The licence-built Sukhoi Su-30MKI is still reliant on outside support for through-life sustainment
Admiral Arun Prakash writes that “continuing dependence on foreign arms, coupled with a dysfunctional acquisition process, is eroding the combat readiness of India’s armed forces”
India’s acute dependence on imported arms and ammunition, 60-70 per cent of Russian origin, will constitute a grave handicap and vulnerability in an armed conflict. The public is often bemused on hearing senior military leaders make gratuitous public pronouncements regarding India’s readiness to “fight a two-front war”. Bewilderment, however, turns into trepidation on reading media reports that the army is looking for eight lakh rifles, carbines and machine-guns, in the international market, to equip its 13-lakh jawans! Our uninhibited Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) leaves little to the imagination, as he tables annual reports in Parliament, exposing India’s deficiencies in military wherewithal.
Further proof of our “readiness” comes from the previous Raksha Mantri, who revealed to the media that days before the Indian Army’s cross-border raids into Pakistan, he had to send officers abroad, “…with authority to carry out on-the spot purchases.” If a relatively minor army operation (hyperbolically described as “surgical strikes”), involving a few dozen soldiers, required urgent “on-the-spot purchases” from abroad, how would India manage to sustain half a million troops deployed in an intense and protracted conflict on two separate fronts? While this conundrum does not seem to trouble our decision-makers, the tax-payer needs to reflect on some facts about our two potential adversaries, China and Pakistan.
Pakistan has the world’s seventh largest army, and even though permeated by religious fundamentalism and embroiled in politics, its professional capabilities cannot be ignored. Those who sneer at the Pakistani “deep state” overlook its strategic masterstroke, whereby, as a military-client of “allweather friend”, China, it has ensured steady arms transfers to all wings of the Pakistani military. Having created a high level of equipment commonality with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Pakistan can go to war, confident that its attrition losses will be expeditiously replaced from PLA stocks.
By comparison, India’s acute dependence on imported arms and ammunition, 60-70 per cent of Russian origin, will constitute a grave handicap and vulnerability in a conflict. Over the years, not only have Indo-Russian relations become purely transactional, but the (post-Soviet) Russian arms industry has been found incapable of providing timely support for its products; a fact repeatedly pointed out in the CAG reports. Other foreign suppliers may prove equally unreliable in wartime.
So, how did China overtake us? In the early 1950s, a fraternal Soviet Union commenced a massive transfer of arms to the PLA, under a Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship. However, as ideological fissures emerged and the Soviets threatened to stop aid, the Chinese leadership ordered seizure of hardware as well as drawings and technological data relating to Soviet weapons. Once the split actually occurred, in the mid-1960s, the Chinese leadership took a far-sighted decision to launch a project for attaining self-reliance in arms, through reverse engineering (guochanhua in Mandarin), as a national endeavour.
The
T-90S MBT has been subject of progressively increasing indigenisation
The first
phase of guochanhua helped China establish, by the mid 1980s, serial production
of Soviet-origin tanks, artillery, submarines, jet fighters and bombers, as
well as strategic systems like ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines.
Manufactured without Soviet licences, many of these products had serious flaws
and contained imported Western components. But they were “Made in China” and
constituted a “great leap forward” towards self-reliance.
China has,
subsequently, launched repeated cycles of guochanhua, with the aim of acquiring
the latest military and dual-use technologies; legitimately, if possible, but
through industrial espionage and violation of intellectual property rights,
when required. At the turn of this century, China had reached a level of
technological development surpassing Russia’s. Today, China has stunned the
world by its ingenuity, exemplified by the world’s fastest super-computer (the
Sunway Taihu-light), J-31 fifth generation stealthfighter, an electro-magnetic
aircraft catapult to equip its new aircraft-carrier and huge strides in
robotics, artificial-intelligence and drones.
India, by a
quirk of circumstance, has become a military and economic entity with
great-power aspirations, before it has become a significant industrial power.
Consequently, it is in the anomalous situation of being a nuclear-weapons state
with the world’s fourth-largest armed forces, but having to support their
operational needs through massive arms imports. All this, inspite of a vast
military-industrial complex, with a large pool of DRDO scientists and a network
of sophisticated laboratories, backed by advanced production facilities of the
defence PSUs.
The
Bangladesh War was really won only because General Manekshaw sought a grace of
nine months to equip his troops. The brief Kargil War required desperate
replenishment of ammunition, midway through the operation. India’s continuing
dependence on foreign arms, coupled with a dysfunctional acquisition process
has eroded the combat readiness of our armed forces. Foreign arms purchases,
considered a ‘golden-goose’ for political war-chests, have also engendered a
morally-corrosive system of corruption at many levels.
Our myopic
failure to learn from experience, and to acknowledge the deleterious impact of
this void on India’s national security, may cost us dearly vis-avis future
machinations of the China-Pak axis. It is a pity that not one of our
postindependence political leaders showed the foresight to launch a strategic
initiative that could make India self-reliant in weaponsystems. Today, we do
have the dream of ‘Make in India’, but it awaits fulfilment by a languid
bureaucracy and a complex document, the ‘Defence Procurement Procedure’, which,
after six iterations, has failed to deliver anything substantive to the
military.
What we need
is a 50-year vision for self-reliance in weaponry and a clear-cut strategy, for
its implementation by an empowered ‘czar’. To those who ask, “Isn’t it too
late?” one can only say, “If we never make a start, how will we ever get
there?”