Indian Power Projection

Ambition, Arms and Influence

Shashank Joshi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351712781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Arms Control
• Index: Politics & International Relations

India is growing into one of Asia's most important military powers. Its defence budget has more than doubled in the past decade, and it imports more arms than anyone else in the world. But India is still seen as a land power focused on long, disputed and militarised borders with Pakistan and China rather than the global military force it was in the first half of the twentieth century under British rule. Is this changing? India is acquiring increasing numbers of key platforms – aircraft carriers, amphibious ships, refuelling tankers and transport aircraft – that are extending its reach to the Indian Ocean littoral and beyond. But most accounts of this build-up have been impressionistic and partial.

Indian Power Projection assesses the strength, reach and purposes of India's maturing capabilities. It offers a systematic assessment of India's ability to conduct long-range airstrikes from land and sea, transport and convey airborne and amphibious forces, and develop the institutional and material enablers that turn platforms into capabilities. It draws extensively on the lessons of modern expeditionary operations, and considers how India's growing interests might shape where and how it uses these evolving capabilities in the future.

This study finds that Indian power projection is in a nascent stage: limited in number, primarily of use against much-weaker adversaries, and deficient in some key supporting capabilities. India's defence posture will continue to be shaped by local threats, rather than distant interests. Indian leaders remain uncomfortable with talk of military intervention and expeditionary warfare, associating these with colonial and superpower excess. But as the country's power, interests and capabilities all grow, it is likely that India will once more find itself using military force beyond its land borders.

I. INDIA’S DEFENCE POSTURE

India is an emerging twenty-first-century power stuck in the groove of twentieth-century conflicts. Even as its influence spreads wider, its likeliest wars will be on its doorstep. This mismatch shapes and constrains its defence posture. No discussion of India’s power-projection forces could be meaningful without first understanding the nature of India’s armed forces and what they see as their priorities. This chapter begins by setting out the basic size and shape of India’s military and trends in its recent development. It then explores some of the most pressing questions confronting the military today: its relationship to the civilian leadership and that between service arms; readiness and standards; and the enduring problem of limited war under Pakistan’s increasingly low nuclear thresholds. Finally, the chapter describes how the role of power projection has evolved in India’s thinking about defence and India’s practical experience in this regard.

By way of context, India has fought four wars with Pakistan: over Kashmir in 1947–49 and 1965; over then-East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971; and over the Kargil sector of Kashmir in 1999. The latter two were resounding victories, and the former operational successes but strategic draws. India suffered a major and traumatising defeat at the hands of China in 1962.¹ It has also engaged in more limited operations, most recently a cross-border strike in Myanmar by special forces; multiple domestic counter-insurgency campaigns, most prominently in Jammu and Kashmir and in the northeastern states; and, as described below, a series of operations further from India’s borders.

Basic Size and Shape

India’s armed forces are built around a 1.1-million-strong army, virtually unchanged in size over the past thirty years, as well as a 180-ship navy and 880-plane air force. A ninety-ship coast guard and 1.4-million-strong paramilitary forces — largely tasked to India’s various domestic insurgencies — supplement these, as do 300,000 first-line army reservists and half a million with less onerous commitments.² In 2014, India’s annual military expenditure was approximately $50 billion: the seventh-highest in the world; 2.8 per cent of the world total;³ and a relatively modest 2.4 per cent of GDP.⁴

The army has six operational commands that control thirteen corps in total. Three of these, I, II and XXI, are strike corps, tasked with leading offensive thrusts into Pakistan. Under this are an estimated thirty-four active manoeuvre combat divisions, with four more (all mountain divisions) at various stages of being risen.⁵ In 2009, at a time of rising concern over China, India began raising two new mountain divisions to be based in the northeast,⁶ and in 2013 announced the creation of a long-mooted mountain strike corps, also oriented towards China, with three further divisions to be in place by 2018–19 (though the latter was slashed for budgetary reasons in April 2015).⁷

The Indian Air Force’s numbers are in a period of flux as a generation of Soviet-era fighters is retired, while their replacements erratically trickle in. The backbone of the fleet — just under a third of the total number of combat aircraft — and its primary air-superiority platform consists of the Su-30MKI, an export variant of the Russian Su-30 Flanker, first acquired in 2002 and with more expected over the next several years.⁸ India has also settled on the French Dassault Rafale as a more flexible multi-role fighter, though it remains unclear whether it would build on a small order placed in early 2015. The IAF’s strength fell to thirty-two combat squadrons by the end of 2015 — roughly the same as a decade ago, but at the low end of the 35–40 fielded from the 1970s to 2000s.⁹ In 2011, the IAF asked to build up to forty-five combat squadrons, around 810 aircraft, in response to what it calls a ‘two front collusive threat’ from what could be 1,500 fourth-generation Pakistani and Chinese fighters, but the government has approved just forty-two squadrons and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar suggests that ‘at least’ thirty-seven squadrons might be satisfactory.¹⁰ The Indian parliament’s Defence Committee in 2014 assessed the gap between sanctioned and existing strength as ‘very grim’ and ‘dismal’.¹¹ In practice, the IAF’s numerical strength over the next decade is more likely to climb back to the average of the past thirty years, rather than to jump to new heights as some hope. However, as Chapters II and III show, this stagnation in numbers obscures some important shifts in capability.

The Indian Navy shows a similar trend: stagnation in some areas, with growing capability in others. The navy currently operates around fifteen submarines and 125 surface ships.¹² Senior officers once spoke of becoming a 160-ship navy by 2022, and now aim for 200 ships by 2027 — though such boasts are aspirational.¹³ The number of India’s principal surface combatants, twenty-seven, was exactly the same in 2015 as in 1990 — but it has around twice as many destroyers, more maritime strike aircraft, more advanced maritime patrol aircraft and, for the first time since 1986–1996, two aircraft carriers. Indian shipbuilding is a rare success story for indigenous defence production, with the new Kolkata- and Visakhapatnam-class destroyers some of the cheapest per tonne anywhere in the world,¹⁴ and 4–5 new ships being added every year. However, submarine numbers have stalled, falling steadily from nineteen boats in 2005 to fourteen today — the lowest level in almost thirty years. This is well above Taiwan and Vietnam (four apiece), Pakistan (eight), and Australia (nine), but below Japan (eighteen), South Korea (twenty-three) and China (seventy). Despite plans for expansion, Indian submarine numbers will plateau at twenty boats in the 2020s, compared to China’s fifty-plus.¹⁵

Trends

Defence Spending

The first, most prominent and most significant trend in the Indian military has been the rapid growth in defence spending over the past twenty-five years.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) figures, real-terms Indian defence spending more than doubled from just under $19 billion in 1990 to around $ 50 billion in 2014, representing an average annual growth rate of 4.4 per cent (but compared to an average annual growth rate in GDP of 6.6 per cent). This outstrips all other large military spenders over this period other than Saudi Arabia and China (whose budgets grew more than threefold and tenfold respectively).¹⁶ In the most recent figures available, India’s 2015/16 budget allocated a little under 247 trillion rupees for defence — just over $38 billion at present exchange rates.¹⁷ (The large discrepancy between this and the SIPRI figure of $50 billion may arise in part because of the large fall in the rupee’s value over the past several years, deflating the dollar value of India’s spending, as well as SIPRI’s inclusion of spending on paramilitary forces and military pensions.¹⁸ India allocated around $8.4 billion to military pensions for 2014/15 and a recent politically charged decision to boost many retirees’ pensions, known as One Rank One Pension, adds a further burden of $4.3 million.¹⁹ These amounts are excluded in official defence-spending figures.) If we accept the SIPRI figure for ease of cross-country comparison, India’s present spending is less than a quarter of China’s and 8 per cent that of the US, but amounts to nearly 60 per cent of Russia’s and over 80 per cent of France’s and Britain’s.

Economic Growth

Second, India’s economic growth has allowed defence spending to rise in absolute terms even as it consumes an ever-smaller share of GDP. India routinely spent above 3 per cent of GDP on defence prior to the 1990s, but now spends a near all-time low of 2.4 per cent. Indian parliamentary committees and commentators have urged that this slide be reversed, but successive governments have been content with the growth in aggregate spending.

Composition of Spend...