We're supremely fortunate that we've got the fucking Himalays defending our entire northern border or else, we'd all be speaking Mandarin by now.
Lets not get carried away. PLA is an unproven force.
Their performance during peacekeeping, while not exactly a 1:1 view of their peer to peer capability at all, is pathetic beyond belief.
That and the corruption within the PLA is a significant thing. Call it cope or whatever you think is true for me but I fully believe the absurdity of Chinese ranks siphoning and selling missile fuel and substituting it with water as per US intel.
Its not a PsyOp to weaken trust of the Chinese in the PLA, otherwise there'd a much heavier emphasis on outreach through Mandarin and we probably wouldn't be the audience (we, as in the public domain on the anglophone side).
Yes, a war with China would be disastrous for us in any case but I don't think the match is rigged against us the way many of us tend to believe.
That and the fact that the CCP won't be able to free up their entire arsenal against us because of the imminent threat of a US intervention at a place of their choosing.
We're not free of the same curse either, I understand, but we're not at a place where the Chinese will steamroll us, even if the land between us were plains and not mountains.
There's this mentality among the Indian officers which they often say out loud with glistening eyes and a smile.
"Indian Army is not an expeditionary force."
Its like a MMA fighter claiming "I'm not a violent man".
Well, that just sucks for you then, doesn't it?
This mentality needs to not just be shut down but actively punished for. Much like you would punish a cadet for saying "I'm a lone wolf who doesn't work well with a team".
All the people who are coping with philosophy by thinking "Oh, this shallow brained f**k doesn't realize what they're trying to say is they can bring that capability but actively chose to not attack because they're so mature and angelic" need to zip it.
Expeditionary capability doesn't appear out of the blue just because you've mastered defense (and if the Jammu attacks are anything to go by, we're far from mastering defense either.)
Its a capability that takes decades to develop. USA, the most warlike and expeditionary nation on earth post WW2, needs to reorient it's troops towards peer to peer threats and expeditionary warfare even though they waged an unbelievably effective expedition in both Afghanistan and Iraq barely 2 decades ago and were consistently fighting COIN afterwards
No one is special, there's no special DNA which activates in time of need, people don't tear out a handpump in a fit of rage because their body has a hidden secret mechanism. That's movie stuff and unfortunately, Indians subconsciously believe that our troops will rise to the occasion with sub par training.
What a double edged sword, eh?
If you actively propagate that the Indian Military is falling behind, you risk demoralizing the solider but can force better training and equipment purchase.
If you don't you risk getting a rude shock in war but with heroic valor that is unmatched and the nature of Indian soldiers.
Such a conundrum.
