Emmanuel Macron has a favorite customer. He isn't selling luxury handbags or overpriced wine this time; he’s hawking delta-wing fighter jets and diesel-electric submarines. The French President’s recent pitch to New Delhi isn’t just about "strategic autonomy"—the favorite buzzword of people who like expensive dinners—it’s about cold, hard hardware and the software locks that come with it.

Macron is signaling that France is ready to open the hood on the Rafale. He’s talking about increasing "indigenous content." In the defense world, that’s the carrot you dangle when you want a country to sign a check that’s roughly the size of a small nation's GDP. India has already spent nearly $9 billion on 36 Rafales in a deal that was as much a political lightning rod as it was a military upgrade. Now, the French want to double down.

The pitch is simple: we’ll let you build parts of the plane. Maybe even the engine. Eventually.

Don't be fooled by the diplomatic smiles. Moving production to India isn't a gift; it's a necessity for Macron to keep the Dassault assembly lines humming while India tries to satisfy its "Make in India" mandate. This mandate is the ultimate friction point. It’s a bureaucratic gauntlet where foreign tech firms are told they must share their secret sauce if they want to play in the Indian market. Usually, companies like Boeing or Lockheed Martin balk at this. They don't like sharing IP. France, however, is desperate enough—or pragmatic enough—to say yes.

But let’s look at the friction. Building a fighter jet engine isn't like assembling an IKEA shelf. It requires a specialized ecosystem of metallurgy and precision engineering that doesn't just appear because a politician signed a memorandum of understanding. India has been trying to build its own jet engine, the Kaveri, for decades. It’s been a saga of delays and underperformance. Macron knows this. By offering "indigenous content," he’s offering a shortcut, but it’s one that keeps India tethered to French expertise for the next forty years. It’s a subscription model with wings.

Then there are the submarines. Macron is reportedly ready to sell more Scorpene-class (Kalvari-class) subs. India’s navy is aging, and the Indian Ocean is getting crowded. China’s presence is a constant itch that New Delhi can’t stop scratching. France sees an opening. The deal for three additional submarines is estimated to be worth around $3.5 billion to $4 billion. That’s a lot of taxpayer money for boats that we all hope never have to fire a torpedo in anger.

The trade-off for India is clear. By pivoting toward Paris, they’re slowly weaning themselves off their addiction to Russian gear. Moscow’s hardware hasn't exactly been the gold standard lately, and the supply chains are, to put it mildly, a mess. France offers a shiny, Western alternative that doesn't come with the same heavy-handed political lectures you get from Washington.

However, the "indigenous" promise often hits a wall when it comes to the "black boxes." These are the proprietary sensors and electronic warfare suites that France will likely never truly hand over. You can build the fuselage in Nagpur, sure. You can bolt the wings on in Bengaluru. But the brains of the aircraft? Those will still have a "Made in France" sticker buried deep in the code.

Macron’s willingness to "increase indigenous content" is a calculated gamble. He’s betting that by giving India the blueprints for the steel, he can keep the keys to the software. It’s a play for a long-term partnership that makes India the primary maintenance hub for French tech in the Indo-Pacific.

It’s a win for Dassault’s shareholders and a win for India’s optics. But for the engineers on the ground trying to bridge the gap between French aerospace standards and local manufacturing realities, the "stronger India" Macron promises is going to be a very expensive, very complicated work in progress.

The real question isn't whether India can build a Rafale, but whether it can afford to keep buying them until it learns how.

One has to wonder if, by the time the first "indigenous" engine actually screams down a runway, the world will have already moved on to drone swarms and orbital lasers that make these $100 million manned jets look like very shiny museum pieces.