Source: Global Security Newswire, 7 September 2011
NATO has expressed interest in collaborating with India on antimissile systems, in part through the potential exchange of relevant technology, the Press Trust of India reported on Sunday (see GSN, March 7).
The military alliance is pursuing an effort agreed to in November 2010 to enhance and connect individual European states' antimissile operations. Speaking at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, top NATO officials described the system as a hedge against possible Iranian and Syrian missile attacks.
“You have a missile threat that confronts you. We have a missile threat that confronts us. It’s a different one, but our ability to defend against it could be the same. We have cooperation on those kind of issues,” one top NATO official said of India.
The official called for diplomatic exchanges between NATO and India comparable to those New Delhi shares with Washington.
“Democracies face challenges that are common. We need to work together and resolve. We need to cooperate, because individually we cannot deal with such threats. It is better to deal with such issues commonly than deal with them individually,” the official said.
The source identified "the technology of defense" as one area of similarity between NATO and Indian antimissile operations.
“Even though the threats of missiles come from different directions, we don’t necessarily see the threat that you see, because your strategic situation is different from ours. But, the technology of discovering and intercepting missiles is similar,” he said.
A senior U.S. official tied to the alliance, though, suggested antimissile collaboration "could be more [a] U.S.-Indian relationship, than a NATO-Indian. But we are getting into ballistic missiles defense systems in a pretty big way."
"As a result, we have knowledge which you can share and we can train together. Even though the threat is different the nature of the response can be similar," the U.S. official said.
New Delhi would determine the specifics of such collaboration, the source said, suggesting "there are experiences that we could talk about and share them."
India has pursued an autonomous missile defense framework to date, despite U.S. offers to involve the South Asian state in its own antimissile scheme, according to PTI. The United States has also suggested it could make Patriot missile defenses available to New Delhi.
The Indian Defense Research and Development Organization is pursuing a dual-layered antimissile framework slated to enter service before 2016. The effort is intended to counter Chinese and Pakistani missile capabilities, though New Delhi has not said so outright, according to PTI (Press Trust of India/The Hindu, Sept. 4).