Arming without Aiming: India's Military Modernization

by Stephen Philip Cohen

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.