India, US ink 2 key deals during Rajnath Singh's visit to Washington

New Delhi: India and USA have inked two key defence agreements to boost the military relations even as Defence Minister Rajnath Singh reviewed the bilateral and regional security issues with his US counterpart Lloyd Austin at Pentagon in Washington DC on Friday.

With Chinese threats on the back of their minds, Singh and Austin took stock of the progress made in operationalising Indo-Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness – a Quad initiative to keep track of “dark shipping” and having an overview on the ships operating in partner nations’ waters.

They also noted that New Delhi is set to deploy Indian Navy personnel in the Combined Maritime Forces Combined Task Force 150 headquarters in 2025.

India became a member of the CMF – a US Navy led 45 country group which seeks to secure the oceans – in 2023.

The CTF-150 looks after the sea lanes in the Arabian Gulf and Indian Ocean from pirates and other threats.

The two ministers also expressed happiness on the conclusion of the Security of Supplies Arrangement (SOSA), which according to an official, will encourage the defence industrial ecosystems of both countries to work together, and enhance the supply chain resilience.

An agreement on the deployment of liaison officers was also signed following which India will be deploying the first Liaison Officer to the Headquarters Special Operations Command in Florida, US, a defence ministry official said.

The agreement will allow the US and India to commit and support one another’s priority delivery requests for procurement of critical national defence resources.

While the US will provide India assurances under the US Defense Priorities and Allocations System, India will establish a government-industry Code of Conduct with its industrial base, where Indian firms will voluntarily agree to make every reasonable effort to provide the US priority support.

India is the USA’s 18^th SOSA partner. Other partners are Australia, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.

The two sides have also finalised several new technological collaborations under the India-US Defence Acceleration Ecosystem (INDUS-X). A formal announcement on these programmes is expected next month at a Silicon Valley conference.