Arming without Aiming: India's Military Modernization

by Stephen Philip Cohen

In contrast, the Indian scholar Rajesh M. Basrur has emphasized political choices and ideological preferences.3 Indian leaders, he says, preferred to view security as a political rather than a military matter and consistently made choices that downplayed military aspects such as nuclear weapons in favor of political management of security issues.

Earlier the Indian Army had contributed units to the binational Punjab Boundary Force deployed along the India-Pakistan border in the Punjab. The campaign was unable to stop the ethnic carnage that accompanied partition, and it went down in history as an early example of a catastrophically failed peacekeeping force.

India's nationalist leaders preserved much of the colonial state and its institutions, including the armed forces, police, and civilian bureaucracy. They sought to maintain continuity despite imperfections and contradictions in how the colonial institutions served a new democracy. With respect to the armed forces, the new government allowed continuity within the institution but brought strong political and, in time, bureaucratic supervision.

Despite production, release, and updating of official documents to facilitate the acquisition process (the Defence Procurement Manual and Defence Procurement Procedure), the system continues to be plagued by fundamental structural problems. The Ministry of Finance, which has its own defense wing, has the authority to intervene in specific spending decisions of the Ministry of Defence, often with an eye toward limiting costs. One of the key unresolved problems in the acquisition process, which is almost entirely about importing weapons from advanced industrial societies (the West and the Soviet Union), is an unrealistic and ambiguous policy of offsets (where foreign companies, as part of their bids, commit to source a percentage of the contract in India). However, any leader or bureaucrat advocating lower offsets becomes vulnerable to charges of corruption. India simply lacks civilian expertise in military matters. Few politicians are interested in defense until forced by events. The bureaucracy that functions as the secretariat for the political leaders comprises generalists with little practical knowledge of military matters, but this group lobbies powerfully to preserve its position against military encroachment. Even the Ministry of External Affairs, with the greatest institutional capacity for international relations, has very few people with sound knowledge of military matters. Although the armed services are highly professional and have the necessary expertise, they ...

In military planning, the Indian government initially retained most of the defense plan proposed by Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck, the last British commander in chief of the Indian Army. The plan envisaged a regular army of 200,000 backed by reserve and territorial forces, a twenty-squadron air force, and a naval task force with two aircraft carriers. However, the new strategic reality, the main threat coming overland from Pakistan, intruded once the Kashmir War started, and the Indian government reduced its ambitious plans for the air force and the navy.

To make a fresh start on military and defense affairs, Nehru hired British scientist and Nobel Prize–winning physicist P. M. S. Blackett to advise him on how the Indian state could leverage science for defense.5 Blackett had been at the center of the Allied war effort. He was privy to Ultra codebreaking, the development of nuclear weapons, and other major military technology programs. In 1946 the United States gave him the Medal of Honor for his service during the war, and in 1948 he won the Nobel Prize for physics for his prewar work. Blackett's 1948 report went beyond the role of science in military affairs to address both India's strategic position and its military spending. It recommended that India limit its military ambitions and pursue a policy of nonalignment with both superpowers to escape a potentially debilitating arms race. He proposed that military spending should not exceed 2 percent of Indian GDP. Blackett also argued against India's acquisition of nuclear and chemical weapons. Instead, he emphasized India's need to develop an industrial and technological base.

decisions. In the 1950s the Indian Air Force (IAF) ordered Canberra bombers and transport aircraft. The Indian Army's purchase of jeeps precipitated India's first major defense corruption scandal in 1955. British debt, held by the Indian government from the colonial period, paid for the purchases. India also struck its first nuclear deal, buying a nuclear reactor from Canada.

After the shock of defeat in 1962, the Indian government moved quickly to redress the military retrenchment of the previous decade. Over the next two years, the country doubled its military manpower, raised a fighting air force (as opposed to a transport fleet), and reversed its position on forging relationships with foreign powers. Both the United States and the Soviet Union stepped in to fill the breach in Indian defenses. Moscow supplied MiG-21 fighters and also built a number of factories in India to assemble advanced weapons.10 The U.S. equipped eight new infantry divisions for mountain defense against the Chinese and rebuilt some defense production facilities. The United States stopped the aid program during the 1965 India-Pakistan war, embittering Indian security managers who marked the United States as an unreliable military supplier. The navy, which had enjoyed a boost from the Nehru-Panikkar vision of Indian maritime renewal, went into decline as the country refocused on its land borders.

1965 war, political unrest, and economic decline in the late 1960s stalled military rearmament. The United States stopped military supplies to both India and Pakistan; the Soviet Union, to forestall escalation in the regional conflict, mediated a cease-fire agreement in Tashkent. The war itself was short and ended in a draw. The Indian Army committed most of its forces in the early days of the armored confrontation with Pakistan, taking the risk of not leaving any reserves. Had Pakistani forces managed to break through to the Beas River on the Grand Trunk Road, Delhi would have been a day away. In the event, Pakistan's first armored division disintegrated at Khem Karan in the Battle of Assal Uttar. India did not press the advantage and soon after suffered its own debacle in the Battle of Chawinda. When the Soviets offered mediation, New Delhi accepted, and India's strategic condition remained unchanged. Nehru's death in 1964 began a political battle for succession that lasted until 1969, and split the Indian National Congress—the movement that had won the country's independence and held uninterrupted power as the preeminent political party for two decades. Concomitant with the political unrest, the Indian economy nosedived due to growing international and domestic pressures. This period saw the large-scale delivery of American food supplies under Public Law 480, which both saved millions of Indian lives and made Indian leaders bitterly aware of their dependency on the Unit...

But India did not rush headlong into conflict. In early 1971, the Indian Army chief, General Sam Manekshaw, told Indira Gandhi that he needed nine months to prepare for war; she accepted this advice. Before starting the war, New Delhi also signed the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation to ensure international balance and continued military supplies.

Why did India not pursue its strategic goals more completely? The conventional answer is that India was under international pressure. President Nixon had ordered the USS Enterprise carrier group into the Bay of Bengal to coerce New Delhi. Even India's Soviet allies wanted a quick cessation of hostilities. There was also the military reality that Pakistani defenses in the west were much stronger than in the east. The irrigation ditches in the Punjab, which had proved to be a considerable obstacle in 1965, continued to present a serious challenge. No popular insurrection welcomed the invaders. Additionally, there is the view that India had concentrated its military capacity so overwhelmingly in the east that a change of theater to the west was not even feasible. Further, Indian military stocks were low and needed replenishment. While all these arguments are valid, it is also the case that these problems were surmountable. New Delhi could have prevailed on Moscow to undertake a serious resupply effort and even asked for Soviet submarines to enter the Bay of Bengal to counter the threat from the USS Enterprise task force. Had Indian leaders been ambitious, they might have taken these risks. The decision to keep war goals in check, we believe, is evidence of strategic restraint. New Delhi saw advantage in breaking up Pakistan, but it did not want to prolong the war.

It was not until the mid-1980s, however, that India pursued a series of ambitious strategic projects, all of which were failures. In 1984 India preempted Pakistani efforts to occupy the Siachen Glacier, a strategic position at an altitude of 25,000 feet in the disputed and nondemarcated region of upper Kashmir. An initial Indian success has since proved to be a steady drain on Indian military resources.

Buoyed by new military capability, Rajiv made two dramatic attempts at strategic assertion. The first came in 1986 when he approved General Sundarji's plans to conduct a large-scale military exercise on the border with Pakistan. Called Brasstacks, the military maneuvers were later reported to have been open-ended and could have turned into an invasion of Pakistan. Military advice to the Indian prime minister is not publicly available, but General Sundarji wrote after his retirement that Brasstacks was India's last opportunity to decapitate Pakistan's nuclear program and force a Kashmir settlement. In the event, Pakistan threatened to use nuclear weapons and India backed down. A similar scene played out in 1990, when India was compelled once more to accept nuclear parity as the new reality. India's conventional superiority, including its modernization program, served little purpose. Indeed, the wars India would fight thereafter were against insurgencies and demanded troops and superior organization rather than advanced weaponry and technology. Rajiv's second act of strategic assertion came in 1987 when he sent the Indian Army to police a peacekeeping deal he had forced on the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers. Both sides rejected the agreement, and the Indian Army was caught between an insurgency on one side and an unhelpful host government on the other. India's only campaign of peace enforcement was a chastening experience. The Indian Army lost more men in that wa...

Seeing that the nuclear option was closing down, India tried to test in 1995, but American satellites picked up the test preparations, and Washington was able to pressure New Delhi into backing off. In 1998, however, a new conservative government, buoyed by consensus in India for overt nuclear capacity and set against American nonproliferation fundamentalism, ordered stealthy nuclear test preparations to avoid satellite surveillance. The tests conducted in May 1998 led to widespread criticism outside India but received great support within the country.

The hardliners in India's strategic community, alarmed by the China threat, have been largely marginalized, even by the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which should have been their natural home.

After some verbal jousting with China in 2009, the government agreed to an army proposal to raise four new mountain divisions oriented toward the border with China, and the IAF is also reopening forward air bases in the north and east. However, there is no consensus in India that New Delhi should seek military advantage over Beijing. Certainly, India has been unwilling to match Chinese investments in defense modernization.

The explosive growth of the last few years has resulted in an unprecedented increase in defense spending. In 2000 India's defense budget was $11.8 billion. The figure had risen to $30 billion in 2009.19 The single largest year-on-year increase of 34 percent came in that year, but military budgets have been rising steadily since 2007. The trend in Indian defense spending is likely to continue, though not at the staggering rates achieved in 2007–09. The dramatic nature of the increases has heightened expectations that India's armed forces will acquire significantly increased capacity that could alter the country's strategic posture. As a percentage of GDP, Indian military spending is now at 3 percent, which is higher than it has been through the last decade, but lower than it was in the last period of modernization in the 1980s. Indeed, Indian defense spending as a percentage of GDP fell to 2 percent in 2007, when the economy expanded rapidly but defense spending did not.

the Indian Army received 54 percent of the total defense budget in 2009. The Indian Air Force received 24 percent, and the Indian Navy, 15 percent. Defense research and development received 6 percent. The army's allocations since 2007 reverse a decade-long trend, where it had been losing budgetary ground to the IAF and the Indian Navy. In particular, the Indian Navy's budget had risen to 18 percent of the total expenditure. The IAF, the country's premier instrument of power projection, is also on a downward trend though its relative decline is slower. Part of the explanation for the reversal of the army's budgetary fortunes lies in the massive Sixth Pay Commission increases. Because the army is disproportionately larger in manpower, it draws the bulk of new resources. However, the strong return of the Indian Army at a time when the air force and the navy have been making large deals indicates the degree to which India remains a land power tied to its historical strategic conditions. It also suggests future difficulties that India must face in rebalancing its forces.

The capital budget for major equipment and infrastructure was $2.7 billion in 2000 and is now $10 billion. In 2009 capital expenditure was about $12 billion, or 40 percent of the budget, while the rest was allocated to the running costs of the armed forces.

Somewhat beyond the purview of this book is how India addresses the relationship between its society and the military—notably the army, which traces its structure to the army created by Lord Clive in the eighteenth century. This is especially evident in the role that caste, class, and ethnicity play in the making of the ground forces.

In most countries, the national government is the only buyer and can set prices to its own advantage or proscribe sales. When weapons manufacturers wish to sell to other parties—mainly other governments—they require the approval of their own governments. Given the asymmetrical power of the government in the market, private investment in the manufacture of weapons occurs under very constrained conditions that ultimately subsidize the development process.

The Defence Research and Development Organisation, the umbrella agency better known by its acronym, DRDO, is a privileged entity that exercises the right of first refusal on equipment demands raised by the services. The head of the DRDO serves as the scientific adviser to the minister of defense, a position in which he has veto power over what India can import. In a number of cases, the DRDO makes the unrealistic case for indigenous production, holding up procurement until it is proved incapable of making the supply. The dual role of supplier and evaluator has resulted in reduced accountability for the dramatic record of its failure.

Instead, after the 1998 nuclear tests, India created the new position of national security adviser to coordinate foreign policy and defense issues, strengthening the civilian rather than the military side of the institutional structure.

Like most other states, India finds it easier to add and expand than to reorganize and innovate. Modernization efforts have been largely linear. Troop numbers have increased, new weapons have been added, and new commands have been created; but these efforts have not been accompanied by a re-examination of organizational fundamentals.

T he extent to which the Indian armed forces modernize will depend greatly on the ability of the Indian Army to accept a reduced position in the service triumvirate. The army eclipses the other services in size, budget, and military operations.

Beginning in March 2004, Cold Start was extensively tested. The assessment of senior army commanders was that Cold Start had been validated even though the scenario had involved actions (attacks into Pakistan) that crossed stated Pakistani red lines.21 These exercises were not conducted with the participation of civilian policymakers; no one appears to have tested the willingness of political leaders to issue orders to send the Indian Army across the border in force, nor, at least in their unclassified form, did anyone explore likely Pakistani responses.

Ussuri River episode.

For a brilliant analysis of the larger issues at stake see Admiral Verghese Koithara, Society, State and Security: The Indian Experience (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1999).

For an authoritative account of the decision, see P. R. Chari, Pokhran-I: Personal Recollections I, Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies Special Report, August 2009,

See Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat, Betrayal of the Defence Forces (New Delhi: Manas, 2001); and Gaurav C. Sawant, “Bhagwat Chronicles His Sacking, Book Release Today,” Indian Express, February 16, 2001.

Report of the Kargil Review Committee, From Surprise to Reckoning (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000).

The text of the declassified portions of the report is available at mod.nic.in/newadditions (December 1, 2007).

See the authoritative Indian review of China's response by D. S. Rajan, “How China Views India's New Defence Doctrine,” Rediff, January 7, 2010 (news.rediff.com/column/2010/jan/07/how-china-views-indias-new-defence-doctrine.htm

Three books offer a comprehensive history of the Indian nuclear weapons program. George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (University of California Press, 1999), is a careful account that draws upon an extensive interview with the Indian participants; Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb (London: Zed Books, 1998), places the program in the context of India's search for a national identity; and Raj Chengappa, Weapons of Peace: The Secret Story of India's Quest to Be a Nuclear Power (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2000), contains rich anecdotal information about the personalities involved in both the nuclear and missile programs.