And they have flatly refused to contemplate any similar co-production of these BrahMos series of cruise missiles with China.

This confirms the pattern we reported on Russia's T-90S Main Battle Tank sales agreement with India in December 2007.

China has for years been trying in vain to get Russia to agree to sell it significant numbers of T-90s. The Russians have always flatly refused to do so -- and still won't contemplate the sale. But they showed no such hesitation in building up the military strength of India, China's traditional rival for primacy over the Asian continent.

It is also striking that the BrahMos co-production agreement and the T-90S tank sale both mark a potentially huge escalation in India's conventional capabilities for ground war. The nation most at risk from that development is not far-off China, but neighboring Pakistan -- for more than four decades China's one major ally in South Asia that offers it crucial access to safeguarding its own vital oil supply routes from the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

Therefore, as we have noted before, Russia is continuing to bet more on India than on China in Asia -- though it is with great scale seeking to boost its ties with both giant nations and simultaneously working hard to defuse major issues of potential tension between them.

But also, despite India's successful efforts to court the United States for the electronic military high tech in which Uncle Sam remains the world's leader, and its more rocky efforts to acquire U.S. nuclear technology, New Delhi continues to rely on Russia for most of its most crucial military weapons systems.

It may be that in the coming months major U.S. defense contractors will finally start making significant headway into making inroads into this huge and rapidly growing market. But even if they do, it is unlikely to change India's basic arms procurement reliability on Russia.

Also, the BrahMos program has been working extremely well -- a development that may go far to offset the fiasco of the enormous delays and cost overruns on the Admiral Gorshkov carrier renovation project.

Co-production in Indian of Russian weapons systems may well therefore be the way ahead to revitalize the venerable Russian-Indian arms sales relationship for the 21st century. BrahMos cruise missile co-production could therefore prove to be the prototype for further such deals. This could go far in repairing the traditional weakness of Indian high-tech arms development and procurement.

India's Defense Research and Development Organization has a decades-long consistent record of producing prototype missiles and weapons that on paper are as good as any in the world. But it has consistently failed to bring many of them anywhere near operational and production standards. That is why India still has to buy Russian Main Battle Tanks and excellent French Scorpion diesel submarines off the shelf after decades of unsuccessful efforts to manufacture its own.

But the BrahMos program has broken free of those old constraints. It has already entered its production and operational deployment stages with the first mark of these weapons. This achievement is an epochal step forward for the Indian arms industry, and it augurs well for future such Indian-Russian co-production agreements.

Finally, India's achievement in reaching production and operational deployment reliability on the BrahMos cruise missile will change the nature of its strategic relations with the United States -- and possibly with Israel, too. For India is now about to find itself in the novel position of having a military technology far in advance of the comparable U.S. technology.

U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles are subsonic, with a maximum speed of around 700 miles per hour at ground level. But the most advanced marks of the BrahMos, based as they are on a successful, mature Russian cruise missile technology, can go more than 2.5 times as fast as that -- at Mach 2.8 at ground level.

Will India be willing to share this technology with the United States? And if its leaders were willing, would the Kremlin permit it? And if -- as seems likely -- India refuses to share such technology with Washington -- how will that affect future U.S.-Indian relations? Will it signify that technology-sharing agreements in practice will remain a one-way street?

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