Opinion
Fit for purpose: It’s imperative to transform India’s defence forces
Summary
- We need to not just close gaps in conventional strength but also keep pace with military technological advances across the world. Here too, quality needs to be the focus rather than just quantity.
National defence is crucial to the security of a sovereign state. While wars of conquest and territorial defence have been fought for ages, the modern notion of national defence is a Westphalian idea. It posits that a nation-state has sovereign control not only of its domestic affairs, but also of security from external threats.
A 1996 National Defence College of India document expands on this: “National security is an appropriate and aggressive blend of political resilience and maturity, human resources, economic structure and capacity, technological competence, industrial base, availability of natural resources and military might."
Viewed from this wider lens, India’s aspiration to become an upper middle-income country by 2047 needs much work on national security. This column, the fifth in my series on a ‘quantity to quality’ transformation, addresses what’s required in national defence.
As with our armed forces, what is needed here differs from requirements in other areas. This is because in defence, we must also keep pace with developments in the capabilities of our adversaries. In that sense, it is not just something we must do to move forward, but also to avoid getting left behind.
Also read: Gradual or surge? One way or another, India needs greater military might.
Because of this ‘reflexivity’ requirement, quantity and quality cannot be fully separated. In some sense, quantity as a minimum requirement might be necessary just to maintain parity with an adversary.
An extract from a document put out by the US Director of National Intelligence reads thus: “During the next two decades, military conflict most likely will be driven by the same factors that have historically prompted wars—ranging from resource protection, economic disparities, and ideological differences to the pursuit of power and influence—but the ways in which war is waged will change as new technologies, applications, and doctrines emerge and as additional actors gain access to these capabilities. The combination of improved sensors, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) with hypersonics and other advanced technologies will produce more accurate, better connected, faster, longer range, and more destructive weapons, primarily available to the most advanced militaries but some within reach of smaller state and non-state actors. The proliferation and diffusion of these systems over time will make more assets vulnerable, heighten the risk of escalation, and make combat potentially more deadly, though not necessarily more decisive." '
It speaks of connectivity, lethality and autonomy in hardware, combined with new concepts of fast offence, zone defence and ‘non-kinetic’ warfare (use of proxies offering plausible deniability) in the software elements of the future battlefield.
Also read: How India's defence sector is going all guns blazing
Arguably, the technological capability of Indian armed forces is at least a generation behind that of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the US, Russia, China, UK and France. India seeks to keep pace with changes in the Chinese armed forces even as China itself seeks to close its military gap with US.
One way to reduce the gap would be to spend more on defence as a proportion of gross domestic product. Nitin Pai, my colleague at Takshashila Institution, argued in Mint for just such a surge in military spending.
The other way to do this is to leap-frog to a future state where India’s focus is on agility, lighter unmanned weaponry, adaptable multi-terrain applications, swarm weapons, fool-proof missile defence and space-based surveillance.
The shift underway in military technology from being based on mechanical engineering and hardware to computer science, software, telecommunication, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) plays to India’s strengths. This is the platform from which India has an opportunity to leap-frog—and must.
Peel the onion a bit further and one realizes that the Army in India is huge, whereas the Air Force and Navy are relatively small. This size difference has helped the Air Force and Navy be a little more agile and innovative than the Army, which has the massive task of managing its personnel and inventory.
For instance, the Indian Naval Academy in Ezhimalai, Kerala, has steadily tightened entry gates and now offers an ‘IIT-like’ engineering path to becoming a naval officer. Wherever projects or missions have been cordoned off and operated with some flexibility, progress has been made.
India’s missile programme and its nuclear-powered submarines can be counted as successes; its inability to build a fighter-jet engine less so (the biggest challenge is precision metallurgy that can handle extraordinary thrust and high temperatures).
Other structural ideas like theatre commands and “jointness within services" have been proposed and partially adopted since the Kargil Committee Report was published in 2000.
Also read: How countries rank by military spending
Indian armed forces are organized around trained personnel, but will need to transform into ‘talent’ organizations. This is a non-trivial transformation at the scale required and countries around the world are struggling with the same project. India’s additional challenge is that it will need to make this transition while at the same time reducing gaps in conventional parity.
P.S: “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be", said Lao Tzu, founder of Taoism.
