industrial collaborations, and commercial and legal issues. It further stressed the importance of instituting integrated project management teams (IPMTs) for assorted programmes with strict financial and completion deadlines, in order to reduce dependency on imported materiel and to augment atamnirbharta. In short, the authority was conceived as an independent body manned by technical and military professionals with the domain knowledge, accountability and flexibility needed to augment India’s military capabilities. Most importantly, the DCAA was to have overarching responsibility for formulating equipment QRs, issuing RfIs and RfPs, overseeing trials, conducting price negotiations and even managing offset obligations. In the end, it all came to nought, and the recommendations, like those of countless other official reviews, were consigned to a filing cupboard in the MoD, never to see the light of day.The unanswered question in conclusion, then, is why the MoD is so forthcoming about the value of AoNs it approves, yet so reticent about their eventual fate.“Tom-toming the value of proposed acquisitions that invariably runs into thousands of crores is easy,” said the aforementioned Army officer “but the real test is how many of these announcements translate into actual contracts delivered on schedule, and how many quietly end up on the scrapheap”.Everything else, especially the AoN, remains merely the machinery of procurement at work, one that has a long, tortuous and frustrating history of turning operational urgency into mere paperwork and bulky files.