Managing ITAR and Export Controls: The High-Security Mandate for Defence Captive Centers

GCCs already make a substantial contribution to the growth of India. In addition to exports, the economic contribution of captive centers is also increasing. According to the most recent industry estimates, GCCs’ direct output is growing in billions of dollars and is expected to grow significantly by 2030 as centres scale up high-value work. This provides primes with an economic incentive to host sensitive engineering work in India under controlled conditions. The transition into high-value defence business presents the opportunity and responsibility of innovative export control systems. 

• Data Jurisdiction & Classification — Label everything ingested; automatically label ITAR/EAR data.
• Segregated Enclaves — Create air-gapped or logically separated environments that have very strict ingress/egress policies.
• Governance of the Workforce – Role-based access, continued vetting, and establishing explicit roles of “US-person where necessary.
• Vendor and Cloud Due Diligence – only accepted vendors; export controls flow-downs: contracts.
• Continuous Monitoring and Audit – Trails immutable logs, automated alerts and a specific export-controls feature.

The DDTC civil power regimes and settlement are the main means of non-compliance, and regulators demand visible controls and recovery. Companies need to integrate legal services, export-control staff, architectural engineers and GCC consultants to develop defence-in-depth programmes. Contextual access control and automated data-loss detection are now standard technologies. 

By investing in a resilient ITAR compliance and defence supply chain security, defence captive centers will open the door to long-term commercial benefits: preferential contracting by Western primes and the capacity to host end-to-end product engineering, as well as enhanced positioning within the global defence ecosystem. Simulation, avionics, electronic warfare, and secure software delivery are the areas where compliant centres will take on the work with the largest margin as defence exports and value creation in the GCC both assume an upward trend.

ITAR and export control management in defence captive centers can no longer be considered an implementation afterthought but rather the high-security requirement which keeps markets open, maintains the country’s national security interests and facilitates innovation. Organisations that integrate stringent governance, technology stack separation, labour controls and ongoing surveillance shall elude punitive action; not only that, but they shall also garner the confidence needed to spearhead defence supply chain modernisation within the next decade.