How a $40 billion Franco-Indian defence partnership is quietly reshaping the Indo-Pacific’s military calculus — and why Singapore should be paying close attention.
When French President Emmanuel Macron jogged along Mumbai’s Marine Drive last week and posed for an impromptu car selfie with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the optics were deliberately casual. The substance was anything but. The three-day visit crystallised what is arguably the most consequential bilateral defence partnership in Asia today: a framework for India to jointly manufacture 114 Dassault Rafale jets on home soil, extend its carrier-capable naval fleet, produce HAMMER precision missiles with Safran, and assemble Airbus H125 helicopters through a Tata joint venture. The total value of India’s wider defence modernisation package — of which the Rafale deal is the centrepiece — stands at approximately $40 billion.
For Singapore, a city-state that has spent the better part of seven decades threading the needle between great powers, this development is not merely background noise from the subcontinent. It is a structural shift in the regional security architecture, with direct implications for the Malacca Strait, the South China Sea, and the credibility of deterrence across Southeast Asia.
The Anatomy of the Deal
The Defence Acquisition Council’s approval on 12 February 2026 set in motion India’s largest-ever single defence procurement. Of the 114 Rafales, only 18 will arrive in fly-away condition from France; the remaining 96 will be manufactured domestically under a joint venture arrangement yet to be formally identified, though Tata Advanced Systems and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited are the most frequently cited candidates. The deal mandates at least 30 per cent indigenous content — a figure the Indian defence ministry has pushed higher — and includes technology transfer clauses covering Thales avionics and Safran’s M88 engine platform.
This comes on top of India’s April 2025 agreement to purchase 26 Rafale-Marine jets for the navy, making India the first international operator of the naval variant and enabling carrier-strike operations from the INS Vikrant. A further 31 naval Rafales are reportedly under consideration. Together, the air force and naval programmes envision a Rafale fleet that could eventually exceed 175 aircraft — a number that would make India the world’s largest Rafale operator outside France itself.
“Rafale is absolutely key. I hope we will do it on submarines. We offered additional capacities.” — President Emmanuel Macron, New Delhi, 19 February 2026
The submarine dimension flagged by Macron is equally significant. India currently operates six French-built Scorpène-class diesel-electric submarines; expansion negotiations are understood to be at an advanced stage. France has experience delivering nuclear-propulsion technology to partner states — the AUKUS controversy over the cancelled French submarine deal with Australia remains a raw wound in Paris — and India’s long-term aspiration for nuclear-powered attack submarines creates an obvious alignment of interests.
Operation Sindoor: The Catalyst Nobody Expected
To understand why this deal is moving with such velocity, one must revisit the four days in May 2025 that fundamentally altered India’s procurement calculus. Operation Sindoor — India’s retaliatory strike against Pakistan-based militant infrastructure following the Pahalgam attack that killed 26 civilians — became the most significant test of high-end combat aviation in the Indo-Pacific in a generation. It also produced one of the most uncomfortable intelligence revelations for Western defence planners since the J-20’s operational deployment.
Pakistani J-10C jets, armed with Chinese PL-15 beyond-visual-range missiles, reportedly downed at least one — and by some accounts, three — Indian Rafale aircraft during the engagement. India has neither confirmed nor denied specific losses, and the Indian Air Force’s vice chief publicly described the Rafale as ‘definitely the hero of Operation Sindoor.’ Regardless, the stock market rendered its own verdict: shares in Dassault Aviation fell more than five per cent in the immediate aftermath, while AVIC Chengdu — maker of the J-10C — surged over 20 per cent.
The Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center characterised the engagement as China’s ‘DeepSeek moment in defence’ — a live-fire demonstration that Chinese military platforms could challenge Western fourth-generation fighters in beyond-visual-range combat. Singapore-based analyst Alexander Neill, a former Shangri-La Dialogue Fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, described the conflict as offering Beijing ‘a rare opportunity’ from an intelligence perspective, noting that the results were being studied carefully by every regional military — including China’s own planners, who had gained a rare window into how their export systems performed against Western-pedigreed platforms.
India’s response to this ambiguous result has been revealing: rather than diversifying away from the Rafale, New Delhi doubled down. The January 2026 Republic Day parade conspicuously flew a Rafale that Pakistan had previously claimed to have destroyed — a direct act of psychological counter-messaging. And in February, the DAC approved the 114-jet programme. The implicit logic is clear: the Rafale’s difficulties were attributed to operational context, tactics, and the electronic warfare environment rather than fundamental platform inadequacy. Expanding and indigenising the fleet — while upgrading existing F3-R jets to the F4+ standard, and eventually F5 — is the chosen path to closing those gaps.
Singapore’s Strategic Interest: A Layered Reading
Singapore’s stake in India’s military transformation is multi-dimensional, and appreciating it requires looking beyond the bilateral relationship to the broader systemic effects.
At the most immediate level, a stronger India is a more credible balancer of Chinese maritime power in the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal. Singapore’s existential geography — a city-state at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, astride the world’s busiest shipping lanes — is acutely sensitive to any power that might seek to control or interdict those routes. The Malacca Strait handles approximately 30 per cent of global seaborne trade; any degradation of freedom of navigation there, whether through grey-zone coercion or outright military pressure, would be an existential economic threat to the Republic.
India operates the largest naval force in the region outside China, and its carrier groups — increasingly equipped with Rafale-Marine jets — project power directly into the eastern Indian Ocean approaches. The 32nd edition of SIMBEX, the annual Singapore-India Maritime Bilateral Exercise, took place in July 2025 with a substantial Indian naval task group. The trilateral SITMEX exercise, hosted by Singapore in November 2025, included both India and Thailand in coordinated tactical drills. These are not ceremonial engagements; they are the connective tissue of a security architecture that Singapore depends upon even when it cannot formally acknowledge doing so.
Secondly, the India-France partnership creates new nodes of convergence with France’s own Indo-Pacific presence. Paris is the only European power with sovereign territory in the Indo-Pacific and a permanent naval presence in the region. The Charles de Gaulle carrier group, operating Rafale-Marine jets, docked in Singapore in March 2025 — a visit that coincided with quiet Franco-Singaporean discussions about access arrangements and information-sharing frameworks. A France deeply invested in Indian defence capability is a France with stronger incentive to sustain its Indo-Pacific military presence, which benefits Singapore’s preferred multi-stakeholder security model.
A stronger India is a more credible balancer of Chinese maritime power — which is why the view from Singapore is more attentive than the public posture suggests.
Third, and perhaps most significantly, the Rafale deal and its broader context raise the salience of the question that most exercises Singapore’s strategic planners: the long-term trajectory of Chinese military power in the South China Sea. Beijing conducted a record 163 recorded operations in the South China Sea in 2025, including a record number of live-fire drills, according to the CSIS ChinaPower Project. The acquisition of Singapore’s own F-35B jets — confirmed on track for delivery by end-2026 — is partly motivated by the same calculus: the deployment of China’s J-20 stealth fighters and the J-35 naval variant demands that regional states build platforms capable of operating in high-threat, contested air environments.
Singapore’s F-35 acquisition and India’s Rafale expansion are thus complementary rather than competing responses to the same underlying challenge. Singapore brings fifth-generation stealth and interoperability with the American F-35 community — now numbering over 300 aircraft across the Asia-Pacific by 2030, per Lockheed Martin’s projections. India brings strategic mass, depth, and a credible conventional deterrent across the subcontinent’s two most demanding flanks. ST Engineering, Singapore’s defence industrial champion, has a manufacturing role in the F-35 programme; as India builds out its Rafale industrial base, there are analogous opportunities for regional supply chain integration, though none have been formally announced.
The China Dimension: Recalibrating the Arms Market
Operation Sindoor’s most durable strategic consequence may be its effect on the global defence market. Chinese officials have actively amplified the J-10C’s performance at defence expos and strategic forums, using Pakistan’s air campaign as a live-fire advertisement for the PL-15 missile and Chinese air combat doctrine. Southeast Asian states — several of which are in the market for combat aircraft — are receiving competing sales pitches from Beijing, Washington, Paris, and Stockholm simultaneously.
Indonesia’s Rafale deal, initiated following Macron’s May 2025 visit to Jakarta, envisions expanding beyond an initial 42 aircraft. That procurement is proceeding even in the wake of Operation Sindoor’s ambiguous results, suggesting that the strategic logic of diversification from Chinese-supplied platforms outweighs the battlefield data. Thailand is acquiring Gripen E/F variants. Vietnam continues to diversify its fighter fleet. The regional arms market is fracturing along predictable geopolitical lines, with Chinese platforms gaining traction in states closer to Beijing’s orbit and Western platforms consolidating in states aligned with the US-led security architecture.
For Singapore — which operates one of the most capable but carefully balanced military establishments in the world, and which maintains robust economic and diplomatic ties with Beijing alongside its deep defence relationship with Washington — this polarisation is uncomfortable. Singapore has consistently resisted being forced into binary choices. The simultaneous deepening of India-France defence ties and the delivery of Singapore’s own F-35s by end-2026 will, however, further consolidate the city-state’s practical alignment with the Western-oriented security architecture, regardless of its formal non-aligned posture.
The Submarine Gambit and the Long Game
Macron’s explicit remarks about submarines deserve particular attention. France’s Scorpène programme has already established a deep foothold in Indian naval acquisition. An expanded submarine fleet — potentially including vessels with air-independent propulsion or, further out, some form of advanced propulsion technology — would substantially alter India’s ability to hold Chinese naval assets at risk in the Indian Ocean and interdict the sea lines of communication that Beijing depends on for energy imports. Roughly 80 per cent of China’s oil imports transit the Malacca Strait, a geography that gives India considerable leverage and gives Singapore a direct interest in how that leverage is structured and exercised.
A more capable Indian submarine force, built with French technology and crewed by India’s increasingly professionalized naval service, reinforces the deterrent architecture that underpins Singapore’s security environment. It also complicates Chinese naval planning in a way that American or Japanese submarines alone cannot — because an Indian submarine force operates from South Asian geography, holding risk over Chinese sea lines from an unexpected vector.
What Singapore Should Watch
Three developments will determine how this partnership’s regional implications unfold over the next five years.
The first is the identity and structure of India’s Rafale manufacturing joint venture partner. If a major Indian industrial conglomerate — Tata, Mahindra, or a newly configured HAL subsidiary — establishes a credible aerospace manufacturing capability, the knock-on effects for regional supply chains, maintenance and repair ecosystems, and technology transfer will be substantial. Singapore’s own aerospace MRO sector, one of the largest in Asia, could eventually intersect with an Indian Rafale sustainment ecosystem in ways that create commercial and strategic interdependencies.
The second is whether France secures the submarine expansion. A French-Indian submarine programme would deepen the bilateral relationship in ways that are qualitatively different from aircraft procurement — submarines require sustained, intimate industrial and intelligence cooperation that aircraft deals do not. It would also represent a statement of strategic confidence in India’s long-term reliability as a partner, at a moment when that question is sharper than it has been in decades.
The third is the trajectory of India-Singapore defence cooperation in the post-Sindoor environment. The 6th India-Singapore Defence Ministers’ Dialogue in October 2024 produced an upgraded bilateral framework and a renewed five-year Joint Military Training Agreement. Singapore’s Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen explicitly stated that India’s role in the regional security architecture — through platforms like the Shangri-La Dialogue and ADMM-Plus — is one that Singapore ‘supports and wishes for India to play a stronger role in.’ The question is whether private encouragement is matched, over time, by more formalised interoperability arrangements.
Conclusion: The Quiet Weight of a Big Deal
In Singapore’s carefully calibrated strategic discourse, the language of alliance is almost never used. But the substance of alliance — shared interests, coordinated capability, mutual dependence — is evident in the steady thickening of India-Singapore defence ties over the past decade, and in Singapore’s quiet satisfaction at an India that is stronger, better-equipped, and more capable of contesting Chinese maritime primacy from the west.
The India-France Rafale partnership, seen through this lens, is not simply a bilateral procurement story. It is a data point in a larger argument about how the Indo-Pacific’s security architecture is being constructed — not through formal alliances or dramatic confrontations, but through the patient accumulation of capability, industrial partnership, and interoperability. Singapore, as perhaps the region’s most astute practitioner of strategic patience, understands this better than most.
The jets will take years to build. The partnerships that surround them are already in flight.
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