The only thing transferable is mfg. It is not like stealth aircraft design or jamming is a single package of knowhow that could be somehow given on a platter. A know how comes only when the engineers themselves become experts in the subject by years of learning & experimentation
There’s a lot of follow on steps required to capitalise on an IP given as part of a technology transfer deal. As any typical business, the OEM will not share know why but only know how with respect to its own specific design to some extent. It then completely falls on the (2)
Capability, motivation and resources of the receiving Indian company to capitalise on the given knowledge. What one has is a specific design that has specific instances/design iterations suited for a pre determined set of quality requirements and parameters. (3)
The physics, engineering principles specific overall behavior, science involved in designing/developing these subsystems are still trade secrets. And not everything is there in a text book somewhere. As many of this knowledge is protected by patents & never published at all (4)
It then comes down to the company, the technical leaders, the engineers and their level of technical capability, motivation and resources to begin benchmarking, reverse engineering, reproducing and mastering most of not all of the subsystem technologies incorporated in. (5)
Only then, will the engineers and scientists be able to create design changes with engineering sense, evaluate and test them, conceptualise new platforms/subsystems from these smaller technologies, test the full envelope of performance of the integrated system and prototype (6)
If the same design is given to a non motivated average set of engineers in an unaccountable agency they would just be able to reproduce the same copies again without any in-depth understanding of the know-why and the engineering principles. (7)
So ToT isn’t a straight forward silver bullet affair. It requires hard negotiations, hard work from the user side, lots of resources, exceptional talent and motivation to absorb the technology and master it. Won’t come overnight because Indian govt signs a multibillion $ deal (8)
Until we have these variable straight on our side, there is no point in haggling about foreign OEMs not providing adequate tech transfer in their deals. They spent Billions of $$ and decades to get where they are and not gonna give it for money just like that (9)
A mfg ToT on the other hand is relatively simple. One gets the machine, gets technicians trained to operate them and engineers to supervise and verify the work. But the processes taught are only for that airframe. What happens to the skills after that production run is over? (10)
Making a sophisticated product doesn’t make one expert in designing that class of product. We all know what kind of welding work MDL engineers do on the Scorpene line. Did MDL learn how to design submarines? No. It just knows to assemble Scorpenes. Nothing more or less (11)
Unfortunately this is not just a govt problem but also an Indianprobelm. Have seen demand for such silver bullet technology transfer/know-why transfer deal from the Indian private sector in non defence domains too. Guys subject matter expertise never comes that way. (12)
This is the crux.
