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What are the geopolitical risks if India were to buy large quantities of state-of-the-art weapons from the United States?
by beamatronic 12y ago
What are the geopolitical risks if India were to buy large quantities of state-of-the-art weapons from the United States?
- smacktoward 12y agoI doubt there would be any significant risks; India and Russia don't share a land border, and Russia's more concerned with China (whom India has also had a contentious relationship with) and Eastern Europe. The biggest barrier to such a shift would probably just be domestic inertia. India has a long history of buying Russian weapons, going back all the way to the early Cold War (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Russia_relations#Soviet_Union_and_India http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Russia_relations#...). This would mean they've built up a lot of infrastructure, training and doctrine revolving around the characteristics of Russian hardware, so they're unlikely to just drop all that overnight. That being said, they have been moving to diversify their portfolio of arms suppliers; the Indian Air Force operates the French Dassault Mirage 2000 alongside its Russian-designed Su-30s and MiG-21s, for instance, and domestically-designed aircraft will be mixed in as well if they can ever get their HAL Tejas project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_Tejas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_Tejas) finished.