The Approval Trap: India's Gap Between Approval and Arsenal

A particular ritual occurs in the Indian defence sector’s reporting today, so familiar that it no longer registers as strange or distinct in what it actually does for the sector. The Defence Acquisition Council meets, and a figure is announced. Just recently, on the 3rd of July, 2026, this figure was 52,000 crore rupees.

Illustration by The Geostrata

This amount was cleared for anti-drone systems, air defence, and high-altitude surveillance platforms, amongst the defence modernization objectives. This announcement makes it look like an acquisition or spending, and that the armed forces have received this capability. Beyond this, the project likely faces delays, cancellations, or an increase in costs.  

THE MIRAGE PATTERN

This ritualistic pattern has occurred for the better part of four decades, across governments, defence ministers, geopolitical climates, wars, and more. This includes the Post-Kargil years, the post-Balakot years, and now the post-Sindoor doctrine. This pattern never actually changes; the only thing that does perhaps change is the persistence and capability of threats.

The fundamental difference in announcement and outcome is largely underanalysed.

This comfort in announcements becomes a pattern as opposed to unfortunate coincidences.

To name this pattern would be to call it the “acceptance of necessity inflation” as a system of building perceptions that issue promises of capability much quicker than turning them into the capabilities necessary. 

THE HOLLOW SKY

To see how this works, it is better to follow a single thread that illustrates this pattern better than most tenets of Indian defence policy in the fighter jet that has haunted Indian defence for the better part of two decades. In 2007, the Indian Air Force issued a requirement for 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft in a deal which would be known as the MMRCA.

The requirement in itself was sound, as the Indian Air Force was already slipping below sanctioned levels and everyone in the planning establishment knew this, which led to the acceptance of necessity in the first place. 

It is not that the government is indifferent to these requirements; however, what followed this acceptance was a process. In this process, qualitative requirements were drafted, revised, and drafted again; trials were conducted, contested, and then repeated; within this, an offset clause meant to guarantee 50% domestic investment became its very own domestic battlefield; and by 2015, after 8 years, the tender was eventually scrapped in favour of a smaller government purchase of 36 aircraft. 

A fresh request for proposal eventually followed in 2018. It was only in March of this year, nearly two decades after the original requirement was cleared, that the Defence Acquisition Council accorded Acceptance of Necessity for a new tranche of 114 Rafale F4 jets, valued at more than 3 lakh crore rupees.

In all of this time, the air force’s squadron strength never actually recovered; it still operates way below the sanctioned levels.

What we observe here is not a failure of intent or acceptance, but rather of every single element of the value chain that happened between the requirement and the actual aircraft. 

COMPOUNDING

Through this quiet, yet persistent pattern, the acceptance of necessity compounds. Every year or every few months, a new proposal or file floats in the pipeline, and three things happen simultaneously: the actual threat environment where the need was recognised moves on, the specified technology according to those requirements already starts to age and become outdated by the time it is even contracted.

In addition to this, the price and the cost of projects due to these issues rise, and procurement rules permit an annual escalation on quoted rates that, stretched across a decade of delay, can eclipse the value of the original sanction before any money reaches a vendor. 

By the time the contract is actually signed, the country pays higher prices for a platform or defence item whose specifications were analysed and finalised for a threat picture that has since either grown or changed.

The Ministry of Defence does not conceal this dynamic; it acknowledges through successive reviews of the Defence Acquisition Procedure that bureaucratic layering, protracted trials, and even inconsistent funding have stretched acquisition cycles across years, sometimes even more than a decade from the first AON to the signed contract. 

INDIA IS NOT MAKING IN INDIA

Under this deadlock, there runs a parallel current tied to India’s vision to build defence apparatus domestically rather than importing. Again, the ambition, the necessity, and the intent are noteworthy and forward-thinking.

The political commitment is not in question, with there being clear visibility for the same due to the government reserving three-quarters of the capital acquisition budget for domestic vendors.

However, many supply orders placed under indigenisation schemes face issues even today, mostly because of a lack of technical capacity or a shortage of a specified raw material requirement. 

Every foreclosure caused as a part of this process causes active damage to the defence gap that already prevails in indigenous defence manufacturing in India. It compounds the problem already caused by existing delays. 

Threading these together shows us the final tapestry of numbers. The Ministry rightly celebrated 2025-26 as a milestone year because the capital budget was spent in full for the first time and without the surrender of unused funds back to the exchequer.

In addition to this, the Defence Acquisition Council granted Acceptance of Necessity to fifty-five proposals worth roughly 6.73 lakh crore rupees and signed contracts that same year totalling 2.28 lakh crore rupees, which is still only a third of the cleared amount.

THE MOVE TOWARDS AN HONEST CURRENCY

India is not the first democracy to face this capability gap. Australia reached the same point nearly two decades ago with its 2003 Defence Procurement Review, with major projects approved against unrealistic schedules and poor testing, much like India today. 

The fix was structural: a first pass that narrowed options and fixed a cost envelope, and a second pass that could proceed only after appropriate testing measures. Projects that passed through this showed better adherence to timelines.  

South Korea took a similar route in 2006, dissolving acquisition offices across its military services into a civilian-led agency to remove the inter-service bargaining and accountability diffusion that had made procurement opaque and prone to delays. Neither country solved the problem permanently, and it was necessary to revisit reforms roughly once a decade.

India, drawing from these models, must learn how to separate the moment a requirement is approved from the moment of real money and risk commitment. 

Three changes would move India's arsenal in that direction. First, an Acceptance of Necessity should carry a validity window after which an unconverted proposal lapses and must be adjusted for the current threat picture, rather than sitting till the next delay.

Second, the DAC's own conversion record, from AoN to signed contract, should be viewed as a performance metric so that each year's headline figure is read alongside how much of the previous year's promise was kept. 

Third, the accountability in Australia's system, with a named owner at each gate and a public register of projects falling behind their own timelines, should be part of the acquisition process and not only for the vendors usually blamed.

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BY KRISH

TEAM GEOSTRATA

info@thegeostrata.com