Rakesh Datta
IAF personnel on parade. It is incredible that despite possessing the third largest army, fifth largest air force and sixth largest navy, the country is attacked repeatedly by its neighbours
ADDRESSING the last combined conference of the senior commanders of the three services there was nothing unusual in the Indian Prime Minister’s remarks that the strategic problems have shifted from the west to the east and so have the threats and challenges.
The pronounced tilt had, in fact, occurred long back after the end of the Cold War in 1991, while the post meltdown phase further intensified it. India’s security attributes in the new power structure descended into the worst kind of anarchical disorder. It was overtaken by dire poverty, economic exploitation, bad governance, inflation, population explosion, caste, religious and sectarian fundamentalism, divisive and fissiparous tendencies, terrorism and insurgency. At the same time, both Pakistan and China heightened tension along the Line of Control (LoC) and the Line of Actual Control (LAC) by assaulting Indian troops and attempting to cross the border at various times with impunity.
The period immediately preceding 1991, and thereafter, had initiated a new kind of war where the adversary found it more convenient to hit strategic targets like the local population and such areas of domain falling under the C5I2SR spectrum. In fact, the Chinese and the Pakistanis had created departments long back that specialised in cyber warfare, while we are only now planning to have a dedicated new Army Cyber Command to look into the aspects of computer war gaming in a serious manner. Unaccustomed to combat cyber warfare techniques used by China and Pakistan way back in the late 1980s, the Government of India used to dismiss such electronic tactical advances as mindless and juvenile activities. How effective the new command will be to counter such cyber assaults, when the Ministry of Defence and the National Security Council Secretariat as well as a host of other important agencies had already suffered dosages of computer hacking, is yet to be comprehended.
One thing that is certainly assured is the shift from positional threats to assaults that are mobile in nature. The serial bomb blasts that hit India repeatedly during the 1990s would substantially vouch for it. As a country we debated for 24 long years on whether or not to nuclear weaponise. But once we took the decision to go ahead with nuclear weapons, the policy of no first use further emboldened Pakistan to test India on three occasions – the war in Kargil, the stand off during Operation Parakram and the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai. Its success lay more in intensifying and fighting on all fronts like political, economic, religious and military.
We have failed to address Pakistan as our enemy and seem to have developed a fear psychosis vis-a-vis China. It has resulted in losing the strategic respect we would otherwise have earned from the peripheral countries.
Our bogey of strategic ties with the US must allow us to appreciate that every country fights its own war and we are no different. Non-alignment is no longer a muscular tool to establish India as a balancer or to practice neutrality in the globalised world. Let us not forget that Pakistan continues to enjoy the non-NATO membership status given to it by the United States. We have also been experiencing terrorism for the last over five decades. The country keeps debating which security agency to use or when it is politically convenient to combat terrorist activities, while military means remains the last option. We are letting our paramilitary forces conduct low intensity warfare with no clear directions.
Formulating a defence policy
We have been unable to combat issues relating to internal security, exhibiting the Nehruvian attitude, making ourselves more active on the global front but with no commensurate military capabilities to support it.
India’s security arch extends from Aden to Malacca in the Indian Ocean and now to the South China Sea. In this context, while the Indian maritime doctrine must conceive its present and future mandate in a strategically dynamic era, one attempts to analyse the role of the newly inducted aircraft carrier, INS Vikramaditya. The Indian Navy has a history of operating such carriers, but their use as an instrument of power projection remains rather questionable.
For instance, INS Vikrant was commissioned in 1961 and we found it difficult to deploy during earlier wars. INS Virat was a little luckier, but what is most significant is whether we have charted any role for INS Vikramaditya at a time when the Chinese have already positioned their aircraft carrier, Liaoning, in the South China Sea. There has been a debate and ongoing scholarly work on the role of aircraft carriers in modern warfare, especially since air-to-air refueling has already enlarged the radius of action of warplanes, as have missiles for striking long distance targets.
The country needs to have a policy for force projection. According to Clausewitz, it is the policy which fights and not the weapon per se. One of the major developments seen on India’s security horizon is formulation of various security doctrines. For instance, there is the Nuclear Policy, the Cold Start Doctrine, the Air Force Doctrine, the Maritime Doctrine as well as the Joint Warfare Doctrine, but the biggest irony is that the country has no national defence policy -- a mother of all doctrines. Its modulating character, however, has a shifting stand to choose from policy of non violence to defensive reactive to defensive offensive or as steered by the country’s foreign policy. There is also a document called the Operational Directive that is issued from time to time. This goes in marked contrast to India’s radical changing of external and domestic realities in which rethinking of its defence policy becomes an urgent necessity.
Consequently, our borders are weak, vulnerable, porous and lack infrastructure. We are exploited with immunity by the peripheral countries largely shooting from a no policy syndrome to the much functional Panipat Syndrome. Information on defence budgeting, military deployments and governments reviews are only employed to broadly portray India’s defence posture, aspirations and reforms, unlike strategic review papers released annually by other countries like the US and China. Further, as India’s defence policy is invariably steered in the absence of a policy, the important factor overlooked is the country’s defence preparedness.
Look at the paradox. On the one hand, the Prime Minister is showing concern for formidable challenges confronting the country while addressing the commanders’ conference and on the other hand counseling for cutting down on defence expenditure. There has not been any appreciable purchase of major weapons for over more than a decade except for the recent commissioning of an aircraft carrier. Such attributes have their own reasoning.
India is a 100 billion dollar market and attracts interest from all great powers including the United States. It is perhaps the major reason for India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation to remain wanting in building indigenous defence capability.
Shekhar Dutt, past defence secretary and currently Governor of Chhattisgarh, had thoughtfully remarked that the army must rationalise its appointments and postings to the Ministry of Defence, which remains of short durations thereby giving greater scope to the bureaucracy to push the agendas.
It was late KM Pannikar who talked of creating a steel ring around India through the establishment of forward bases in Singapore, Mauritius, Yemen and Sri Lanka. Instead, we have failed badly, giving away turf to both Pakistan and China in the region. The Chinese string of pearls strategy was an offshoot of Britain’s war in the Falklands, which made them learn the importance of carrying provisions along. India stands to contend for a global power status but it demands a massive show of strength, right policies, good governance and effective leadership. Alas, we have lost out on all these variables.
Reading the adversary’s psyche
It is incredible that despite possessing the third largest standing army, fifth largest air force and sixth largest navy, the country is attacked repeatedly by its neighbours. Interestingly, the larger deficit in handling of strategic issues by India since independence is its inconvincing credibility, notwithstanding the adequate military prowess. India’s soft state attributes must grow its horns not by way of attacking neighbours but by defending itself effectively before being hit or assaulted.
It is significant to mention here that the country is in league with all the major and meaningful countries undertaking joint military exercises but, there is a need for strong action to secure the home front.
The Indian strategic milieu has certainly changed and so are its attitudinal requirements. It permeates into all areas assumed to build up the country’s comprehensive national power such as political, economic, social and military. Three things which have largely affected the security architecture are -- First, the changing complexion of security in which our increasingly dangerous neighbourhood has not only reduced our geo-political space but, also kept our defence forces in a bind. Second, unusual military buildup and with little being produced indigenously. Third, a buildup of nuclear weapons even as India maintains a no-first use policy and has no corresponding assertive defence policy.
We do not have a law to deal with terrorism, whereas insurgency in Kashmir, the northeast and Naxalism remain our primary official threats. Interestingly, India is making efforts to fight terrorism in league with global partnerships. However, one thing that has remained common to the pre and post-cold war period is India’s ceaseless policy of crying hoarse every time but yet never showing firmness in dealing with her security problems. One could only hope that the new government may try to set India’s strategic house in order.
We need to read deeply into our adversary’s psyche where power grows from the barrel of the gun and threatens only those with no hold on the barrel.
The writer is Chairman, Department of Defence and National Security Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh
Security Impasse
We have failed to address Pakistan as our enemy and seem to have developed a fear psychosis vis-a-vis China, thereby losing the strategic respect we would otherwise have earned
We have been unable to combat issues of internal security, letting our paramilitary forces fight low intensity warfare with no clear directions
There has not been any appreciable purchase of major weapons for over a decade
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2014/20140408/edit.htm#6
IAF personnel on parade. It is incredible that despite possessing the third largest army, fifth largest air force and sixth largest navy, the country is attacked repeatedly by its neighbours
ADDRESSING the last combined conference of the senior commanders of the three services there was nothing unusual in the Indian Prime Minister’s remarks that the strategic problems have shifted from the west to the east and so have the threats and challenges.The pronounced tilt had, in fact, occurred long back after the end of the Cold War in 1991, while the post meltdown phase further intensified it. India’s security attributes in the new power structure descended into the worst kind of anarchical disorder. It was overtaken by dire poverty, economic exploitation, bad governance, inflation, population explosion, caste, religious and sectarian fundamentalism, divisive and fissiparous tendencies, terrorism and insurgency. At the same time, both Pakistan and China heightened tension along the Line of Control (LoC) and the Line of Actual Control (LAC) by assaulting Indian troops and attempting to cross the border at various times with impunity.
The period immediately preceding 1991, and thereafter, had initiated a new kind of war where the adversary found it more convenient to hit strategic targets like the local population and such areas of domain falling under the C5I2SR spectrum. In fact, the Chinese and the Pakistanis had created departments long back that specialised in cyber warfare, while we are only now planning to have a dedicated new Army Cyber Command to look into the aspects of computer war gaming in a serious manner. Unaccustomed to combat cyber warfare techniques used by China and Pakistan way back in the late 1980s, the Government of India used to dismiss such electronic tactical advances as mindless and juvenile activities. How effective the new command will be to counter such cyber assaults, when the Ministry of Defence and the National Security Council Secretariat as well as a host of other important agencies had already suffered dosages of computer hacking, is yet to be comprehended.
One thing that is certainly assured is the shift from positional threats to assaults that are mobile in nature. The serial bomb blasts that hit India repeatedly during the 1990s would substantially vouch for it. As a country we debated for 24 long years on whether or not to nuclear weaponise. But once we took the decision to go ahead with nuclear weapons, the policy of no first use further emboldened Pakistan to test India on three occasions – the war in Kargil, the stand off during Operation Parakram and the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai. Its success lay more in intensifying and fighting on all fronts like political, economic, religious and military.
We have failed to address Pakistan as our enemy and seem to have developed a fear psychosis vis-a-vis China. It has resulted in losing the strategic respect we would otherwise have earned from the peripheral countries.
Our bogey of strategic ties with the US must allow us to appreciate that every country fights its own war and we are no different. Non-alignment is no longer a muscular tool to establish India as a balancer or to practice neutrality in the globalised world. Let us not forget that Pakistan continues to enjoy the non-NATO membership status given to it by the United States. We have also been experiencing terrorism for the last over five decades. The country keeps debating which security agency to use or when it is politically convenient to combat terrorist activities, while military means remains the last option. We are letting our paramilitary forces conduct low intensity warfare with no clear directions.
Formulating a defence policy
We have been unable to combat issues relating to internal security, exhibiting the Nehruvian attitude, making ourselves more active on the global front but with no commensurate military capabilities to support it.
India’s security arch extends from Aden to Malacca in the Indian Ocean and now to the South China Sea. In this context, while the Indian maritime doctrine must conceive its present and future mandate in a strategically dynamic era, one attempts to analyse the role of the newly inducted aircraft carrier, INS Vikramaditya. The Indian Navy has a history of operating such carriers, but their use as an instrument of power projection remains rather questionable.
For instance, INS Vikrant was commissioned in 1961 and we found it difficult to deploy during earlier wars. INS Virat was a little luckier, but what is most significant is whether we have charted any role for INS Vikramaditya at a time when the Chinese have already positioned their aircraft carrier, Liaoning, in the South China Sea. There has been a debate and ongoing scholarly work on the role of aircraft carriers in modern warfare, especially since air-to-air refueling has already enlarged the radius of action of warplanes, as have missiles for striking long distance targets.
The country needs to have a policy for force projection. According to Clausewitz, it is the policy which fights and not the weapon per se. One of the major developments seen on India’s security horizon is formulation of various security doctrines. For instance, there is the Nuclear Policy, the Cold Start Doctrine, the Air Force Doctrine, the Maritime Doctrine as well as the Joint Warfare Doctrine, but the biggest irony is that the country has no national defence policy -- a mother of all doctrines. Its modulating character, however, has a shifting stand to choose from policy of non violence to defensive reactive to defensive offensive or as steered by the country’s foreign policy. There is also a document called the Operational Directive that is issued from time to time. This goes in marked contrast to India’s radical changing of external and domestic realities in which rethinking of its defence policy becomes an urgent necessity.
Consequently, our borders are weak, vulnerable, porous and lack infrastructure. We are exploited with immunity by the peripheral countries largely shooting from a no policy syndrome to the much functional Panipat Syndrome. Information on defence budgeting, military deployments and governments reviews are only employed to broadly portray India’s defence posture, aspirations and reforms, unlike strategic review papers released annually by other countries like the US and China. Further, as India’s defence policy is invariably steered in the absence of a policy, the important factor overlooked is the country’s defence preparedness.
Look at the paradox. On the one hand, the Prime Minister is showing concern for formidable challenges confronting the country while addressing the commanders’ conference and on the other hand counseling for cutting down on defence expenditure. There has not been any appreciable purchase of major weapons for over more than a decade except for the recent commissioning of an aircraft carrier. Such attributes have their own reasoning.
India is a 100 billion dollar market and attracts interest from all great powers including the United States. It is perhaps the major reason for India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation to remain wanting in building indigenous defence capability.
Shekhar Dutt, past defence secretary and currently Governor of Chhattisgarh, had thoughtfully remarked that the army must rationalise its appointments and postings to the Ministry of Defence, which remains of short durations thereby giving greater scope to the bureaucracy to push the agendas.
It was late KM Pannikar who talked of creating a steel ring around India through the establishment of forward bases in Singapore, Mauritius, Yemen and Sri Lanka. Instead, we have failed badly, giving away turf to both Pakistan and China in the region. The Chinese string of pearls strategy was an offshoot of Britain’s war in the Falklands, which made them learn the importance of carrying provisions along. India stands to contend for a global power status but it demands a massive show of strength, right policies, good governance and effective leadership. Alas, we have lost out on all these variables.
Reading the adversary’s psyche
It is incredible that despite possessing the third largest standing army, fifth largest air force and sixth largest navy, the country is attacked repeatedly by its neighbours. Interestingly, the larger deficit in handling of strategic issues by India since independence is its inconvincing credibility, notwithstanding the adequate military prowess. India’s soft state attributes must grow its horns not by way of attacking neighbours but by defending itself effectively before being hit or assaulted.
It is significant to mention here that the country is in league with all the major and meaningful countries undertaking joint military exercises but, there is a need for strong action to secure the home front.
The Indian strategic milieu has certainly changed and so are its attitudinal requirements. It permeates into all areas assumed to build up the country’s comprehensive national power such as political, economic, social and military. Three things which have largely affected the security architecture are -- First, the changing complexion of security in which our increasingly dangerous neighbourhood has not only reduced our geo-political space but, also kept our defence forces in a bind. Second, unusual military buildup and with little being produced indigenously. Third, a buildup of nuclear weapons even as India maintains a no-first use policy and has no corresponding assertive defence policy.
We do not have a law to deal with terrorism, whereas insurgency in Kashmir, the northeast and Naxalism remain our primary official threats. Interestingly, India is making efforts to fight terrorism in league with global partnerships. However, one thing that has remained common to the pre and post-cold war period is India’s ceaseless policy of crying hoarse every time but yet never showing firmness in dealing with her security problems. One could only hope that the new government may try to set India’s strategic house in order.
We need to read deeply into our adversary’s psyche where power grows from the barrel of the gun and threatens only those with no hold on the barrel.
The writer is Chairman, Department of Defence and National Security Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh
Security Impasse
We have failed to address Pakistan as our enemy and seem to have developed a fear psychosis vis-a-vis China, thereby losing the strategic respect we would otherwise have earned
We have been unable to combat issues of internal security, letting our paramilitary forces fight low intensity warfare with no clear directions
There has not been any appreciable purchase of major weapons for over a decade
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2014/20140408/edit.htm#6
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