Chandigarh: If there is one enduring feature of India’s defence procurement, it is the tendency of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the armed services to spend years deciding what they do not want, only to return years later in pursuit of precisely the same solution.This cycle has repeated itself often enough to qualify as an informal institutional doctrine.Materiel acquisition programmes are launched, evaluated, debated, cancelled, and abandoned, only to be resurrected years later under a new acronym, a revised requirement, or a different political dispensation. In the process, years are lost, capability gaps widen, and costs invariably rise to levels that become increasingly difficult to financially sustain.The clearest illustration of this tendency is the 2007 Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) competition, which sought 126 fighters for the Indian Air Force (IAF), and stretched over nearly a decade of trials, evaluations and negotiations.Six aircraft were evaluated, two were shortlisted, and in 2012, France’s twin-engine Rafale emerged as the winner. The programme was initially valued at around $10–12 billion, with 108 aircraft slated for indigenous manufacture by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) under a transfer-of-technology arrangement.After years of protracted negotiations over costs, liability, work share, and production responsibilities between Dassault Aviation and HAL, the entire exercise unravelled. Governments changed, priorities shifted, and the MMRCA programme was ultimately abandoned. Instead, the newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party-led (BJP-led) government signed an inter-governmental agreement (IGA) with France in 2016 for 36 Rafales in flyaway condition for around Rs 58,000 crore, all of which were delivered by 2022.But the Rafale story did not end there.In April 2025, India signed a Rs 63,000-crore agreement with France for 26 Rafale Marine fighters for deployment aboard INS Vikrant, the indigenously designed and built aircraft carrier, deepening its commitment to the very aircraft that had emerged victorious in the original MMRCA competition.The irony, however, was striking: a programme conceived around the local manufacture of 108 Rafales ended with every one of the 62 replacement aircraft being imported in fully built, flyaway condition from France at enhanced cost, with no local manufacturing footprint and no meaningful transfer of skills or capability to the domestic ecosystem.Subsequently, 19 years after the MMRCA tender was launched, the MoD issued a Letter of Request to France in late May 2026 for 114 Rafale fighters under the Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (MRFA) programme. Valued at an estimated Rs 3.23 lakh crore, or roughly $39 billion – nearly four times the cost of the original MMRCA proposal – the acquisition envisages 90–94 aircraft being manufactured in India by a Strategic Partner, with the remainder imported, closely mirroring the original MMRCA framework.Or, in other words, after years spent selecting the Rafale, negotiating for it, and then abandoning it, the IAF ended up returning, once again to France, seeking essentially the same aircraft in slightly smaller numbers, under a remarkably similar manufacturing arrangement – but at a higher cost. In short, the acronym had changed; the requirement had not.An equally striking example concerns the nearly three-decade-old Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) programme with Russia.India’s interest in this project dates back to the late 1990s-early 2000s, when it began exploring participation in Russia’s future FGFA effort, then known as the PAK-FA (Perspektivny Aviatsionny Kompleks Frontovoy Aviatsii), led by the Sukhoi Design Bureau. Thereafter, in 2007, the two sides signed an IGA to jointly pursue this programme, based on the emerging Russian design.What followed was nearly a decade of negotiations over work share, technology transfer, development costs, stealth characteristics, avionics and engine performance. Throughout the period, FGFA was repeatedly presented as the vehicle through which India would gain access to fifth-generation fighter technology while sharing development responsibilities with Russia.India also invested $295 million in the FGFA project, but by 2018 it walked away with MoD, HAL and IAF officials citing concerns over the aircraft’s stealth characteristics, engine maturity, costs and, crucially, the limited access to technology being offered. After spending more than a decade inside the programme and contributing substantially to it, the IAF concluded that the aircraft did not sufficiently meet its operational requirements and that resources would be better directed towards indigenous fifth-generation fighter efforts like the twin-engine Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA).That appeared to settle the matter, except it did not.Nearly a decade later, the FGFA concept, which itself had evolved into the Su-57 ‘Felon’ around 2017–18, is once again entering strategic discussion between Delhi and Moscow-this time as a potential stopgap platform pending the induction of India’s still-nascent AMCA, optimistically projected to be ready for series production around the mid-2030s.On Friday, President Vladimir Putin forcefully revived the Su-57 pitch, offering India the fighter and reiterating Moscow’s proposal to manufacture it in India, provide extensive technology transfer, and integrate locally developed weaponry, avionics, and mission systems.Putin is reported to have emphasised that Russia was ready to work with India on both the supply and further development of the Su-57, adding that there were no preconditions or restrictions on technology transfer – an implicit contrast with more restrictive approaches taken by some Western partners, like France, who have traditionally limited the scope of sensitive technology sharing with India. The Russian President was obviously referring to access to sensitive fighter source codes that govern mission systems, avionics and sensor integration, which France’s Dassault Aviation has repeatedly declined to provide to the IAF.Simultaneously, sections of India’s strategic community and media have begun advocating a limited acquisition of at least two Su-57 squadrons as an interim capability, in view of China’s expanding fleet of fifth-generation fighters and the protracted timelines confronting the AMCA programme. Aviation industry officials in Bangalore said this highlighted the usual tendency on the part of both the MoD and the IAF to ‘prioritise quick fixes’ over long-term solutions, when indigenous programmes were expected to take longer than expected to mature.Also read: India’s Interest in the US’s Javelin Anti-Tank Missile is Back. Here’s Why it MattersAlongside, the paradox embedded in these two troubled fighter programmes is stark and unmistakable.Had the MMRCA and FGFA programmes been pursued to their intended conclusions, the IAF would by now be in a markedly stronger position, with both its medium-weight and fifth-generation fighter requirements substantially addressed. Instead, nearly two decades after both programmes were launched, it finds itself revisiting solutions it had previously abandoned, while grappling with a worsening fighter squadron crisis that has declined to merely 29 squadrons from a sanctioned force structure of 42, even as both China and Pakistan continue to modernise their combat fleets.Meanwhile, editorial space precludes a comprehensive catalogue of India’s procurement reversals, detours and rediscoveries, but the handful outlined below illustrate a familiar pattern: capabilities once rejected, delayed, or abandoned often re-emerged years later as urgent operational necessities. The aforementioned IAF instances may be the most prominent, but the IN and the Indian Army, too, have found themselves pursuing similar procurement circles by returning to solutions they had previously discarded or found to be politically untouchable or sensitive.In 2005, for instance, the IN had selected Italy’s Whitehead Alenia Sistemi Subacquei (WASS) Black Shark heavyweight torpedoes (HWTs), to arm its six Scorpène-class diesel-electric submarines built under Project-75 (P75) by Mazagaon Dock Shipbuilders Limited (MDL).But soon after their construction began, corruption allegations emerged in 2010-11 against WASS’s parent company, Finmeccanica, over the procurement of 12 AW101 Augusta-Westland helicopters, which remains unresolved 16 years later, leading to the HWT purchase being scrapped in 2016.The consequence was immediate and operationally perverse.India’s newest conventional submarines entered service between 2017 and 2025, without HWTs, forcing the IN to resort to jugaad, the quintessentially Indian practice of improvised, stop-gap engineering solutions that keep systems operational. In this case, it meant arming all six boats with upgraded German-origin SUT torpedoes, originally acquired in the mid-1980s, a fallback widely regarded within naval circles as distinctly inferior to the Black Shark munitions.What ensued in the meantime was a nearly decade-long search for alternatives.The IN examined substitute weapons for the virtually ‘toothless’ SSKs and repeatedly revisited procurement options, but none offered a quick solution and, moreover, demanded extensive platform alterations for their induction. Eventually in December 2025, the MoD and the IN returned to WASS, signing a Rs 1,896-crore contract for 48 Black Shark torpedoes, 50 units fewer than the original 98, but at a considerably higher cost. Once again, a long-festering capability gap was addressed by returning to a previously rejected solution, albeit at a markedly higher cost in both time and money.Earlier, the IN had also inducted the Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) Barak-1 naval point-defence missile in the late 1990s, but corruption allegations – again, never resolved – subsequently enveloped the programme. Procurement stalled, investigations dragged on, and follow-on acquisitions were frozen for years.Yet the Navy’s requirement for shipborne air defence never disappeared, and the MoD eventually not only resumed cooperation with IAI for the missile system, but expanded it significantly through the Barak-8 family, which was also inducted across the IAF and the Army.The Barak-8 programme too was nearly shelved amid corruption allegations that stalled procurement and pushed it into limbo, before being revived and restructured as a joint Indo-Israeli co-development effort between the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and IAI. Deployed across all three services, the Barak variants ultimately delivered the capability that had long been sought by India’s military – albeit years later and, again, at greater cost.The Indian Army also traversed a remarkably similar path in its desperate search for artillery modernisation.After the Bofors howitzer scandal of the late 1980s, the MoD and the Army effectively froze all field artillery procurement for almost three decades. Successive governments went to extraordinary lengths to avoid anything associated with Bofors, turning a single scandal into an institutional taboo that paralysed decision-making in one of the Army’s most critical combat arms. The result was an extraordinary strategic stagnation, and while operational requirements evolved through the 1990s and were brutally underscored during the Kargil conflict, all new inductions were repeatedly postponed.Also read: With Finance Ministry Nod, Long-Stalled Rs 70,000-Crore Submarine Project Moves Closer to RealityWhen modernisation finally resumed in 2012-13, the contradiction was stark. The indigenous Dhanush gun that emerged from this restart was, in effect, an upgraded derivative of the very FH-77B Bofors design that India had spent decades politically distancing itself from. By the time artillery procurement restarted in earnest, led by Dhanush, the Army had effectively lost nearly 30 years in one of its core combat spheres.Collectively, across the armed forces, India’s procurement history is suffused by programmes delayed, abandoned, blacklisted, reconfigured, or otherwise stalled, only to re-emerge years later in altered form. Yet beneath these reversals lies a deeper problem: flawed decision-making, shifting official priorities and a chronic lack of accountability. Few decisions are ever cleanly owned, fewer still are pursued with consistency, and almost none attract meaningful consequence when timelines collapse, capability gaps widen and costs escalate.A cross-section of service veterans and analysts maintain that India’s materiel procurement resembles a pendulum: it swings first toward imports, then indigenous development, then joint development, before drifting back toward imports again. Each shift is usually justified on rational grounds, with many programmes, like those listed above, repeatedly returning to their point of origin years later, only more expensive, more delayed, and often operationally compromised in the interim.That is why MMRCA and FGFA resonate so strongly today.In both cases, India spent years evaluating and negotiating a solution, ultimately walked away, and then found itself circling back to variants of the same requirement, because the underlying capability requirement had never disappeared. Seen in that light, the pattern is difficult to dismiss as a coincidence or a simple lapse.As Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, observed in Goldfinger, “Once is happenstance. Twice is a coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” Indian defence procurement may not quite qualify as enemy action, but when the same pattern keeps repeating, it begins to look less like an isolated error and more like a bad and recurring compulsion.