Praween Sawhney should be hanged to death.
hmmm….some of the things he says seems correct…
I
1. for example our military power - Army and Air Force is not as much as it should be. We still believe in a manpower-sacrificing war fight. We don’t believe in building our military power to a point where Porkis don’t even think of messing with us. This is a given. Be it pushing terrorists across the border or actually daring to retaliate on Feb 27 (even if for show - sawhney is lying when he says they crossed the LoC. they did not.), we are unable to create a deterrence. After the Feb 26 attack, the Porkis should have been pissing in their pants. They shouldn’t have (even for scoring PR points) been allowed the Feb 27 charade. The same thing goes for surgical strikes - that did not deter them. They did Pulwama right after that.
2. We have been way too quiet on paki acquisition of nukes and missiles. Neither did we try to actively curtail their program or develop hacking capabilities or some other mechanism that makes their nukes ineffective. At the end of the day, the Porkis do have nukes and that does give them a fall back option should everything collapse over there. Have we thought of how exactly to enforce deterrence in this scenario? Look at how Israel is giving Iran a real tough time in acquiring nukes. Have we done anything like that?
3. We seem to be betting on the long game - grow our economy (and hence our military power) to a point where they won’t mess with us. But the point remains that deterrence must be enforced today. How is that Porkis are messing with a SSBN power? No nation in the world has ever messed with an SSBN power. India is the only country with an SSBN platform that gets messed with by the Porkis, openly. On top of that we are an aircraft carrier and missile power as well. If we are unwilling to project power for deterrence, what are these expensive toys for?
4. Inability to project power has serious consequences for us. We will not get a seat at the UNSC. We will only be a nominal player in international grouping. Paki Terrorists will brazenly attack us. Chinese will continue to mess alongside the borders. Overall, the world will think that we are incapable of providing net security to smaller nations. Even business people may think that we have a weak government unable to enforce security.
5. While Pravin Sawhney is an A grade liar, there are some points he makes that are relevant - establishing deterrence via building an overwhelming military power should be what the armed forces should be working toward. And we are still not. We should have salami sliced into PoK and GB and grabbed territory every time there’s been an attack, and increased the holding costs immensely. Why the heck we don’t do such things is beyond me? Sometimes I wonder if legacy issues such as a Sikh/Punjabi dominated army comes in the way of exercising overwhelming firepower in the Porkis. Maybe the Indian Punjabi generals think of the Pakistani Punjabi generals as not deserving of such overwhelming response due to cultural affinities? Whatever it is, IA and IAF must figure out ways to deter the Porkis once and for all.
