Arming without Aiming: India's Military Modernization

by Stephen Philip Cohen

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.