Tag Archives: Bruce Riedel

Defense Dysfunction

The MMRCA decision illustrates the deep problems besetting the Indian defense establishment.

Much of the commentary about India’s elimination of the Boeing and Lockheed Martin bids from its hotly-contested, highly-lucrative Medium Multirole Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) competition has focused on its meaning for US-India relations.  The air force is the largest beneficiary of the country’s burgeoning military budget and a number of foreign companies were looking to snap up the $11 billion MMRCA contract. The Americans were also expecting that the diplomatic capital they assiduously built up in New Delhi in recent years would turn the decision to their favor. Instead, New Delhi opted to reject the U.S. entrants and shortlist for final selection the Typhoon aircraft produced by the four-nation Eurofighter consortium (composed of British, German, Italian and Spanish defense companies) and the Rafale offered by France’s Dassault Aviation SA.

MMRCA_ImageMany interpret the decision as an emphatic rebuff of Washington’s overtures for closer security links. John Elliott, a long-time observer of the Indian scene, views the move as an effort at “keeping the U.S. firmly in its place.”  Others see it as a sign that lingering doubts still reside in New Delhi about the reliability of the United States as a defense supplier. Bruce Riedel, an informal Obama administration adviser on South Asia, argues that “there is a belief that in a crisis situation, particularly if it was an India-Pakistan crisis, the U.S. could pull the plug on parts, munitions, aircraft – precisely at the moment you need them most. Memories are deep in this part of the world.” Stephen P. Cohen, the dean of U.S. South Asianists, concurs: “India would have given the order to a U.S. firm if it had been assured that the United States would back India politically thereafter.  Since this guarantee was not available, and awarding a U.S. firm the contract would increase Washington’s ability to influence New Delhi, the United States was a not a good choice politically as a supplier.”

According to Ashley J. Tellis, one of the most insightful and well-informed observers of US-India affairs, both perspectives are wrong, however. In a superb review of the decision, he argues that it represents less an omen about bilateral ties than a sui generis episode involving the Indian air force’s rigid application of technical desiderata. The bottom line, Tellis says, is that New Delhi selected the European contestants for no other reason than they were adjudged the better flying machines.

Some Indian commentators are of the view that, with bilateral ties now so multi-dimensional and mature, Washington’s sense of letdown will dissipate quickly. This is likely to prove wishful thinking, given how aggressively the Obama administration lobbied on behalf of the American bids. But Tellis’s account at least reassures that the decision did not entail a repudiation of the US-India strategic partnership.

Less heartening, including to those in Washington who want to see New Delhi become a more capable global power, are the serious problems in the Indian defense establishment that are highlighted by the MMCRA selection process. Aiming to ward off charges of graft and extraneous influence that have plagued big-ticket military contracts in the past – Rajiv Gandhi’s government collapsed in 1989 due to the corruption scandal involving the Bofors heavy artillery pieces – Defense Minister A.K. Antony crafted a selection process that relied solely on narrow technical assessments that reportedly encompassed some 500 criteria. Relevant strategic, political and financial factors were purposively excluded from consideration. Following extensive field trials, the air force concluded that the two European finalists possessed superior aerodynamic capabilities relative to their American competitors.

Tellis agrees that, on the basis of narrow technical assessments, the Typhoon and Rafale represent the best choices and that the selection procedure was free of corruption. But if the process was clean, it was not in his view a rational or even well thought-out one. By making such a major procurement decision without examining other attendant considerations, the defense ministry, in Tellis’s view, runs the risk of misallocating precious resources, thereby undercutting India’s larger national security interests. Giving due weight to important non-technical factors, he contends, would have cast the American entrants, particularly Boeing’s F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet, in a more favorable light. As he sees it, the Super Hornet is a truly cost-effective choice once issues like unit piece, technology transfer, offsets, production lines schemes and possibilities for strategic collaboration are assessed.

This specific judgment might be contested within the Indian air power community, but the post-mortem Tellis provides about this particular acquisition decision has larger institutional implications. He reveals, for instance, that the financial details of the bids were not examined prior to the short-listing. If they had been, evaluators might well have asked whether the marginally superior performance offered by the Typhoon and Rafale are worth their markedly higher price tags ($125 million and $85 million, respectively) compared to the Super Hornet’s $60 million. And even if Indian officials decided they were still getting their money’s worth, it would have behooved them to include the U.S. plane on the shortlist in order to enhance their bargaining leverage vis-à-vis the European companies.

It is also striking that only after the shortlist was announced did the defense ministry turn to consider important questions about technology transfer, offset arrangements and production efficiency. India’s defense industrial sector remains conspicuously immature, certainly in contrast to other world powers. (As Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta maintain in their new book, the well-funded military R&D system is remarkably short of accomplishment.) Yet Tellis points out that the European aircraft selected have a more limited capacity to transform the country’s technology base than their American counterparts. This, too, would seem to be an important matter to assess, yet it was deliberately excluded from consideration.

Geopolitical considerations were similarly absent from the decision, especially the issue of whether New Delhi should leverage the opportunity to enhance military-technological ties with the United States. With President Obama’s personally intervening with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the lack of integrated decision-making all but guaranteed negative diplomatic fallout. As Tellis notes:

“In its zeal to treat this competition as just another routine procurement decision falling solely within its own competence, the acquisition wing of the ministry of defense communicated its final choice to the American vendors through the defense attache’s office at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi without first informing the ministry of external affairs. This action put the latter in the embarrassing position of not knowing about the defense ministry’s decision a priori and, as a result, was unable to forewarn the United States.”


The upshot, according to Tellis, is that the thoughtless manner “in which these results were conveyed did not win New Delhi any friends in Washington, a process that Indian government officials now recognize and ruefully admit was counterproductive.”

New Delhi has now announced that a blue-ribbon commission is being formed to examine the deep problems besetting the defense establishment, including those in the areas of strategic planning, resource allocation and systems acquisition. A good point of departure would be considering the woeful institutional lessons offered by the MMRCA case.

Bruce Riedel’s underwhelming new book

It doesn’t tell us any more than we already know

It is hard to see what Bruce Riedel’s new book “Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of Global Jihad” seeks to do.

Book cover (credit:bestofferbuyuk.com

It covers the history of the United States’ relationship with Pakistan from Partition onwards, but is too brief and too shallow to provide a good picture. Dennis Kux and Howard Schaffer deal with this in much greater detail. As an analysis of Pakistani politics and civil-military relations, it is a subset of Stephen P Cohen’s excellent book. As a narrative of the creation and growth of the military-jihadi complex, it is supered by Ahmed Rashid and Hussain Haqqani, who go much deeper. Finally, as an account of the Obama administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan, it has little to add to Bob Woodward’s book published last year.

Coming from one of the most astute analysts of Pakistan, and from someone who was “in the room” during important moments in contemporary history, the book is a disappointment. Mr Riedel could well have cited Kux, Schaffer, Cohen & Rashid as references in his introductory chapter and gone on to provide us with a deeper, broader analysis of Pakistan’s current situation and fleshed out the possible directions it may take in the future. Yet, we are left with just one single chapter on the implications of one single—what he calls “possible (but not probable)”—outcome: the implications of a jihadist state in Pakistan. That begs the question: what about the probable outcomes? Shouldn’t the book be discussing those in detail?

Perhaps because he is still too close to the policy-making in Washington, Mr Riedel uses statements like “the United States currently has better relations with both India and Pakistan than any other time in the past several decades”. This, after he lays out in great detail how deeply unpopular the United States is in Pakistan (not least because of Washington’s improved relations with India), how the Pakistani military is at loggerheads with its U.S. counterpart, and after mentioning incidents like the suicide attack on the CIA base in Khost. Let’s hope Mr Riedel was merely being diplomatic and politically correct, because the alternative is unflattering.

The disappointment deepens when you see the author accepting the trite argument that Pakistan’s insecurities vis-a-vis India will assuaged if there is a settlement of the Kashmir dispute, even on Pakistan’s own terms. A person who correctly sees a hasty U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan as a victory for Al-Qaeda’s global jihad somehow fails to consider the geopolitical implications of India yielding to Pakistan’s military-jihadi blackmail. To be fair, Mr Riedel recommends nothing more than what was agreed in India-Pakistan back channel talks, but even so, the premise that Pakistan will pose less of a threat to international security if only India were to make some concessions takes the heat off the protagonists—Pakistan and its scaffold states. And no, privately nudging the Indian leadership to pursue dialogue with Pakistan is unlikely to be any more effective than doing so publicly.

What is the book’s big prescription for Pakistan? The combination of carrots (Kerry-Lugar long-term aid) and sticks (drone attacks and suchlike) that are currently employed by the Obama administration. There is very little by way of identification and evaluation of other options. This might, again, be due to the fact the Mr Riedel was recently a part of, and still very close to, the ongoing deadly embrace. By that token, this book might have come too early.