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Assessing the India–UAE Strategic Defence Partnership and the Limits of Indian Delivery

Picture of Tahir Azad

Tahir Azad

Analysis Series

Analysis/0042/June/2026/London-Dialogue. 30 June 2026

1. Introduction

On 15 May 2026, during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Abu Dhabi, India and the United Arab Emirates agreed a framework for a Strategic Defence Partnership, alongside parallel pacts on strategic petroleum reserves and liquefied petroleum gas. The defence framework, in the language of India’s Ministry of External Affairs, spans defence industrial collaboration, advanced technology, training, exercises, maritime security, cyber defence and secure communications. It formalised a direction set in January 2026, when the two governments signed a Letter of Intent during the New Delhi visit of UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and it built on a bilateral relationship elevated to a comprehensive strategic partnership in 2017. In both capitals the announcement was presented as a milestone. It is not.

This analysis takes a deliberately sceptical line. The framework is a statement of political direction, not a binding commitment to fight, and the most concrete test of what it can deliver, the reported talks on exporting the BrahMos cruise missile and the Akashteer air defence system to the UAE, exposes a deeper problem than diplomatic phrasing. India does not currently possess the production depth, the sovereign export authority, the hypersonic capability, the integration architecture, or the delivery discipline that a credible Gulf defence supplier would require. Nor does it possess anything resembling the religious, demographic and economic bonds that make the comparable Pakistan–Saudi pact a different order of commitment altogether. Unlike that agreement, the India–UAE framework contains no clause that an attack on one is an attack on the other, and it was announced without operational detail. That absence is not an oversight. It reflects what the relationship actually is.

2. The capability question: a critical assessment

Production ceilings that fall well short of what a Gulf client would need

BrahMos is a genuinely capable supersonic weapon, but the claim that India can supply it at scale does not survive contact with the production data. The new Lucknow facility, flagged off by the Defence Minister in October 2025, is designed to manufacture roughly 80 to 100 missiles a year, with aspirations, not yet realised, of pushing the wider BrahMos lines toward around 300 units annually later this decade. These are India’s own replenishment numbers for its own three services. There is no spare capacity sitting idle for export, and there is no credible path to generating one quickly.

The point is sharpened, not softened, by why the Lucknow plant exists at all. It was accelerated because Operation Sindoor in May 2025 exposed how quickly India’s own munitions stocks deplete in sustained operations. A state that has just discovered it cannot replenish its own inventory fast enough in a four-day conflict is not positioned to promise a Gulf client resupply through a war that could run for months. Selling a handful of missiles for demonstration value is straightforward. Underwriting wartime consumption is not, and nobody serious should infer otherwise.

A supplier that is not sovereign

BrahMos is a joint Indo-Russian product, and every export requires Moscow’s consent. Reporting on the UAE talks treats this as a surmountable but real condition. It is more than a formality. India cannot offer the UAE an unconditioned, sovereign supplier relationship of the kind Western vendors provide. Every transfer is routed through a third capital whose interests do not automatically align with India’s and whose consent can in principle be withheld, slowed, or renegotiated. A defence relationship that depends on a third country’s permission is not a strategic partnership in the full sense of the term; it is a contingent arrangement that India does not fully control.

The hypersonic claim that the facts do not support

Commentary on this partnership frequently gestures toward Indian hypersonic capability as a future prize. The claim does not hold up. The BrahMos-II programme, intended to reach Mach 7 to 8 over roughly 1,500 km, has slipped for the better part of two decades. Flight testing is now expected only around 2027 to 2028, and even that timeline is in question: the joint programme has been constrained by prohibitive per-unit costs and incomplete scramjet technology transfer from Russia, to the point that New Delhi has been pivoting toward cheaper indigenous designs with operational horizons around 2030 and beyond. A capability that does not exist cannot be exported. The hypersonic dimension of this partnership is not a near-term reality; it is a talking point.

The enabler gap: training, targeting and the satellite layer

A missile is not a stand-alone object. Fielding BrahMos in the UAE requires crew training, maintenance infrastructure, mission-planning support and, critically, the sensor and satellite architecture needed to find and fix targets at range. India would be exporting a strike weapon into a force whose intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; command and control; and satellite cueing are built to Western and US standards. India’s own positioning and targeting ecosystem, anchored in Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC) and still partly reliant on Russian GLONASS, was never designed to plug into that architecture. This is not a minor integration task to be resolved in a contract annex. It is a substantial engineering and certification burden that the public framing of the deal does not begin to acknowledge.

3. India's defence-industrial track record: a sobering balance sheet

Claims about India’s readiness to be a serious Gulf defence supplier should be tested against India’s own documented record, and that record counsels caution rather than confidence.

The import dependency has not been resolved, only restructured

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, India remained the world’s second-largest arms importer between 2021 and 2025, accounting for 8.2 per cent of global arms imports, behind only Ukraine. Russia still supplied around 40 per cent of India’s arms imports in that period, down from 70 per cent a decade earlier, with France and Israel filling much of the gap. SIPRI’s own assessment is unambiguous on the underlying cause: India’s continued and probably increasing reliance on foreign suppliers is evident in pending orders for up to 140 combat aircraft from France and six submarines from Germany, and domestic production, while expanding, still faces substantial delays. A country that remains the world’s second-largest arms buyer, by its own most recent five-year figures, is not yet positioned to present itself to the Gulf as a self-sufficient alternative to Western suppliers.

DRDO’s own auditor has documented the problem in detail

India’s Comptroller and Auditor General examined 178 of DRDO’s high-priority Mission Mode projects, the category specifically reserved for technologies that are already proven and readily available, and found that 119 of them, two-thirds, failed to meet their original deadlines, with time overruns ranging from 16 to 500 per cent. In 49 cases the additional time taken equalled or exceeded the entire original schedule. The CAG was blunt about the consequence: delay in completion has a serious impact on acceptance of the product by users, who instead fulfil their requirements by importing it. This is not a story of a fledgling agency finding its feet. It is the considered judgement of India’s own constitutional auditor, applied to the easiest category of project DRDO undertakes.

The pattern recurs in flagship programmes. The Kaveri engine, begun in 1989 to power the indigenous Tejas fighter, consumed roughly four decades and an estimated 400 million dollars before failing to meet the thrust and performance specifications required for combat use, leaving the Tejas dependent on imported General Electric F404 and F414 engines to this day. The HELINA anti-tank missile, sanctioned in 2008 against a 2010 deadline, was still undelivered more than a decade later. Independent reporting on the broader programme notes that the Indian Air Force still operates 31 fighter squadrons against a sanctioned strength of 42, a shortfall directly tied to delivery delays in indigenous programmes. None of this is disqualifying in isolation. Taken together, it describes a defence-industrial base that struggles to deliver predictably even for its own armed forces, let alone for a foreign client expecting wartime reliability.

What this means for the UAE talks

The relevance to the BrahMos and Akashteer discussions is direct. A state whose own auditor documents systemic schedule slippage, whose flagship engine programme failed outright, and which remains the world’s second-largest arms importer is not the straightforward, scaled, sovereign supplier that headline coverage of the India–UAE talks imply. The Indian defence-industrial base is improving, and its export figures are genuinely rising. It has not yet reached the point where it can credibly promise the UAE what the framework’s language suggests.

4. Technical feasibility assessment

The table below sets out, dimension by dimension, what a credible Gulf-scale defence export relationship would require against India’s documented current position. It is constructed deliberately as a feasibility audit rather than a marketing summary.

Sources: Machinist; IDRW; Newsd/Reuters; WION; Defence Security Asia; Broadsword; The Print (CAG report); The Print (SIPRI).

5. The interoperability problem

The UAE’s deterrent is overwhelmingly Western. It operates US-supplied THAAD and Patriot batteries and the MGM-168 ATACMS ballistic missile, supplemented by South Korean systems. Bolting a Russian-origin Indian cruise missile and an Indian command-and-control network onto that backbone is not a matter of signing a contract. It raises substantive questions of data standards, secure communications, fire-control integration and certification that have not been resolved and may not be resolvable quickly. Akashteer is attractive in principle because it fuses tracks from multiple sensors but fusing Indian software into a THAAD-and-Patriot enterprise architecture, built over decades to American specifications, is a serious systems-engineering undertaking, not an add-on. Interoperability is the quiet condition on which the entire value of the deal depends, and on present evidence it favours the incumbent Western suppliers, not the new Indian entrant.

There is also a discreet political logic working against India. Analysts note that Abu Dhabi values diversification partly because closer ties with India carry the advantage of not antagonising Washington. That is a hedging rationale, not the foundation of a strategic alliance. It indicates that the UAE views India as a useful supplementary vendor, not as a security guarantor, and it should temper any Indian reading of the framework as a breakthrough.

6. The decisive contrast: why Pakistan can do for Riyadh what India cannot do for Abu Dhabi

Commentary that treats the India–UAE framework as comparable to the Pakistan–Saudi Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement of 17 September 2025 is making a category error. The Pakistan–Saudi pact is sustained by religious, domestic-political, demographic and economic bonds that have no equivalent in the India–UAE relationship and recognising this is essential to an honest assessment of what India has actually achieved.

Religious and civilisational bonds

Pakistan is the only nuclear-armed Muslim-majority state, a status it has long invested with meaning, and Saudi Arabia is the custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites. Academic analysis of Saudi soft power in Pakistan describes the Kingdom’s standing as rooted in its status as home to Mecca and Medina for the world’s Muslims, a religious weight that runs through Pakistani public life via Hajj and Umrah, religious education funding, and decades of cultural exchange. There is no civilisational or confessional bond of this kind between India and the UAE. India’s relationship with Abu Dhabi is warm and pragmatic. It is not sacred to anyone.

Domestic politics and emotional investment, not just statecraft

The Pakistan–Saudi pact also serves a domestic political function that has no parallel in India’s UAE outreach. Pakistan’s military leadership has used the agreement to demonstrate to its own people and to other countries in the region that it has built a resilient set of partners and is not unduly reliant on China at a time of acute anxiety in Islamabad about over-dependence on a single patron. This is reinforced by genuine public sentiment, Saudi Arabia is widely regarded inside Pakistan, across class lines, with a mixture of religious reverence and economic gratitude, sustained by a diaspora of roughly 2.5 to 2.7 million Pakistani workers in the Kingdom sending home several billion dollars a year in remittances. Pakistani officials have invoked the pact in real time, with the foreign minister stating that Islamabad had warned Tehran not to attack Saudi Arabia, citing the defence agreement, during the 2026 war. That is a government acting on a domestic mandate it can defend to its own public. Indian officials have made no equivalent statement regarding the UAE and could not credibly make one, because no comparable public mandate exists.

Manpower and a half-century of presence

Pakistan’s commitment is not rhetorical. It has stationed troops in the Kingdom on and off for decades, deploying approximately 15,000 personnel during the Iran–Iraq War and roughly 13,000 during the First Gulf War, alongside a standing presence of around 1,500 to 2,000 personnel in recent years and the training of thousands of Saudi service members over time. Pakistan can offer Saudi Arabia what India cannot offer the UAE: large, deployable, battle-tested manpower with a standing habit of presence on the ground, built up over fifty years of practice.

Economic dependency that runs one way

Saudi financial support has repeatedly stabilised Pakistan’s fragile economy, including direct cash deposits, deferred oil payments and multi-billion-dollar aid packages over the past decade. This dependency gives Riyadh leverage and gives Islamabad a structural incentive to reciprocate with security services that India simply does not have toward the UAE. India runs a persistent annual trade deficit with the UAE of more than 26 billion dollars, and India is an aspiring great power negotiating from relative strength, not a client state seeking rescue. The asymmetry that binds Pakistan to Saudi Arabia has no analogue here.

The nuclear shadow: ambiguous, and that ambiguity is the instrument

It is important to be precise rather than sensational on this point. Pakistan has not confirmed, and Saudi Arabia has not requested, a formal nuclear umbrella. Pakistan’s defence minister suggested capabilities would be made available under the pact, then walked the comment back. Analysts at the Belfer Center judge a literal nuclear umbrella unlikely, arguing Pakistan’s strategic establishment would be wary of any commitment diluting control over its own nuclear codes. Legal and policy specialists note that the scope of what qualifies as any aggression remains unclear, as does whether the agreement places Saudi Arabia under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella. The honest conclusion is that the nuclear dimension is deliberately ambiguous, neither confirmed nor denied with finality, and that the ambiguity itself functions as a deterrent signal to Iran and Israel. India possesses no equivalent instrument to offer the UAE, ambiguous or otherwise, and nothing in the India–UAE framework gestures in that direction.

What India does not have

Set against this, the India–UAE relationship has none of the five elements that give the Pakistan–Saudi pact its weight: no religious or civilisational bond, no domestic political mandate built on public emotional investment, no historical pattern of large-scale troop deployment, no one-directional economic dependency, and no nuclear ambiguity to draw on. What remains is a transactional, commercially driven relationship between a large arms importer seeking export revenue and a wealthy client seeking diversification. That is not a discreditable basis for cooperation. It is simply a much smaller one than the comparisons being drawn in public commentary suggest, and India should not allow the comparison to flatter its own position.

A fair qualification should also be entered on the Pakistani side: analysts judge it unlikely that Islamabad would actually go to war with Iran or Israel over a strike on Saudi soil since Pakistan’s forces remain configured against India and cannot afford to open a western front. Pakistani assurances, too, are partly symbolic. But even a partly symbolic commitment resting on religion, diaspora, manpower history and one-sided economic leverage carries more genuine weight than a wholly transactional framework that rests on none of these things.

7. Regional reactions: the cost side of the ledger

India’s outreach does not occur in a vacuum, and several capitals are watching critically.

The Gulf and the Saudi–UAE rivalry. Expanded India–UAE defence ties must be read against the competition between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for regional leadership. By leaning toward the UAE, India risks complicating its substantial relationship with Saudi Arabia, with which it has pursued the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor and conducted joint exercises as recently as 2025. Visible defence alignment with one Gulf rival can chill the other.

Iran. The framework was signed during Iran’s war with the United States and Israel, and the UAE was a principal target. An Indian strike weapon entering the Emirati arsenal will be read in Tehran as alignment, complicating India’s own important relationship with Iran, including the Chabahar port and the connectivity it offers to Central Asia.

Pakistan and China. Both observe closely. BrahMos acquired its battlefield reputation against Pakistan’s Chinese-origin air defences during Operation Sindoor. Its spread into the Gulf is precisely the kind of Indian power projection Beijing has historically resisted and which Islamabad will frame to its own Gulf partners as destabilising.

The United States. Washington remains the UAE’s principal security guarantor and supplies its core air defence. The US is unlikely to welcome a Russian-origin missile and an Indian command-and-control system entering an architecture it underwrites, even as it tolerates diversification that does not displace American systems. India’s room to manoeuvre here is narrower than the framework suggests.

8. Full war is a different scenario

The UAE’s 2026 performance against Iran was, by any measure, formidable. Abu Dhabi absorbed a disproportionate share of Iran’s drone and missile campaign and intercepted the large majority of incoming threats using its layered THAAD and Patriot network. That performance should not be mistaken for evidence that the UAE, or any Indian addition to its arsenal, is ready for sustained, high-intensity war.

The defence rested on a finite stock of extremely expensive interceptors, and analysts observed interceptor rationing within weeks, with priority given to ballistic threats over drones. A bounded campaign of weeks is not the same test as months of attrition. The UAE itself drew the lesson that it must diversify and deepen its security arrangements, which is the demand signal India is responding to, but the deficit the war exposed was defensive depth: more interceptors, more sensors, and more magazines. BrahMos is an offensive weapon. It does not fill that gap. It adds a strike option whose principal effect is to raise the stakes of any future Iranian response, while doing nothing to solve the interceptor shortage that nearly cost the UAE its air defence in March 2026.

9. Conclusion

The India–UAE Strategic Defence Partnership is a real diplomatic step, and it should not be dismissed outright. It deepens India’s presence in a region central to its energy security, diaspora and trade, and it advances New Delhi’s ambition to become a credible defence exporter. But this analysis has deliberately tested that ambition against the evidence, and the evidence does not support the confidence with which the partnership has been received.

India cannot currently match the production volume, the unconditioned supply relationship, the hypersonic capability, the interoperability, or the delivery discipline that a serious Gulf defence supplier would need. Its own constitutional auditor has documented a defence-research establishment in which two-thirds of audited high-priority projects missed deadlines, sometimes by a factor of five. Its flagship indigenous engine programme failed outright after four decades and hundreds of millions of dollars. It remains, by its own government’s preferred international benchmark, the world’s second-largest arms importer. None of this is disqualifying for a long-term partnership. All of it should disqualify the comparison to the Pakistan–Saudi pact, a relationship underwritten by religious solidarity, genuine domestic political and emotional investment, a half-century of troop deployment, one-directional economic dependency, and a deliberately ambiguous nuclear shadow that India possesses no equivalent of and has never sought.

Strip away the framework’s language and what remains is narrower and more honest: a transactional, commercially useful relationship between a state that still imports most of its weapons and a state diversifying its suppliers for reasons that include, explicitly, not upsetting Washington. The UAE has shown it can defend itself against a bound barrage. A full war is a different scenario, and on the evidence assembled here, neither a framework agreement nor a missile sale conducted under Russian licence is what will settle it.

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Tahir Azad

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