Tag: Technology

India has built foreign-designed weapons under license for six decades without acquiring design authority. This report explains why: procurement treats technology transfer as a contractual deliverable, but absorption cannot be contracted for. It sets out a ladder of technological depth and a five-stage chain, then scores four programs against them.

Drawing on verified procurement records, budget documents and industry data from both countries, the report identifies near-term matches between documented Indian requirements and established Australian capabilities, six medium-term areas of shared technological priority, and the structural obstacles standing between them. It closes with seven initiatives with indicative costs, most of which require no direct expenditure.

This report assesses the outcomes of South Korean President Lee Jae Myung’s three-day visit to India from 19 to 21 April 2026, the first state visit by a Republic of Korea head of state in eight years. It tracks the visit’s strategic frameworks, government-to-government agreements, business-to-business deals, and policy announcements, and reads them against the prior arc of the India-ROK Special Strategic Partnership.

This report is a follow-up to an earlier study, “Beyond the Kinetic,” by the same authors, which introduced the Socio-Technical-Cognitive Battlespace as a way of understanding modern conflict.

The report does three things. It maps the market and policy drivers of the boom, including domestic demand, the GCC ecosystem, infrastructure status for data centers above 5 MW, a twenty-year tax holiday for foreign hyperscalers exporting their services, state-level incentive packages, and a dense maze of data localization rules. It then conducts a cost-benefit analysis that questions the dominant claims of technological sovereignty and broad economic gain. Finally, it argues that India must shift from investment facilitation to negotiated extraction, and lays out the concrete templates the government can put on the table: compute for academia, applied R&D testbeds, regional tech clusters, AI-based public service delivery, and a structured renewables and storage push.

This scoping report is the first in a series of five and examines the evolving maritime risk environment in the Indo-Pacific, the strategic importance of UDA, and the technological developments shaping it. It highlights UDA as a promising avenue for Australia-India cooperation, building on complementary strengths such as India’s manufacturing scale and Australia’s niche intellectual property and research expertise.