In this edition of Defence Dispatch, we look at three developments that shaped April. First, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh's visit to Germany, which produced a ten-year defence industrial cooperation roadmap and brought the P-75I attack submarine deal closer to conclusion. Second, the official publication of the India-Russia Reciprocal Exchange of Logistics Support (RELOS) agreement, which for the first time allows a foreign military to temporarily station personnel on Indian soil. Third, the defence outcomes of South Korean President Lee Jae Myung's state visit to India, including a shift in the K9 Vajra partnership from acquisition toward co-development and joint design.
In Focus:
India-Germany: A Defence Industrial Roadmap Against the Backdrop of European Rearmament
On 22 April, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Germany's Federal Minister of Defence Boris Pistorius signed a Defence Industrial Cooperation Roadmap in Berlin, establishing a ten-year framework for joint research, development and production of defence equipment. An implementing arrangement on UN peacekeeping training cooperation was signed alongside. Minister Singh's three-day visit was the first by an Indian Defence Minister to Germany in seven years where he also visited the ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) shipyard in Kiel with Minister Pistorius. Pistorius reportedly indicated he expects the P-75I submarine contract to be signed within three months.
The P-75I programme covers six advanced diesel-electric submarines equipped with air-independent propulsion, to be built at Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders in partnership with TKMS. The deal is estimated at $8-10 billion and structured around substantial technology transfer and local production. If concluded on these terms, it would mark the first time Germany has transferred submarine production technology to a non-European country.
The roadmap arrives at a moment when Germany's own defence posture is changing rapidly. On the same day the roadmap was signed, Berlin released its first formal military strategy since 1949, committing to a military buildup that will require volumes of munitions, air defence systems, unmanned platforms and digital infrastructure that its domestic industrial base cannot supply alone. Germany's military spending grew 24 percent year-on-year to $114 billion in 2025, making it the fourth largest defence spender globally, and European NATO members collectively spent $559 billion. In our first edition, we noted that Europe was entering a period of deliberate rearmament driven by weakening assumptions about U.S. security guarantees, and that this shift would reshape procurement, partnerships and defence production far beyond the West. The EU-India Security and Defence Partnership signed in January, which we covered in that edition, was an early institutional expression of this trend. Minister Singh himself referenced that partnership during the Berlin talks, framing the roadmap as a way to leverage it for tangible bilateral and wider European outcomes. His address to Indian and German industry leaders at the Defence Investor Summit in Munich the following day was direct about how India sees itself fitting into this picture. He pointed to what he described as significant untapped potential between ReArm Europe and Aatmanirbhar Bharat, identifying AI-enabled unmanned aerial systems, advanced radar and sensor technology, and sonobuoys as specific areas for co-development. India's pursuit of self-reliance, he stated, is "not inward-looking" but about designing, developing and producing with trusted partners.
For India, the opportunity is real and immediate. A Europe that is rearming and actively seeking industrial partners is a materially different proposition from the one India engaged with even five years ago. The challenge, as with any such framework, is to convert institutional interest into industrial outcomes, and the P-75I contract will be the first test of whether this roadmap produces genuine technology transfer or remains, as previous defence cooperation frameworks often have, a statement of intent.
India-Russia: The RELOS Agreement and What It Signals
On 17 April, the full text of the Reciprocal Exchange of Logistics Support (RELOS) agreement between India and Russia was published on Russia's official legal information portal. The agreement was signed in Moscow in February 2025 and ratified by President Putin in December, but had been kept notably low-profile by New Delhi. Its provisions are now public: each side may station up to 3,000 troops, five warships and ten military aircraft on the other's territory. The pact covers refuelling, repairs, port access, air traffic control, and supply of food, water and technical resources for naval and air operations. It is valid for five years, with automatic renewal.
India has logistics exchange agreements with several countries, including the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) with the United States signed in 2016, and similar arrangements with Japan and Australia. But none of those permit the stationing of troops, warships and aircraft at the scale RELOS provides for. This is the first time India has allowed a foreign military to temporarily station personnel on its soil.
The strategic logic runs in both directions. Russia currently has no military infrastructure in the Indian Ocean, a region that has become active following disruptions to Gulf shipping lanes. RELOS provides access to Indian maritime facilities and extends the operational endurance of Russian naval deployments in the region. For India, the pact opens access to Russian facilities in the Arctic and Far East, including the northern sea route from Vladivostok to Murmansk. At a time when competition in the Arctic is intensifying, with China actively pursuing polar shipping routes, that access carries weight.
A close examination of the text suggests the provisions are largely technical, focused on facilitating existing bilateral exercises such as the INDRA series rather than enabling new large-scale operational deployments, and that any troop movement still requires advance coordination and bureaucratic clearance. However, RELOS moves the relationship from a primarily equipment-centric supply arrangement to one that also enables operational logistics cooperation.
The asymmetry in how the two sides have treated the agreement is itself telling. Russia published the full text and flagged it publicly while India has said little. That pattern, keeping defence engagements with Moscow low-profile while continuing to deepen them in substance, is consistent with how India has managed the relationship in recent times. Whether RELOS produces operational outcomes beyond what already existed through ad hoc arrangements, or whether it remains primarily a formalisation of existing practice, will depend on how actively both sides choose to use it.
India-South Korea: Defence Cooperation Enters a New Phase
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung's state visit to India from 19 to 21 April was the first by a Korean President or Prime Minister in seven years and came within a year of Lee assuming the presidency. The visit produced a Joint Strategic Vision for the India-ROK Special Strategic Partnership covering a range of areas, but it is the defence outcomes that are of particular interest.
The K9 Vajra programme has been the most visible product of India-South Korea defence cooperation. Based on Korea’s Hanwha Aerospace's K9 Thunder platform and manufactured in India by Larsen & Toubro, roughly 100 units of the 155mm self-propelled howitzer are in service, deployed across desert and high-altitude terrain including Ladakh. The two countries have now agreed to enter a third phase of the programme. MEA Secretary (East) P. Kumaran described the shift plainly: where the first two phases were oriented toward direct acquisition and progressive localisation, Phase III will involve greater technology transfer, co-development and joint design of advanced military systems.
The scope of discussions went well beyond artillery. Both sides explored cooperation in self-propelled air defence gun-missile systems, anti-aircraft guns, missile platforms, and cybersecurity. As the K9 demonstrated, South Korean systems can be adapted for Indian operational conditions and manufactured domestically at scale. Extending that model to air defence is a priority that draws directly from the lessons of Operation Sindoor and the growing salience of drone and aerial threats. A Korea-India Defence Accelerator (KIND-X) was also launched to connect defence startups, incubators, investors and research institutions from both countries.
The track record, however, has been thin. Beyond the K9, the relationship has struggled to convert institutional engagement into outcomes. Past efforts to collaborate on minesweepers and submarine procurement did not advance, held back by procedural mismatches and gaps in mutual confidence. What appears to have changed is the operating environment. South Korea’s defence industry offers the kind of rapid production capacity, industrial depth and advanced engineering that India needs as it seeks to compress modernisation timelines and move past slow acquisition cycles. Whether the institutional machinery announced this month, including the inaugural Defence and Foreign Affairs 2+2 Dialogue and Minister Rajnath Singh's planned visit to South Korea in May, sustains the momentum will determine if the relationship moves beyond the K9 as its sole reference point.
Defence Roundup:
● India's defence exports surged to a record ₹38,424 crore in FY 2025-26, a 62.66% increase over the previous year, with exports now reaching over 80 countries. Defence production stood at ₹1.51 lakh crore in 2024-25.
● The Defence Acquisition Council granted Acceptance of Necessity for procurement proposals worth ₹3.60 lakh crore across the Army, Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard, covering multi-role fighter aircraft, anti-tank systems, P-8I maritime surveillance aircraft, and advanced monitoring systems.
● Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and GE Aerospace signed a technology agreement to co-produce F414 jet engines in India, supporting the country's next-generation fighter programmes.
● Australia named India a "top-tier" security partner in its 2026 National Defence Strategy, identifying it as the most important defence partner in the Northeast Indian Ocean.
● India's military spending rose 8.9% to $92.1 billion in 2025, making it the world's fifth-largest defence spender according to SIPRI, overtaking the United Kingdom. Global military expenditure reached a record $2.887 trillion.
● DRDO and the Indian Navy successfully conducted the maiden salvo launch of the Naval Anti-ship Missile-Short Range from a naval helicopter off the Bay of Bengal, the first instance of two such missiles being fired in quick succession from the same airborne platform.
● The Indian Army released a roadmap outlining 30 types of unmanned aerial systems and loitering munitions across multiple operational categories, signalling a shift toward scalable and cost-effective drone warfare capabilities.
Defence Time Machine:
Anduril's Roadrunner, is one of the more conceptually strange weapons to emerge in recent years. It is a twin-jet autonomous vehicle that launches vertically, hunts a target at high subsonic speeds, makes an autonomous threat assessment. If the skies are clear, returns home, lands on its tail, and gets refuelled for the next sortie. If the threat is real, it becomes a warhead. The same system, same flight, two entirely different outcomes depending on what it finds.
What makes this significant is less the hardware and more the logic it encodes. Modern air defence has long faced a cost asymmetry problem - expensive interceptor missiles fired at cheap, expendable threats (we've done a deep-dive on this in the last edition which can be read here). The Roadrunner collapses that calculus by making the interceptor itself recoverable and reusable except in the one scenario where expenditure is actually warranted. It is one of the first operational weapon system where "kamikaze" and "boomerang" are features of the same platform.
For a defence ecosystem increasingly focused on cost-effective layered air defence, as India's own procurement priorities reflect, the architecture Roadrunner represents is worth watching closely.
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