NDA (I) 2018 General Ability Test · Question 145 of 150

Correct — B, United States of America. The Defence Technology and Trade Initiative is the standing India-United States forum on defence technology, set up in 2012 and driven from the American side by Ashton Carter, then Deputy Secretary of Defense and later Secretary of Defense. Its purpose was to take the relationship past the ordinary buyer-and-seller pattern of arms sales. Both countries have complicated procurement systems, export-control rules and budget cycles, and DTTI was created to work around those bureaucratic obstacles — to speed up approvals, to open channels for technology sharing, and to identify projects the two could develop and produce together. It is run through joint working groups and a short list of pathfinder projects, and it is a dialogue mechanism rather than a treaty or an alliance.

• (a)Russia — Russia is India's oldest and largest defence supplier, and the two have their own long-standing machinery — the India-Russia Inter-Governmental Commission on Military-Technical Cooperation, and joint ventures such as BrahMos. None of that goes by the name DTTI.
• (c)Israel — India and Israel have a substantial defence relationship, particularly in missiles, radars and unmanned systems, but it runs through direct contracts and joint development programmes rather than through this forum.
• (d)France — France is a major supplier — Rafale aircraft, Scorpene submarines, earlier the Mirage 2000 — and the two countries hold a regular strategic dialogue. DTTI is not the name of that channel.

India buys defence equipment from several countries and maintains a differently structured relationship with each. With Russia the pattern is long-running licensed production and joint ventures. With France and Israel it is largely direct purchase with offsets. With the United States, defence trade grew very fast after 2005 but from a standing start, and DTTI was the mechanism designed to convert that trade into shared technology. The initiative sits alongside the foundational agreements the two countries signed to make their forces interoperable, and alongside the annual Malabar naval exercise, which is the subject of another item in this same paper.

Anchor to the exam. In April 2018 DTTI was six years old and had produced joint working groups on land systems, naval systems, air systems and aircraft carrier technology, along with a handful of small pathfinder projects. Commentators at the time judged its practical output modest against its ambitions, and that criticism is part of the honest picture of the initiative rather than a footnote to it. What has not changed is the answer to this question: DTTI is, and has always been, an India-United States forum. What has changed is the wider setting — the India-United States technology relationship has since been widened well beyond defence hardware into critical and emerging technologies, so a candidate should describe DTTI as one channel among several rather than as the whole relationship. The way to hold the acronym is to attach the country to it at the point of learning, because this section of the paper is full of initiative names that differ only in their partner.

• DTTI is the India-United States forum on defence technology and trade, created in 2012.
• Ashton Carter, then US Deputy Secretary of Defense and later Secretary of Defense, was the prime mover on the American side.
• Its stated aim is to move beyond a buyer-seller relationship towards co-development and co-production.
• It works through joint working groups and a small set of pathfinder projects; it is a dialogue mechanism, not a treaty.
• India's defence relationships with Russia, France and Israel run through separate and differently named channels.

• Guessing Russia because it is India's largest defence partner by volume; the question is about the name of a forum, not the size of a trade.
• Treating DTTI as a treaty or an alliance — it is a dialogue mechanism with working groups.
• Confusing DTTI with the separate agreements on logistics, communications and geospatial cooperation.

NDA gives an acronym or an initiative name and asks for the partner country, and stocks the options with India's other major defence partners.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The BrahMos supersonic cruise missile is a joint venture between India and

  • (a)France
  • (b)Israel
  • (c)Russia
  • (d)the United States

  Answer(c) Russia — the name itself combines the Brahmaputra and the Moskva.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The stated purpose of the Defence Technology and Trade Initiative is to

  • (a)set annual arms import quotas for India
  • (b)move the partnership beyond a buyer-seller relationship towards co-development and co-production
  • (c)provide a forum for settling defence contract disputes
  • (d)coordinate United Nations peacekeeping deployments

  Answer(b) move the partnership beyond a buyer-seller relationship towards co-development and co-production.