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Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

Building Trust in South Asia through Cooperative Retirement of Obsolescent Missiles

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(Mr. Feroz Khan also contributed to the piece.)

Nuclear deterrence is growing roots in South Asia. India and Pakistan have both incorporated nuclear capabilities into their defence planning. Both are guided by a philosophy of minimum credible deterrence, although within this context modest growth is expected to achieve desired force postures. It is natural that asymmetries exist in the forces held by India and Pakistan. These will persist along with different perceptions of strategy and tactics. Despite these differences, we believe India and Pakistan have both reached a point where they should share perceptions about deterrence and nuclear stability in the region.

indiapakThe time is right for India and Pakistan to expand shared understandings through cooperative exchanges of information about their respective deterrence postures. Such understanding could be critical in a crisis. Both India and Pakistan have mutually resolved to enhance strategic stability in our region, as affirmed in the Lahore Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in February 1999.  One possibility for furthering this goal is to consider retiring their oldest, first generation, nuclear capable, short-range ballistic missiles (SRBMs), which are at the end of their natural lifespan. Pakistan’s HATF 1 & 2 and India’s Prithvi 1 & 2 have served their purpose and will be eventually retired unilaterally according to each nation’s normal decommissioning process.  We propose a plan of mutual transparency measures that would share information about the retirement of these missiles on a reciprocal, bilateral basis — without impinging on the continuing modernisation of both sides’ strategic forces. The retirement of other nuclear capable, obsolescent ballistic missiles can then follow in the same cooperative spirit.

We have participated in an in-depth study and also recently in a mock exercise to explore how information exchanges between our two countries could be conducted. We are confident that such an exchange could be achieved with minimal risk and costs and yet provide important reassurance about significant changes in deterrence postures.

The Foreign Ministers of India and Pakistan have recently reaffirmed their commitment to pursue confidence building measures (CBM) in connection with their ongoing Composite Dialogue. A working group on peace and security matters is charged with exploring CBMs in the security area. One candidate CBM would be to conduct a Joint Transparency Exercise (JTE) to exchange information about retired missiles. With the voluntary retirement of these obsolescent missiles already imminent, New Delhi and Islamabad could make a virtue of a necessity by adding reciprocal transparency to the retirement process. Our studies show such a joint CBM is ripe for consideration and could be conducted in the near term. A first step might be to declare these nuclear capable missiles to be non-nuclear delivery systems. Then, as these missiles are removed from the nuclear arsenal, our two countries can build trust and understanding as our respective experts expand cooperation in the drawdown of obsolete forces.

This is a small step. It has been endorsed by several prestigious expert groups. We have studied the practical details of how such ideas could be implemented. We concluded that such exchanges could be powerful tools in enhancing mutual confidence and signal maturity as responsible nuclear powers. The costs and risks for India and Pakistan are small, but the potential benefits are great. It is a step whose time has come.

(Feroz Khan and Gurmeet Kanwal, both retired Brigadiers, are with the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA, and the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, New Delhi, respectively. Views are personal.)


Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

Capacity Building for Future Conflict

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In view of India’s unresolved territorial disputes with China and Pakistan in the mountainous Himalayan region, there is a very high probability that the next major land conflict on the Indian sub-continent will again break out in the mountains and, in order to avoid the possibility of escalation to nuclear exchanges, the conflict will in all probability remain confined to mountainous terrain.

A strategic defensive posture runs the risk of losing some territory to the adversary if capabilities do not exist to be able to launch a deep ingress to stabilise the situation. India’s must upgrade its military strategy of dissuasion against China to that of genuine conventional and nuclear deterrence that can come only from the ability to take the fight deep into the adversary’s territory through the launching of major offensive operations. To achieve this objective, it is necessary to raise and position one mountain Strike Corps each in Jammu and Kashmir for offensive operations against China and Pakistan and in the northeast for operations against China. In addition, other defensive corps must be given limited capability to launch offensive operations with integral resources.

Manoeuvre is extremely limited in the mountains due to the restrictions imposed by the terrain. In the plains too India’s Strike Corps cannot execute deep manoeuvres due to the risk of Pakistan’s nuclear red lines being threatened early during a campaign. As firepower is the other side of the coin, it is necessary to substantially upgrade capabilities of the armed forces to inflict punishment and indeed achieve victory through the orchestration of overwhelming firepower, or else India will have to be content with a strategic stalemate.

These capabilities include conventionally-armed SRBMs to attack high value targets in depth. Air-to-ground and helicopter-to-ground attack capabilities need to be modernised, particularly those enabling deep ground penetration and accurate night strikes. In fact, the Indian Air Force should aim to dominate the air space and ground strikes must paralyse the adversary’s ability to conduct cohesive ground operations. Artillery rockets, guns and mortars must also be modernised. Lighter and more mobile equipment is required so that these can be rapidly moved and deployed in neighbouring sectors.

India’s holdings of precision-guided munitions (PGMs) continue to be low. In recent conflicts like the war in Iraq in 2003 and the ongoing Afghan conflict, PGMs have formed almost 80 per cent of the total ammunition used. Indian PGM holdings must go up progressively to at least 20 to 30 per cent in order to achieve high levels of operational efficiencies. India’s defence planners must recognise that it is firepower asymmetries that will help to achieve military decisions and ultimately break the adversary’s will to fight.

Capabilities for heliborne assault, vertical envelopment and amphibious operations are inadequate for both conventional conflict and dealing effectively with contingencies that might arise while discharging India’s emerging regional responsibilities. Two rapid reaction-cum-air assault divisions (with an amphibious brigade each) need to be raised by the end of the 13th Defence Plan, i.e. by 2017-22. The expenditure on these divisions will be highly capital intensive and will be subject to the defence budget being gradually raised to first 2.5 per cent and then 3.0 per cent of India’s GDP.

C4I2SR capabilities are still rudimentary in nature and must be substantially modernised to exploit the synergies that can be achieved by a network centric force. A seamless intelligence-cum-targeting network must be established to fully synergise the strike capabilities of air and ground forces in real time. A good early warning network will enable the army to reduce the number of troops that are permanently deployed for border management and will add to the reserves available for offensive operations. Infrastructural developments along the northern borders have failed to keep pace with the army’s ability to fight forward and must be speeded up.

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

US-India Strategic Partnership will Counter-balance China’s Growing Assertiveness in Asia

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The India-China strategic relationship is stable at the strategic level, but it is marked by Chinese aggressiveness at the tactical level. Though the probability of conflict is low at present, it cannot be completely ruled out. Given China’s growing assertiveness in Asia, it has now clearly emerged that its rise is likely to be anything but peaceful. Under the circumstances, the US-India strategic partnership is emerging as a counter weight to China’s assertiveness and as a force for stability in Asia.

China is engaged in the strategic encirclement of India, both from the land and from the sea by way of the string of pearls strategy. The China-Pakistan nuclear, missile and military hardware nexus is a threat-in-being for India. Also, China is making inroads into Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and emphasising economic cooperation to justify building its own rail and road route linking Xingjian with Karachi. China and Pakistan have a cosy arms trade relationship. Their friendship, in President Hu Jin Tao’s words, is “higher than the mountains and deeper than the oceans.” Will they collude with each other in a future conflict with India?   The answer to that question is undoubtedly yes. That is why two of the Indian armed forces Chiefs have said recently that there is a possibility of a two-front war in a future conflict either with Pakistan or with China.

China’s far from peaceful rise is marked by the fact that there is not a single bordering country with which China has not fought a war: the erstwhile Soviet Union, Vietnam, India, and Korea.  They have shot down their own satellite in space. They have been firing missiles across the Taiwan Strait. They have begun to physically occupy some of the disputed Spratly and Paracel Islands. Due to internal contradictions there is a probability that some time in the future China may implode. There is also a possibility that China may behave irresponsibly towards its neighbours. China has been modernising its military at a very rapid rate. Its defence budget has been growing at 12-16% per annum in real terms. Therefore, 15-20 years down the line, when China has completed its military modernisation and resolved the dispute with Taiwan, it may turn its gaze southwards towards India. China will then be in the position of military strength and India will be in a position of relative military weakness. China will be able to dictate terms to India in the resolution of territorial dispute. The real driving force behind India’s strategic partnership with the U.S. is to counter China’s diplomatic aggression and military assertiveness.  If China implodes or if China behaves irresponsibly, India would need a strong friend, if not an ally, and no one could be better than the US.

India should upgrade its military strategy against China from that of dissuasion to deterrence in terms of both conventional deterrence as well as nuclear deterrence. The army in particular lacks the ability to deliver a strong offensive punch across the high Himalayan mountains on to the Tibetan Plateau. Genuine deterrence comes only from the capability to launch major offensive operations to threaten the key objectives of the adversary. If the Chinese are convinced that India will launch major offensive operations across the Himalayas in retaliation for Chinese aggression, they will be deterred from waging a war.  Local border incidents can, of course, never be ruled out. The strength of the Indian Air Force has gone down from 39 Squadrons to 32 ½ Squadrons. That should be unacceptable to India’s strategic planners. The Indian Navy needs greater support by way of budgetary allocations, capabilities for tri-Service amphibious operations and offensive air support in order to make it a genuinely blue water navy. The one weakness that China has is that its oil tankers and its trade pass through the northern Indian Ocean Region (IOR). If the Chinese decide to mess with India on the high Himalayas, they can be squeezed in the IOR.

India-US Relations Blog

America-India – Did the Bush Administration Oversell or Did the Obama Administration Botch It?

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This week Michael Green and Daniel Twining wrote an opinion article in the Washington Post titled Why aren’t we working with Japan and India? It is an attempt to discuss the reasons for, what they call, the current “listlessness in our two biggest strategic partnerships in Asia.” This is a serious article but deeply flawed.

The article’s key paragraph on India begins with “India has also disappointed.”. It ends with the statement “The refrain in Washington is that the Bush Administration oversold the potential for strategic partnership with New Delhi.”

We disagree. The Bush Administration established the Strategic Partnership with India. It was the most far-reaching step taken by any American President regarding India. President Bush viewed China and India as two huge countries that would play a global role in the 21st century. In his simple yet profound way, he asked which of these two countries would be a better partner for America? The answer was simple, India.

So President Bush in his direct, decisive manner made India a Strategic Partner of the USA. The Bush Administration threw away the old, failed strategy of trying to balance India with Pakistan and looked at India as a key ally, an emerging power on par with China and the only counterweight of size to China.

This is exactly how India perceives itself. This congruence of vision was the sound long term basis for the America-India Strategic Partnership implemented by President Bush. Nicholas Burns, Under Secretary to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, expressed the view of the Bush Administration at that time: “Within 20 years, the rise of the new U.S.-India partnership will be considered among the most important developments in U.S. foreign policy in our time.”

Then came President Obama. His framework for the world was completely different than that of President Bush. The Obama Administration spent its first year in trying to woo China. The Obama Administration was convinced that President Bush had gone too far in favoring India and they restored the old policy of maintaining a balance of power between Pakistan & India.

This was not just rhetoric. This has been the consistent policy of the Obama Administration since the inauguration. Witness the clear statement from Secretary Hillary Clinton in April 2010 that the manner in which India & Pakistan have pursued atomic weapons has “upset the balance of nuclear deterrence”. The Bush Administration had realized and accepted the fact that India was going to build a nuclear deterrence against China. The Clinton statement showed that the Obama Administration considered India only from the old Pakistan-India balance of power framework.

In short, the Obama Administration unilaterally destroyed the very foundation on which President Bush had built his America-India strategic partnership. But neither Government was willing to publicly accept this reality.  So both America and India continued to pay lip service to the concept of the America-India strategic partnership.

The sudden u-turn in America’s framework stunned the Indian Government and the entire Indian Establishment. In their naivete, they had assumed that America as a whole had finally understood India and embraced India’s vision of its role in the world. But where foreign policy is concerned, there may be only one India but there are two Americas. It took the Indian Government a year to realize that the America-India strategic partnership they had accepted was only with Bush’s America and not with Obama’s America. Then the Indian Government began hedging its bets and moving away from the Obama Administration. Since then, the relations between America and India have remained “listless”.

Another factor in the decay of India-US relations has been Washington’s definition of “partnership”. This is borne out by the Washington Post article which assumes a partner of America should not oppose American initiatives but align with them regardless of how the initiatives impact the partner:

Yet, in the first two years of the Obama Administration, the Indians have opposed the United States on climate and trade initiatives (the initiatives were in direct conflict with Indian objectives), failed to enact liability legislation needed for American companies to develop India’s nuclear industry (a political and ethical impossibility in democratic India), resisted meaningful economic reforms (true), cozied up to Burma’s junta with gas and arms deals (a strategic necessity for India just like cozying up to Saudi Arabia is a strategic necessity for America) and rejected U.S. combat aircraft in India’s biggest defense deal to date (the last generation aircraft offered by the U.S. were judged as inferior by the Indian Military).

President Bush had astounded the Indian Government by treating India as a real partner. He understood what India could and could not do. He focused on what was achievable which was plenty. India responded in return and we are convinced that every major Indian deal would have been won by the Bush Administration. In contrast, the Obama Administration kept imposing its own initiatives on India and expected India to to follow. This pressure backfired.

Today, the Obama Administration is facing the virtual collapse of its framework. They have realized that China is a major strategic competitor and perhaps an adversary. So the Obama Administration has gone from wooing China to building a network of allies to contain China. This is the main purpose of Secretary Clinton’s trip to India and Asia.

The Obama Administration’s cherished policy of making Pakistan stronger and more stable has collapsed. But the Administration’s tactical objective has not changed. The Obama Administration still considers Pakistan as their most reliable ticket to exit Afghanistan.

America’s rapid exit from Afghanistan and the Obama plan to give Pakistan all the aid necessary to facilitate this exit remains the most difficult barrier between America and India. Secretary Clinton is trying to get India to steer away from Af-Pak and to get more active against China in the Pacific. The immediate strategic objective of India is to maintain and increase its presence in Afghanistan.

When strategic objectives are in such conflict, how can a strategic partnership make sense? This is the main reason for the current “listlessness” in America-India relations.

(This post originally appeared on Macro Viewpoints and has been republished with the approval of the author.)

Defence And Strategic Affairs Blog

Managing National Security: Structural Flaws

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Despite complex external and internal security threats, unresolved territorial disputes, the rising tide of left wing extremism (LWE) and urban terrorism, India’s national security continues to be sub-optimally managed.

In 1999, the Kargil Review Committee headed by the late Mr. K Subrahmanyam had made far reaching recommendations on the development of India’s nuclear deterrence, higher defence organisations, intelligence reforms, border management, the defence budget, the use of air power, counter-insurgency operations, integrated manpower policy, defence research and development, and media relations. The Cabinet Committee on Security appointed a Group of Ministers (GoM) to study the Kargil Review Committee report and recommend measures for implementation. The GoM was headed by Home Minister L K Advani and, in turn, set up four task forces on intelligence reforms, internal security, border management and defence management to undertake in-depth analysis of various facets of the management of national security.

The GoM recommended sweeping reforms to the existing national security management system. On May 11, 2001, the CCS accepted all its recommendations, including one for the establishment of the post of the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) – which has still not been implemented. A tri-Service Andaman and Nicobar Command and a Strategic Forces Command were established. Other salient measures included the establishment of HQ Integrated Defence Staff (IDS); the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA); the establishment of a Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) headed by the Defence Minister with two wings: the Defence Procurement Board and the Defence Technology Board; and, the setting up of the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO). The CCS also issued a directive that India’s borders with different countries be managed by a single agency – “one border, one force” – and nominated the CRPF as India’s primary force for counter-insurgency operations.

Ten years later, many lacunae still remain in the management of national security. In order to review the progress of implementation of the proposals approved by the CCS in 2001, the government has now appointed a Task Force on National Security and given it six months to submit its report. The task force must review the performance of the National Security Council (NSC), which is responsible for long-term threat assessment and the formulation of comprehensive perspective plans designed to upgrade the capabilities of the security forces to meet future threats and challenges. The task force must also consider whether the NSA should continue to remain only an advisor or he should be given limited executive functions, particularly for counter-terrorism operations, including covert cross-border operations, and intelligence coordination and assessment. Cyber security and offensive cyberwar operations also require apex level policy guidance and oversight.

The integration of the armed forces HQ with the MoD continues to remain cosmetic and needs to be revisited. An issue that needs no further debate is the appointment of a Chief of Defence Staff as the principal military advisor to the government. It is an idea whose time has come. However, the appointment of a CDS should be followed by the establishment of tri-Service integrated theatre commands for greater synergy in the planning and execution of military operations and aid to civil authority. Another key requirement is for the immediate raising of an integrated cyber, aerospace and Special Forces command.

The task force must also consider whether it is necessary to appoint a constitutionally mandated National Security Commission to oversee the day-to-day management of national security in this era of strategic uncertainty and threats and challenges that are continuously evolving and morphing into new forms.