India as a great power Know your own strength

average american

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India as a great power Know your own strength

Instead of clear strategic thinking, India shuffles along, impeded by its caution and bureaucratic inertia. The symbol of these failings is India's reluctance to reform a defence-industrial base that wastes huge amounts of money, supplies the armed forces with substandard kit and leaves the country dependent on foreigners for military modernisation.


India is poised to become one of the four largest military powers in the world by the end of the decade. It needs to think about what that means
Mar 30th 2013 | DELHI |From the print edition

UNLIKE many other Asian countries—and in stark contrast to neighbouring Pakistan—India has never been run by its generals. The upper ranks of the powerful civil service of the colonial Raj were largely Hindu, while Muslims were disproportionately represented in the army. On gaining independence the Indian political elite, which had a strong pacifist bent, was determined to keep the generals in their place. In this it has happily succeeded.

But there have been costs. One is that India exhibits a striking lack of what might be called a strategic culture. It has fought a number of limited wars—one with China, which it lost, and several with Pakistan, which it mostly won, if not always convincingly—and it faces a range of threats, including jihadist terrorism and a persistent Maoist insurgency. Yet its political class shows little sign of knowing or caring how the country's military clout should be deployed.

That clout is growing fast. For the past five years India has been the world's largest importer of weapons (see chart). A deal for $12 billion or more to buy 126 Rafale fighters from France is slowly drawing towards completion. India has more active military personnel than any Asian country other than China, and its defence budget has risen to $46.8 billion. Today it is the world's seventh-largest military spender; IHS Jane's, a consultancy, reckons that by 2020 it will have overtaken Japan, France and Britain to come in fourth. It has a nuclear stockpile of 80 or more warheads to which it could easily add more, and ballistic missiles that can deliver some of them to any point in Pakistan. It has recently tested a missile with a range of 5,000km (3,100 miles), which would reach most of China.

Which way to face?
India as a great power: Know your own strength | The Economist
 

tramp

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It is true that India does not seem to have a clear strategic holistic planning as this article suggests. Are the three wings of the Indian armed forces pulling in different directions?
What is India's preparedness to counter a rapid Chinese action to take Arunachal Pradesh? I doubt India will be able to resist them as our infrastructure in that sector does not match China's.
India is safe so long as it is embroiled on the North Korean front. But once that is over, India need to be alert.
 

Yusuf

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North Korea is not the reason why China has not attacked India @tramp
 
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badguy2000

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one state"s military might ultimately lies on its industry might,not on weapon no. In service.
 

tramp

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North Korea is not the reason why China has not attacked India @tramp
It may not be the reason. But, if at all there is a strategic thinking in those lines (which cannot be ruled out totally), there is more chance of a move when they are not occupied otherwise.
 
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W.G.Ewald

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Much bigger and richer, India has tended to win its wars with Pakistan. Its plans for doing so again, if it feels provoked, are worrying. For much of the past decade the army has been working on a doctrine known as "Cold Start" that would see rapid armoured thrusts into Pakistan with close air support. The idea is to inflict damage on Pakistan's forces at a mere 72 hours' notice, seizing territory quickly enough not to incur a nuclear response. At a tactical level, this assumes a capacity for high-tech combined-arms warfare that India may not possess. At the strategic level it supposes that Pakistan will hesitate before unleashing nukes, and it sits ill with the Indian tradition of strategic restraint. Civilian officials and politicians unconvincingly deny that Cold Start even exists.
The only sure way not to incur a nuclear response is to take out the nuclear strike capability first and early, certainly not up to 72 hours after hostilities are intiated. I assume India intel people are constantly at work locating where those sites are.
 

W.G.Ewald

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This image was linked from The Economist article.

 

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