U.S. Defence Secretary Ashton Carter will be in India on Thursday in one of the last visits from a cabinet member of the outgoing Obama administration.
No breakthroughs are expected during the visit, officials admitted.
Mr. Carter’s visit, from December 8, will give an opportunity for the two governments to review the progress achieved in deepening defence ties over the last three years before the change of administration in the U.S., officials said.
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Mr. Carter and his Indian counterpart, Manohar Parrikar, had met eight times over the past two years signifying the level of engagement between the two sides.
The highlight will likely be the finalisation of the provisions for the ‘Major Defence Partner’ status which the U.S. had designated India during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Washington in June this year.
“We shared a paper with them on the provisions and they got back, which was not satisfactory. They said they would come back with a revised one,” a senior official said. In a related move, last week, the House and Senate Armed Services Committee of the US Congress had asked Mr. Carter and the U.S. Secretary of State to conduct an assessment of the India’s capabilities to support and carry out military operations of mutual interest for the two countries.
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LEMOA moves
Meanwhile, the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Understanding (LEMOA), one of the three foundational agreements which India signed with the U.S. early this year, is yet to be operationalised. “LEMOA turned out to be a fairly complicated accounting exercise,” a senior official said.
This is because each service has their own system in place for accounting and payments and now efforts are on to put in place a unified system.
To sort out the issue, the defence ministry has held three meetings with the services.
“We will try to get a system going. Finance and accounting people are working on it. We will hold another meeting and fix it,” the official added.
On the other two agreements — Communications and Information Security Memorandum of Agreement (CISMOA), and Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA) — the two sides have held several rounds of discussions but no progress is expected as of now.