By Daniel Kliman, Iskander Rehman, Kristine Lee and Joshua Fitt
The United States has made a strategic bet: that India will decisively shape the military balance in Asia.1 In an era of avowed great power competition with China,2 at a time when the U.S. military’s edge over the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) continues to erode,3 this wager will have an outsized impact on the future trajectory of the region. If India can maintain an advantage over China along its Himalayan frontier and sustain its dominance in the Indian Ocean, U.S. efforts to deny Beijing a regional sphere of influence are far more likely to succeed—as is the vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific shared by Washington and Delhi. If India fails to realize its military potential, the United States, caught in between its many global commitments, will struggle to uphold a favorable balance of power.
Today, America’s wager has yet to fully pay off. The trend lines in the India-China military equation are broadly negative. Despite very real improvements in Delhi’s defense capabilities and a significant advantage conveyed by India’s maritime geography, its longstanding superiority over China in the Indian Ocean is at risk of slipping away. Beijing has enhanced the capability and capacity of the naval forces it can project into the Indian Ocean and pursued overseas military facilities to support a more regular People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) presence there. Moreover, China’s long-range precision strike complex, though constructed primarily with the United States as the intended adversary, extends into the Indian Ocean—presenting a threat to Delhi’s maritime operations. The state of play along India’s Himalayan frontier is more mixed. Delhi possesses a clear advantage in localized military strength, but China has made significant infrastructure improvements in Tibet to enhance PLA mobility to surge troops forward, while folding the entire border with India under a single unified theater command—a major organizational restructuring that could yield an operational edge.
India has not stood still amid growing military competition with China. Delhi has sought to provide its forces with greater mobility and operational awareness along the Himalayan frontier, while giving increased focus to maritime domain awareness, logistics, and subsurface monitoring across the vast expanses of the Indian Ocean. To weather a potential PLA attack, India has placed greater emphasis on infrastructure hardening; base resiliency; redundant command, control, and communications systems; and improved air defense. At the same time, India has shifted to a more punitive deterrence posture: Having invested in long-range strike capabilities suitable to both land and maritime warfare, it conducted a recent trial of a new anti-satellite weapon. It has also refined an operational concept for the Himalayan theater that aims to take the battle into China’s territory. Lastly, Delhi has begun taking steps to promote greater military jointness through new forms of defense organization.
Positioning India to Prevail in 2030
Delhi’s ongoing efforts, though promising, will not fundamentally change the current trend lines in the India-China military equation. This report advances a set of recommendations that collectively aim to ensure select areas of Indian military advantage and stress PLA vulnerabilities. These recommendations are rooted in an assessment of policy and budgetary choices that might become viable for India in the decade ending in 2030.
Whether India can compete militarily with China will hinge on its operational concepts. The first advanced by this report is a sharper version of India’s existing operational concept for the Himalayan theater, while the second is more novel and tailored to an increasingly challenging maritime environment.
Himalayan Operational Concept: In peacetime, India should seek to deter China from crossing their shared land frontier. In the event of a large-scale invasion, Delhi would retain critical strong points while attriting attacking forces and disrupting the flow of PLA reinforcements across the Tibetan Plateau, but would avoid large mechanized ground incursions into China.
Maritime Operational Concept: Delhi should endeavor to deter Beijing from initiating a conflict by demonstrating a continued ability to hold at risk China’s sea lines of communication. In wartime, India should rapidly eliminate the PLA in the Western Indian Ocean and disrupt Beijing’s seaborne trade while slowing naval reinforcements from mainland China. This would be accomplished by mounting a layered defense that starts in the waterways of Southeast Asia.
Implementing these operational concepts will require Delhi to:
Reform India’s defense organization through establishing a joint Himalayan theater command, standing up joint and geographically reconfigured Eastern and Western maritime commands, and inaugurating a Defense Electronic Warfare Agency.
Invest in select capabilities by strengthening command, control, communications, computer, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR), developing more robust counter-C4ISR, enhancing the lethality and survivability of the Indian Army and Navy, and rationalizing the Indian Air Force around a smaller number of multi-role aircraft.
Bolster foreign strategic partnerships through expanding maritime domain awareness cooperation with France, Australia, and Japan, while fully leveraging security ties with the United States.
Optimizing U.S.-India Defense Engagement
Two decades of deepening U.S.-India security cooperation have generated real results, but both Washington and Delhi need a fresh look at how they can advance security ties in an era of intensified strategic competition with China. Looking out to U.S.-India defense engagement in 2030, this report makes the following recommendations:
Enhance defense trade through strengthening institutional foundations on each side and tailoring U.S. arms exports to backstop India’s operational concepts for China.
Advance Indian capacity and capability by launching a new C4ISR/counter-C4ISR bilateral initiative, co-developing and jointly producing an unmanned surface vessel (USV), and initiating U.S.-India consultations on engineering for mountain warfare.
Deepen policy and planning coordination through putting in place the foundations for China-related contingency talks, acting in tandem to blunt Beijing’s pursuit of overseas military access, and reciprocating access to strategically located Indian Ocean islands.
Improve information sharing by clarifying bureaucratic procedures and constructing technical channels to support rapid dissemination of intelligence to India, and establishing a U.S.-India-France information sharing consortium on China’s activities in the Western Indian Ocean.
Optimize bilateral military exercises through reorienting U.S.-India special operations exercises toward great power competition and evolving the new U.S. tri-service exercise with India to focus on high-end conflicts.
U.S.-India defense relations have recently confronted headwinds, such as Delhi’s decision to purchase the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system. Yet India remains Washington’s best bet in the region in the context of revived great power competition, while the United States is uniquely equipped to support Delhi’s future military competitiveness vis-à-vis Beijing. With their combined vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific at stake, the United States and India should take the long view and work toward achieving a far deeper strategic partnership by 2030.
Thought Paper Series
This report also draws from insights provided by three short thought papers from experts Chris Dougherty, Darshana M. Baruah, and Arzan Tarapore:
Force Development Options for India by 2030
Chris Dougherty, a Senior Fellow at CNAS, advances a set of defense reforms and force planning recommendations for the Indian military in his paper, “Force Development Options for India by 2030.” In light of the challenges China poses both on the Himalayan frontier and in the Indian Ocean, Dougherty’s recommendations focus on investing in offensive asymmetric capabilities and shifting the Indian Army toward multi-domain operations.
Strengthening Delhi’s Strategic Partnerships in the Indian Ocean
Darshana M. Baruah, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, focuses on the maritime domain in her paper, “Strengthening Delhi’s Strategic Partnerships in the Indian Ocean.” Baruah argues that India must leverage its partnerships—in developing its maritime domain awareness, intelligence sharing, and technological innovation capabilities—to shape a maritime environment that is conducive to its strategic interests.
A More Focused and Resilient U.S.-India Strategic Partnership
Arzan Tarapore, a Nonresident Fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, argues that the United States and India should recalibrate their partnership amid competition with China in his paper, “A More Focused and Resilient U.S.-India Strategic Partnership.” Tarapore contends that the partnership should be grounded on a realistic set of goals focusing on a strategy of denial against China, including through coordinated joint security assistance and the exchange of Indian military personnel with regional states, as well as multilateral exercises with highly capable forces.
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