Roles and Tasks of India’s Defence R&D vis-a-vis USA’s RDT&E - A Preliminary Analysis

While developing a range of products for the Armed Forces - covering electronics, sensors, weapons, missiles, armored vehicles, combat vehicles, aircrafts, unmanned systems, advanced computing systems and advanced materials – India’s Defence Research & Development Organization (DRDO) has been applying multi-disciplinary engineering, technology and scientific methods. DRDO’s strength has helped achieving higher levels of technological maturity and self-reliance in some of the critical Defence systems and technologies such as strategic systems, air defense systems, radars, sonars, aircrafts, airborne early warning & Control (AEW&C), underwater weapons, electronic warfare (EW) systems, guns, tanks and armoured vehicles. DRDO’s policies are also helping towards building a robust industry-academia interaction framework and a greater Defence research & development (R&D) and ecosystem in the country.

In this context, an analysis of the USA Defense R&D activities by the various Laboratories and Centers and Budget allocations has been being carried out to help evolve greater clarity among the stakeholders. Mapping of R&D activities in DOD’s R&D Framework is also done to clarify on certain misconceptions on the roles and tasks of DRDO & the often-stated comparisons to DARPA. Some of the important conclusions which can be drawn based on of this analysis are as addressed in the following parts.