Educating the Defence Minister

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

In the Westminster system of government, cabinet ministers are autonomous, virtually a law unto themselves, and serve at the pleasure of the prime minister. If the PM is a strong, elected, leader, the fear of rubbing him the wrong way and consequently being out of the cabinet or demoted is enough reason to induce discipline. If, on the other hand, India finds itself stuck in a condition for the last eight years of an unelected and unelectable person as Prime Minister then we have government turning into a farce if not circus as is the case these days.

With Manmohan Singh deriving his political legitimacy from his party chief, Sonia Gandhi, who in turn waits with trepidation for the designated dynast, Rahul Gandhi, to show signs of political acumen and toughness to justify her installing him in the hot seat, government has subsided to a big tent show with different rings and new acts introduced every now and then. There is Sonia Gandhi’s and, in the personalized politics of the day, Congress Party’s son–in-law Robert Vadra’s financial legerdemain hogging the limelight in one ring, Sharad Pawar’s Lavasa ‘hill station’ antics in the next, and Salman Khurshid’s miracles involving the disabled in the third ring, and the people cannot but be appalled with the brazen-ness of these schemes.

A political cipher of a PM, however, looks on as anarchy rules even in the cabinet, with ministers, depending on their interest, or lack thereof,  ideological bent and layman’s grasp of issues but mainly the political heft each carries, mostly marring the Ministries they are given charge of. Politicians leading ministries in the business of delivering government goodies and directly impacting the lives of people – ministries of health, agriculture, food, Public Distribution System, fertilizer, petroleum, coal, roads and highways, railways, etc., can apply their common sense and gut instincts to push programs they can proudly claim at the hustings as their own handiwork. Promoting their personal projects can, however, mean working against the PM’s national agenda, resulting in paralysis of government.

Then there’s Home Ministry, much prized by politicians, mainly because the appointee commands various coercive arms of the state – Intelligence Bureau, Central Bureau of Investigation, which can be marshalled to build dossiers on friends and foes alike, and that’s always helpful. It keeps Mulayam Singh and Mayawati in line and ensures Congress party’s extended stay in power. Then there are departments of government that are somewhat technical in nature – the several economic ministries and Defence, where basic instincts have to be backed by specialized knowledge.

It has been the misfortune of this country, starting with V.K. Krishna Menon in the late 1950s, to have strong-minded politicians as defence ministers who, like the proverbial tail, have mercilessly wagged the dog, sometimes reducing the Indian armed forces to a pitiful state. On the 50th anniversary of the 1962 war debacle, the press is full of Krishna Menon’s misdoings. Lucky, his successors were not shown up by the Chinese. We have had some strange Defence Ministers though and can recall the tenure of the redoubtable Yadav supremo, who was anything but mulayam in reducing the ministry to a translation bureau.

For the last eight years, the country has had the former Kerala Chief Minister, A.K. Antony, minding national defence. His resolve to clean up the military procurement process and rid the process of meddlesome middlemen spreading corruption, like bad water does dysentery, was ambitious. A man of probity, he was brought in to erase the Bofors taint off the Congress party. Ironically, he will be seen as having presided over defence scams (Augusta-Westland VIP helicopters, etc.) to complement other scams elsewhere in the UPA government. His policy of indiscriminate black-listing of vendor companies led to small players with good products – for example, Singapore Kinetics Ltd. with its light howitzer that in rigorous testing beat the competition — being ousted from the bidding process, and big players escaping the sieve altogether. Such as a supplier country that secures very large contracts, because it is seriously rumoured, it has perfected the art of channelling huge payoffs to the political apex – the same modus operandi used in Bofors, which clears deals. That’s the secret that other countries are cottoning on to. In the event, Antony seems more like the clueless chowkidar with single-barrelled gun by his side at the bank entrance to reassure customers, while robbers make off with the loot from an open vault accessed from an unlatched back door.

Worse, Antony seems to place his ideological antipathies above national security. His opposition to foreign bases has negatived any progress on formally accepting the Agalega North and South Islands offered by the Mauritius government which, if secured for the Indian Navy and air force, would immeasurably extend India’s strategic reach in the Indian Ocean. Still worse, is the defence minister repeating, the rhetorically high-sounding but, in practical military terms, inordinately foolish injunction to the armed forces to “defend every inch of Indian territory”. On October 18, it took the form of a declaration concerning the China border infrastructure, to wit, “We are now capable of defending every inch of our country”. Except in the lexicon of military-wise ignorant politicians, “every inch” quite literally means every inch, which in actual military operations amounts to a bad joke.

May be, the Army Chief General Bikram Singh can impart a half-hour tutorial to his Minister, gently informing him of the vagaries attending on the smallest military action. Antony can ask for a briefing from Revenue Intelligence, albeit belatedly, on how the commission-bribery system works, so his innocence, which in politics is a liability, doesn’t do his own standing more harm. Hopefully, it can set a precedent of the COAS educating the generalist civil servants as well, because the “every inch” rhetorical nonsense can backfire in crisis with the people expecting zero loss of ground in all hostilities, which as General J.N. Chaudhri, supposedly told Lal Bahadur Shastri when the PM first used that phrase during the 1965 War, he couldn’t guarantee.

]Published Oct 25, 2012 as “Defence Tutorial” in the ‘Asian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists/defence-tutorial-725 and the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at www.deccanchronicle.com/columnists/bharat-karnad/defence-tutorial ]

Posted in China, China military, civil-military relations, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Indian Politics, Pakistan military | Leave a comment

Nuclear decisionmaking 1964-74 – discussion at IDSA

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

As part of the nuclear history project, an hour-long video of panel discussion at IDSA, Oct 10, 2012,  chaired by Inder Malhotra and involving Joseph Pilat of the Los Alamos lab, K. Santhanam, Vice Admiral (ret) KK Nayyar, and yours truly. Recently uloaded by IDSA. May be of interest. Accessible at http://idsa.in/video/PanelDiscussionIndiasnucleardecisionmaking196474

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, disarmament, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Indian Politics, nonproliferation, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US. | 8 Comments

Republicans better for India

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

It matters to Indian national interest which person and party wins the presidential elections in the United States, not for the usual reasons of the this or that winner being more friendly to this country. But because, generally, Republicans are more hard-headed and strategically-oriented, clearer in their minds of what countries are more important in the larger geopolitical game underway at any given time. And, specifically, because Republican appointees to high posts in the Administration tend to be more Manichean in their outlook – cognizant of ideological adversaries who need to be checked, unlike Obama’s officials trying to ‘nuance’ their way out of trouble.

The fact that the George W Bush government saw the emergence of an aggressive China as a rival and assessed democratic India’s importance as a counterpoise in Asia was not dependent on the nuclear deal that many in the Manmohan Singh regime claim was decisive. Even without the deal, a convergence of interests indicated the direction in which the two countries would proceed. The nuclear deal was the sour cherry atop the cake that the improving bilateral relations could well have done without, as subsequent developments ha shown. Indeed, the foundations for good Indo-US relations were actually laid by Republican President Ronald Reagan in the Eighties. What is remembered by Indians, however, are the dark days of the Richard Nixon era, when the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise sailed into the Bay of Bengal with its load of nuclear weapons on an errand of gunboat diplomacy — prevent Indian forces from taking Dhaka in December 1971. It didn’t work but seeded distrust of the United States, and Republicans in particular. Nixon’s sidekick, Henry Kissinger, in promoting Mao’s China as counterweight to the Soviet Union in the Cold War, in fact, ended up seeding its unparalleled rise and growth.

For reasons not entirely clear, the Indian establishment prefers the Democratic Party with romanticized memories of the days when Kennedy’s ambassador in New Delhi, John Kenneth Galbraith, had easy access to Jawaharlal Nehru, offered sound but unsolicited economic advice to a socialist India struggling with the statist demons it had created, and  all the while displayed good humour.  But, it was during Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B Johnson’s presidency that India lived ‘ship to mouth’ – relying on the gift of American PL 480 grain, which leverage was used ruthlessly to punish India for not supporting the American policy in Vietnam. But it was the denial in 1966 of the $980 million grant-in aid that Johnson had promised, which had the most devastating consequences. The nearly billion dollar aid was supposed to cushion India’s transition to a market economy. With that cushion pulled from underneath her, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi decided against going through with her economic reforms  liberalizing the Indian economy that Washington had been urging. Had Johnson not held back the funds, Mrs Gandhi not gone back on her decision to eliminate the license-permit raj in 1966, India would have had a ten year economic head-start and, who knows, might have been where China is today – on top of the world.

It is a curious take on history by Indians that President Bill Clinton is thought of as a great lover of India. Even the Indian government — which should know better, regards him thus, possibly to not embarrass the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady. Actually, Clinton began to appreciate India only after his plan for a concert of powers with China in the new millennium was rejected by Beijing, but not because Washington didn’t try hard enough. Recall how Clinton bent over backwards to please China, going to the extent of leaking to the New York Times Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s letter that spoke plainly about the growing Chinese nuclear arsenal as the reason for India’s 1998 tests and  weaponization. It breached confidence and showed enormous bad faith.

The Democratic Party in the US has been in the forefront of pushing nonproliferation and, should he win a second term, Barack Obama is likely to make the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) his primary foreign policy goal at the very least to buttress his credentials as a campaigner for a nuclear weapons-free world for which he prematurely won the Nobel Prize for Peace. It is another matter that CTBT is peripheral to the central issue of the United States and Russia reducing their respective weapons/warheads stockpiles. Moreover, most of the extreme non-proliferationists in Washington are associated with the Democratic Party and part of the Obama Administration — persons such as Robert J. Einhorn, Special Adviser in the State Department, an inveterate India-baiter, and Ellen Tauscher who, before assuming charge as Assistant Secretary of State, vowed to bring countries like India into the Non-Proliferation Treaty net.

The reason why the Obama Administration will pursue CTBT is because it diverts attention from drawing down America’s strategic inventory and presents an avenue for easy success. After all, the manner in which the Manmohan Singh government was persuaded to indefinitely extend the “voluntary moratorium” wouldn’t have escaped Washington’s attention. A bit more push here, a lot more pressure there, and the US State Department may be forgiven for believing it will have the outgoing Congress coalition regime drag India into the NPT basket.

Obama’s “Ásia pivot” — an extension of the George W Bush policy — conceptualized to deal with China’s aggressive maritime strategy hiked India’s importance as strategic partner. The worst the Republican Party presidential candidate Mitt Romney has been accused of in foreign policy terms is that 17 of his 24 advisers were part of the last Republican Administration, and that these are neo-conservatives who with their strident views will precipitate matters especially where China and the Middle East are concerned. Iran could complicate Indian relations with Washington. But with a Romney Administration targeting China and the economic, political, and military confrontations between them heating up, the net beneficiary would be India. Why is that bad?

[Published October 19, 2012 in the ‘New Indian Express’ at http://newindianexpress.com/article1305812.ecd ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US. | 2 Comments

Revisting 1962, with ifs and buts

Posted on October 11, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Many years ago, Air Marshal B.D. Jayal (Retd), former Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, South Western Air Command, one of the most thoughtful airmen around, recalled how he and his mates of 1 Squadron sat in their transonic Mystere IVA fighter-bombers lined up on the Tezpur airfield in Assam, their frustration mounting by the minute, awaiting the order to take off against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that never came. Jayal’s experience came to mind when reading Air Chief Marshal N.A.K. Browne’s comment on the 50th anniversary of the 1962 war that but for the non-use of Indian Air Force (IAF) India might not have lost. It is an arguable thesis.
Had the IAF been ordered into action, the advance of PLA across the Thag La Ridge would have been hindered but not halted. Indian planes would have fought unopposed in the air, leaving the pilots to concentrate on releasing the on-board ordnance at the right moment in their dives, but only until the Chinese interceptors and bombers arrived on the scene. Air intelligence passed on by the British to the Indian government had indicated no active Chinese air activity in Tibet, and indeed very few serviceable air strips — no more than three or four on the entire plateau. But the IAF aircraft would have had to contend, especially in the East, with steep mountainsides, and the bomb drops very likely would have missed their targets, most of the time. It wouldn’t have helped that the targets were mainly infantry columns, foot soldiers making up the “rifle and millet corps” comprising the PLA at the time. For reasons of terrain, the IAF aircraft might have been more effective in the West in the Aksai Chin, where the relatively gentler mountain topography would have permitted sustained strafing runs to negate swamping PLA infantry tactics.

The outcome of the war, in other words, may not have been very different even with the IAF in full cry. But this assumes Mao Zedong, who had invested his personal political capital in “teaching India a lesson”, would have desisted from deploying the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) once it became clear that affording the IAF a free run could cost him success. In that situation, the IAF would have had to deal with the more numerous Chinese MiG-15s as against the fewer, but more advanced, Hawker Hunter and the Mysteres — MiG-17 equivalent — in its own employ. One cannot be too sure how that face-off would have turned out, considering the Chinese Air Force had greater, and more recent, operational experience of flying against the US Air Force and carrier-borne US Navy aircraft in the Korean War (1950-53).

This to say that the result of using the IAF might not have been all that clear-cut as Browne suggests, even with the other advantage Indian pilots had of taking to the air, fully fuelled and loaded, unlike their Chinese rivals who, because of the thin air of the Tibet plateau would have compromised on ammunition (for on-board 23mm canons on MiG-15s) and quantum of fuel. The only way India could have secured a distinct tactical advantage is, if in the first hours of the Chinese invasion, New Delhi had sanctioned IAF bombing runs on the PLA staging areas in Tibet with the Canberra medium-bombers, 70-80 of which aircraft were in the Indian inventory by then. That would have had a devastating effect of taking out pre-positioned stores for the planned invasion. It would have demoralised the PLA troops going into battle but also, most definitely, have brought the PLAAF in and the region would have witnessed a major air war. The IAF Canberra medium-bombers would have outshone the Chinese Illyushin-48s, and the Indian Hawker Hunters — one of the finest fighter aircraft of its generation — and Mysteres might have had the better of the Chinese MiG-15s, the first of the swept-wing fighters that had given the American F-86 Sabres a run for their money in Korea. But one cannot be certain. It is an interesting scenario to game to determine the “what might have-beens”.

Even better, though, would be to game the exact situation, but update the gaming parameters by incorporating the latest aircraft in the two air forces and the rival border infrastructures. The question in 1962, however, as in all conflicts the Indian military has been involved in since, remains the same — the infirm political will of the Indian government. On the Chinese side was Mao, a stalwart military leader of repute and resolve. On this side was Jawaharlal Nehru with, and this is not widely known, a keen military sense — his take on the Indian Army progress or the lack thereof during the 1947-48 Kashmir operations are incisive, but non-existent will. He was collaterally unnerved by the prospect of Indian air action broadening the war, perhaps, inviting retaliatory Chinese bombing raids on Calcutta, which the then chief minister of West Bengal, B.C. Roy, warned would lead to the end of the Congress Party rule in that state come the next state elections.

Update the scenario and we have Hu Jintao in China — not as bloody-minded as Mao for sure but no shrinking violet either when it comes to using force.  Political commissar, Hu, dealt ruthlessly with the helpless Tibetans in their benighted country under Chinese military occupation since 1949. And in New Delhi, we have Manmohan Singh who, as a senior official in the National Security Council secretariat told me, believes it is good for the country to possess hard power — latest guns, ships and combat aircraft — but not to use it. If conventional military capability, too, is to be reduced to the same unusable deterrent status as India’s nuclear weapons, then it will face the same dilemma — what happens if it fails to deter? The conventional military, fortunately, can be fielded; it just needs a bit of prime ministerial spine. Indian nuclear armaments, in contrast, have no such fallback position what with over-zealous adherence to the “no first use” principle and Indian government officials and military Chiefs of Staff iterating the self-defeating view that these are not weapons for war fighting, reducing what little credibility they have.

[Published Oct 11, 2012 in the ‘Asian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists/revisiting-1962-ifs-and-buts-599 and the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at www.deccanchronicle.com/columnists/bharat-karnad/revisiting-1962-ifs-and-buts ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Geopolitics, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Politics, Military Acquisitions, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons | 27 Comments

Leave security to experts

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Brajesh Mishra’s death last week triggered fulsome and well deserved eulogies from his Foreign Service colleagues and persons who had worked with him during the Bharatiya Janata Party-led coalition government, 1998-2004. There is no question but that he was the steel in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s spine and, to mix metaphors some more, the drive-shaft propelling policies. Without him, Vajpayee would have easily lapsed into his natural, easy-going, mushiness where foreign and national security policies are concerned. As both Principal Private Secretary (PPS) and National Security Adviser (NSA) to the PM he wielded the main levers of government. But it was his personal closeness to Vajpayee which ensured that everybody up and down the vast Indian government apparatus knew that when he spoke it was a Prime Ministerial decision or directive.

But Brajesh was curiously defensive, even sensitive, about his personal relationship with Vajpayee, perhaps, because it owed less to his equation with him or his own accomplishments than to the gratitude the BJP leader felt he owed Brajesh’s father, Dwarka Prasad Mishra, one-time Congress Party Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh. When I once asked him about it, Brajesh brusquely diverted me from the subject. What I suspect is the truth is this: Vajpayee once contested the Lok Sabha seat from Gwalior and, as a friend, D.P. Mishra ensured he had no worthwhile Congress opponent in the general elections. When later, Mishra pater fell out with Indira Gandhi, Vajpayee invited him to join the BJP, but professing loyalty to the Congress Party, he declined. It was around the time that Vajpayee became the Minister for External Affairs in the Janata government post-Emergency, and sent Brajesh on a prize posting as Permanent Representative to the United Nations headquarters in New York in 1979. And, once he became PM, Vajpayee appointed Brajesh PPS-cum-NSA, again as IOU to the son for his father’s political benefaction. It is another matter altogether that Brajesh proved an effective vizier.

Many of the things done by the BJP government are wrongly attributed to him. For instance, the decision to conduct nuclear tests and to weaponize was not remotely Brajesh’s, but mandated by the BJP election manifesto. The priority the issue was accorded was the party’s as well, with a mighty assist from his predecessor P.V. Narasimha Rao egging Vajpayee on. However, Mishra efficiently coordinated the efforts of the various arms of the government to realize such goals. But, the strategic payoffs from the breakthrough Shakti tests, in terms of rocketing India, thermonuclear weapons-wise, into the rank of strategically impregnable nations, never accrued. This was because of the astonishingly strange and perverse decision announced by Vajpayee in his suo moto Statement in Parliament on May 28, 1998 imposing a “voluntary test moratorium”.

It was an especially egregious decision as the fact that something had gone wrong was known almost immediately after the S-1 test on May 11, meaning the decisive weapon, which the Vajpayee government was all set to ballyhoo, had achieved only a small thermonuclear burn. However, the need to keep up pretences led to declarations by such as R. Chidambaram, then chairman of the atomic energy commission, that the hydrogen device delivered exactly the yield it was supposed to. Supportive statements by the then head of DRDO, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who as a rocket engineer, had no business pronouncing on matters he had no expert insights into, compelled the field testing team in Pokhran, which was processing telemetry data and collecting site-evidence at the time as prelude to analyzing the under-performance of the Hydrogen Bomb design, to fall in line. It eventuated in Brajesh approving and Vajpayee announcing the fateful moratorium decision This was precisely the wrong decision when more open-ended testing was required to obtain a credible thermonuclear arsenal as was advocated by other equally reputable stalwarts of the Nuclear programme. At this point things become a little murky. Brajesh should have compelled Chidambaram to face P.K. Iyengar, A.N. Prasad, and others who had expressed doubts about the fusion test and sought new tests, but he didn’t. Indeed, he flatly denied he had anything to do with the moratorium decision, telling me that Vajpayee made such decisions as he felt strongly about without consulting him. (This is all there in my 2008 book Índia’s Nuclear Policy).

The problem is this: On all really controversial decisions by the BJP government, Brajesh put the onus on the Prime Minister. Brajesh also held he had nothing to do with the rhetorically useful but impracticable principles such as “No First Use” Vajpayee announced in Parliament, and constrained the National Security Advisory Board group drafting the nuclear doctrine. Had Mishra been more familiar with nuclear weapons development and strategic deterrence history and literature, decisions such as this and to publicize the draft-doctrine wouldn’t have been made.

These developments emphasized the late K. Subrahmanyam’s advocacy for separating the posts of NSA and PPS, and filling the former with persons with proven expertise in strategic military matters. The irony is that had Subrahmanyam been made NSA, his decisions would have coincided with Brajesh’s (as the former’s writings before and after the 1998 tests indicated)! Subrahmanyam’s case though is still valid because it is better for an NSA with a thorough grounding in the strategic military field to arrive at decisions the generalist Brajesh did via a generalist’s partial knowledge. His inability to muster any technically elaborate explanations for any of his nuclear deterrence-related decisions, was passed off as part of his gruff nature. Brajesh was, however, right in reining in the over-enthusiasm attending on the opening to the United States affected by the Jaswant Singh-Strobe Talbott “strategic dialogue”.

The issue Subrahmanyam didn’t raise is the monopolization of the NSA post since then by retired Foreign Secretaries who invariably end up, at a minimum, micro-managing the Ministry of External Affairs, as many of their successors would honestly attest, but otherwise are unable to push military and defence decisions because they don’t know enough and in any depth and detail to carry conviction with the others with hands on the wheel.

[Published in the ‘New Indian Express’ on Saturday, Oct 6, 2012, at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article287359.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, DRDO, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Strategic Relations with the US & West, US. | 1 Comment

School of Hard Knocks

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

George Tanham’s scathing 1995 RAND Report on the Indian Air Force excoriated the service leadership for much of the Service’s ills – doctrinal incoherence, multiplicity of combat aircraft types in the inventory that has produced logistics, servicing, and training nightmares, the emphasis on platforms and, despite the evidence of the First Gulf War in 1992, rather than on high-technology suites (avionics, ground-based electronic support) and force multipliers. It is only after the report was published that Air Headquarters (AHQ) woke up to air war in the modern age, and began contemplating tanker aircraft and airborne warning and control systems.

Last week the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a monograph by a former RAND staffer, Benjamin S. Lambeth, on IAF’s performance  in the 1999 Kargil border conflict. It is a straightforward rendition of what happened and how the missions were carried out, coming to what are by now stock conclusions in any study on the Indian military in wars, such as the absence of inter-service war and operational planning and, once into the conflict, of cooperation and coordination at least in the initial stages. The still bigger problem was of the complete lack of preparation for fighting an air war in the mountains because nobody in the IAF command structure anticipated  an operation “at such elevations until it was forced to do so by operational necessity.” Why not? Well, to tweak one of Tanham’s conclusions, because “traditionally Indians do little formal thinking”.

Lambeth refers to the “jugaad” mentality, which all Indian organizations live (and die) by. Had the IAF planners kept abreast of technology developments, such as GPS integrated into the avionics of all fighter aircraft as standard equipment, and if the Tactical Development (TacD) cell then in Jamnagar (since shifted to Gwalior) had been tasked by AHQ to develop fighter tactics for use in mountains before, rather than after receiving the hard knocks of three aircraft downed in first three days of entering the war by man-portable heat-seeking Stinger and Pakistan-produced copies of the Chinese Anza missiles, the Service wouldn’t have sullied its record.

But jugaad has limitations, as improvisation by its very nature is a sub-optimal solution. There would be no need for it if the IAF brass, and the Indian military generally, did their homework, foresaw contingencies instead of practising missions by rote, and meshed new technologies with novel tactics during peacetime preparedness regimes.

Lambeth exaggerates the role of the US-sourced Laser-Guided Bomb – the Paveway-II. Only nine of these LGBs were dropped during the entire conflict, eight of them by the Mirage 2000 and one from a Jaguar and  successfully took out the Pakistan Army’s Northern Light Infantry (NLI) battalion headquarters atop Tiger Hill. But destruction, especially of the Muntho Dhalo supply depot and base-camp that made sustaining the intrusion impossible, resulted from an innovative use of dumb bombs – the 250 pound bombs left over from when the Ajeet (the licence-production version of the Folland Gnat) air defence fighter carried them in the 1970s. He also does not mention the fact that the LGB kits purchased from the United States by IAF prior to the 1998 nuclear tests had a grievous flaw in one of the internal circuits, which prevented integration of the Paveway with the Mirage 2000 fire control system. Americans refused to help correct the flaw because India was then under US sanctions owing to its nuclear tests the year before. None of these aspects find mention in the Lambeth study.

The innovation worked out by the ASTE (Aircraft and Systems Testing Establishment) staff and IAF pilots even as the battle raged, was to first correct the Paveway circuit, and then to devise tactics to drop the dumb bombs in precision-mode using the bracket-mounted bazaar-bought GPS units in the Mirage cockpit with its on-board computer. Lambeth does not relate the story behind this innovation either. IAF asked the French for advice on how to use the dumb bombs on low-value targets. True to their mercenary reputation, the French refused to part with any free advice, even though they had previously used dumb bombs successfully in precisely the manner ASTE-IAF had worked out, and suggested instead that they be given a contract for upgrading the avionics mid-operations!

The Lambeth study states that the initial series of dumb bomb attacks by MiG-23s and MiG-27s were wide off target because of inaccurate target coordinates supplied by the Army. What he does not reveal – perhaps because the senior IAF officers he talked with did not apprise him of this — is how the army’s 15 Corps spotters risked their lives to close-in on the entrenched NLI encampments and dugouts on the ridge-line and mountain slopes to get an accurate fix on these targets. This more precise data led to the dumb bombs hitting their marks dead-on in the latter phase of the conflict.

The main lessons of Operation Vijay in Kargil other than the value of self-reliance and preparing for unforeseen tactical missions, are that no foreign country will pass on professional secrets. And, as regards the French suppliers, their money-grubbing attitude, and their propensity to default on  contracts on technology transfer, the Indian government has to ensure that on the Rafale Multi-role Medium-Range Combat Aircraft deal, as I have iterated in this column, that payments are timed with every technology package actually transferred, including not just the source codes and flight control laws, but manufacturing technology for every last sub-assembly and component, and that there are no technology ‘black boxes’ that we, the Indian taxpayers will keep paying for the lifetime of the aircraft.

The Defence Ministry’s Price Negotiation Committees in past deals have invariably ended up favouring the foreign supplier because they have not conditioned payouts on suppliers meeting stringent and time-bound technology transfer criteria for every little bit connected with the aircraft. These sorts of boondoggles cannot be tolerated anymore. Insiders, however, claim that owing to the usual lax approach of Defence Ministry-Defence Production department bureaucrats and the private sector company fronting for the Dassault Avions Company, a host of irregularities may be embedded in the Rafale deal. These will doubtless be investigated by the next government.

[Published Sept 27, 2012 in the ‘Ásian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists/school-hard-knocks-632 and the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at www.deccanchronicle.com/columnists/bharat-karnad/school-hard-knocks ]

Posted in Defence Industry, DRDO, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Military Acquisitions, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, United States, US. | 12 Comments

‘World Politics Review’ — Karnad’s views on Cong Party & Manmohan Singh Govt

Posted on September 22, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

World Politics Review

Revolt Against Singh Could Stall India’s Economic Momentum

By Catherine Cheney, 21 Sep 2012, ‘Trend-lines’

In India, a growing number of political leaders are threatening to withdraw their support for the governing coalition of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the face of new economic measures that, among other changes, allow for greater foreign investment by global retail giants in India’s heretofore protected domestic retail sector.*
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Mamata Banerjee, the populist chief minister of West Bengal, announced that her party, the Trinamool Congress, would formally leave the government. Meanwhile, Kunal Ghosh, a member of the Indian Parliament from the same party, suggested that Singh should resign.
“India is passing through a turbulent time, as are many other countries,” Bharat Karnad, a research professor in national security studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, India, told Trend Lines. “The real danger is that the country will relapse into its bad economic habits of a dominant state-controlled economy.” That, Karnad said, could cause India to lose its “economic momentum and energy, and accordingly blight its prospects of rising to great power status.”
Karnad explained that Singh’s decline started a few years ago, when the prime minister was unable to push his agenda of economic reforms because it clashed with the trademark “populist-socialist-statist” thinking of the president of the Indian National Congress, Sonia Gandhi, and the Gandhi family.
As an unelected prime minister nominated to the post by Gandhi, Singh does not have a constituency that he can rely on in political crises, Karnad added. According to Karnad, Gandhi found Singh to be an expedient choice for prime minister because he poses no threat to her or her son, Rahul Gandhi, who she is grooming for the post.
“Ruling by borrowed political heft means Singh is only as effective [as Gandhi] allows him to be,” explained Karnad.
He added that the various provincial and regional party agendas “do not necessarily coalesce well,” and there are concerns that the governing coalition, the United Progressive Alliance, may fall apart because of Banarjee’s withdrawal of support.
Karnad expected Gandhi to work hard to keep the governing coalition together until the next general elections set for 2014, mainly because Rahul is currently deemed unprepared for the role of prime minister. Opportunistic support from the Bahujan Samaj Party and the Samajwadi Party could allow the UPA to survive until then, he said, but elections may become necessary should either party decide to withdraw their support.
In terms of any impact Singh’s eventual ouster might have on relations with the United States, Karnad said that there “may be minor changes in rhetoric and atmospherics.” But he does not expect a negative impact on bilateral relations, because “there is now a political consensus among all parties” on the importance of maintaining the “strategic partnership” with the U.S.
“If Singh has put himself on the line for anything, even more than the economic reforms, it is improved relations with the United States,” Karnad said, mentioning the 2007 nuclear cooperation deal between the U.S. and India for which Singh survived a no confidence vote as the flagship issue for the prime minister.
The bigger impact of a governing coalition without Singh, Karnad noted, would be the potential rollback of his economic reforms, already menaced by the fractious political environment.*
“If Singh is out and his economic reforms agenda is junked, the country’s foreign policy orientation is unlikely to change,” Karnad said. But, he continued, India’s economic progress and growth rate will be seriously set back, with “all the consequences that will follow in the wake.”

[Available at www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trend-lines/12359/revolt-against-singh-could-stall-indias-economic-momentum ]

Posted in Indian Politics, Internal Security, Strategic Relations with the US & West, US. | 1 Comment

Preempting Danger

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

If a graph were drawn with Pakistan government’s bluff, bluster, and threats of nuclear weapons use on one axis and the growth of its nuclear arsenal on the other axis, what you’d trace is actually a line that has been steadily dipping as our neighbour’s nuclear weapons inventory has grown. The conclusion would be that a weak Pakistan feels more reassured and secure with a reliable nuclear arsenal by its side, believing it will deter the much larger, more powerful, India it has always apprehended as a mortal threat.

China was at its obnoxious worst in the mid-1950s when it had just embarked, with Soviet Russian help, on its nuclear weapons programme. Maozedong declared that China could absorb the loss of 300 million people in a nuclear attack. That statement, because of its outrageousness, alerted American war-planners to the fact that they had a huge strategic problem on their hands: Mao’s China would not be easily deterred. Up until then, the United States routinely issued nuclear threats. However, with China fast-tracking the development of both the megaton thermonuclear weapons and the inter-continental ballistic missile able to reach targets in America, and achieving these capabilities by 1967, the U.S. Defence Secretary Robert S. McNamara conceded that China had attained deterrence vis a vis America.

In the Fifties serious plans were hatched by the Pentagon to take out the Chinese gaseous diffusion plant producing enriched uranium for bombs and other nuclear facilities in Lop Nor, graphically referred to by mission-planners as “throttling the baby in the cradle”. This plan remained unimplemented because of the uncertainty of the USSR reaction to such a strike. After the rift between Moscow and Beijing and a couple of years before the first Chinese atomic test in October 1964, Russians mooted a joint plan to destroy Chinese nuclear weapons-making capability. This time, the U.S. acted coy for reasons not entirely clear. With the loss of those two  opportunities and the subsequent fast-tracked development by China of a megaton thermonuclear weapon and an intercontinental ballistic missile able to hit the farthest targets in Russia and the U.S. west coast, its ascent to great power became unstoppable.

India could have pre-empted the nuclear danger from Pakistan by attacking the nuclear installations in Kahuta and the Indian government contemplated such strikes, the first time in 1982 in cooperation with the only specialists in the business, Israel, and the second time in early 1984, when a solo effort was considered. In both instances, the Indian government, as is its wont when making critical decisions, got cold feet. The attack window on Pakistani nuclear facilities closed in 1988 with the Pakistani acquisition of a deliverable device. Writing in that period, I had urged bombing Kahuta, which shocked many people. But I had also warned then that once the Pakistani bomb came on line, India would “forever have to hold its peace” with Pakistan.

Much of Indian thinking and writings pertaining to national security is suffused, not with realism, but passion and sentiment. It so colours the view and clouds judgement that hard decisions are impossible to make. But having not made the crucial decision, countries have to live with the consequences — the U.S., Russia, and the world with a nuclear China, and India with a nuclear-armed Pakistan.

But nuclear adversaries on its flanks with a nexus between them, poses a tremendous strategic challenge to India. Pakistan has been more forthright and direct in exploiting its new found sense of nuclear security to wage “asymmetric warfare”, using terrorism. It recruits malcontents in Pakistan society and among the Indian Muslim community, trains them, launches them on terrorist missions within India, rides the disaffection of the people in Kashmir, and generally creates a heck of a nuisance.

India, on the other hand, with much bigger ambitions and potential, has been just so glad to beat the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty-deadline and barely cross the line with simple fission and boosted-fission weapons, it has chosen to virtually shut its nuclear shop. But, there’s not much strategic profit to milk if you don’t go the whole hog, which the Indian government hasn’t had the guts to do because it would require open-ended nuclear explosive testing to obtain a variety of proven and performance-certified nuclear and thermonuclear weapons and panoply of delivery systems, including ICBMs to take on China.

Pakistan is best dealt with by an array of targeted intelligence operations, which can be modulated depending on whether the uptick in trade and economic relations has moderated Islamabad’s behaviour. The benefits to Pakistan from plugging into the Indian economic engine, according to Shahid Javed Burki, a former Vice President of the World Bank, and one of the strongest advocates of free trade under the South Asian Free Trade Agreement, is an increase of as much as 2.4% in  its Gross Domestic Product. No small attraction for a country tipping the scales in the ‘failed states’ Index. Indeed, the well-known Pakistani analyst, Ayesha Siddiqa, claims that pressure from the Pakistani business community made the Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kayani green signal the peace process underway with India.

The trouble is the Indian government is either primed for peaceful relations or for adversarial relations, not for the more real-life mixed relations in which trade, cultural exchanges, and open visa regimes co-exist with remotely-controlled acts of terrorism and subversion, and military provocations on the side. It is the sort of multi-pronged policy China has perfected and prosecutes smoothly against India. Such a multi-purpose policy is what India needs to adopt except against China the effort will have to be sharper, ruthless, and more proactive. Thus, as priority China has to be paid back for its actions to nuclear missile-arm Pakistan, by transferring nuclear-warheaded cruise and ballistic missiles on the sly to Vietnam, and the ‘Tibet card will have to be revived and put on a war footing, all this even as bilateral trade inches towards the $100 billion mark and our diplomats prattle pleasantly in Mandarin.

[Published September 21, 2012 in the ‘New Indian Express’ as “Danger of Sino-Pakistan nexus” at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/article1237244.ece ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Terrorism, United States, US., Western militaries | 5 Comments

Nuclear Correctness

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

National Security Adviser (NSA) Shiv Shankar Menon was at an Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) meet on August 27 to launch a revived Rajiv Gandhi Action Plan for nuclear disarmament. In his speech, he teased the audience with his claim that pre-1998, India faced “explicit or implicit” nuclear coercion on three occasions “to try and change India’s behaviour”.

Making informed guesses, two obvious instances are, of course, the 1971 episode of the Enterprise carrier Task Group with aircraft armed with nuclear ordnance steaming into the Bay of Bengal holding out an explicit threat. Another equally explicit threat was, perhaps, made in 1995 thwarting Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s decision to test. The third instance is the tricky one but it happened, I believe, in 1974 imediately after the first test. Indira Gandhi had approved an open-ended series of underground tests but abruptly cancelled testing after just the first Pokharan explosion on May 11. The question why, had troubled a number of senior nuclear scientists at the time, who were aware that Dr. Homi Bhabha, the nuclear visionary, was killed by an American timed-explosive on board his Geneva-bound flight – which has since been borne out by an admission by the alleged agent who admitted placing the explosive on the plane. Bothe because stopping the Indian Bomb was a Washington priority and it was surprised by the Indian test, an implicit threat was likely conveyed to the Indian government to halt testing or face action. There was no further testing in Indira’s lifetime.

Hard pressure and dire threats have always been part of the Standard Operating Procedure of the nuclear Haves to keep the nuclear club manageably small, and a way of imposing disarmament on the nuclear Have-nots. Rajiv Gandhi’s 1988 Action Plan for a nuclear disarmed world was a quaint attempt to replicate Jawaharlal Nehru’s championing nuclear disarmament in the Fifties. Except, Nehru  cleverly sought “general and complete disarmament”, which required all countries to disavow nuclear weapons, of course, disband their conventional militaries, and retain only small constabularies for internal law and order purposes. The thinking behind Nehru’s stratagem was that general and complete disarmament being an unrealistic and unachievable goal, it allowed India to take the moral high-road while providing cover for an India furtively pursuing the weapon option and reaching the weapon threshold by 1964 with the commissioning of the plutonium reprocessing plant in Trombay.

The main difference between the Nehruvian initiative and the Action Plan was that the latter lacked the former’s realpolitik foundations. People around Rajiv Gandhi actually believed that this Plan was a practicable proposition and that nuclear weapon states would rush to zero-out their thermonuclear arsenals as per a definite timetable. The same people, with Rajiv Gandhi’s confidante Mani Shankar Aiyar in the van, are now seeking to revive that Plan at a time when President Barack Obama’s Prague Initiative, eventuating in two nuclear summits in Washington in 2009 and in Seoul two years later, packs far greater international weight and credibility. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been a regular at these summits, and endorsed this U.S.-led effort. With the Indian government on the Obama bandwagon and the nuclear summits trumping the Action Plan, not only does the latter not have a chance, it does not even pack much moral heft that Nehru’s advocacy did 60 years ago. It is rather like a tired, old mare being whipped to go round the track one more time.

As to why Congress party stalwarts, like Aiyar, see political value in reviving the Rajiv Plan, is hard to say, except in terms of trying to remain relevant in a Nehru-Gandhi party because, in the real world, more countries are inching towards the safety and security afforded by nuclear weapons. Actually, with uncertainty and spreading international anarchy, nuclear weapons are a security comforter for nations. In the event, Shiv Shankar Menon’s straight talk on the subject at the ICWA event — “Until we arrive at that happy state [of] a world truly free of nuclear weapons”, India will not disarm — was the firmest official declaration to-date. It also  torpedoed the refloated Action Plan.

Alas, the NSA stuck to the Establishment view revolving around the minimum deterrence concept, which seriously needs to be junked. Derived from this concept is the view that Menon dutifully mouthed, that nuclear weapons are not meant for “war fighting”. Naturally, a small nuclear force cannot perform diverse strategic roles other than try and deter the adversary with threat of “massive retaliation”. But this is a manifestly incorrect take on the military aspects of the Bomb incessantly propagated by the late K. Subrahmanyam. Unfortunately, it has put down deep roots in the higher bureaucratic and military circles.

In the nuclear realm, as in the conventional military sphere, the greater the variety of armaments and more of them that a country has in its nuclear weapons inventory, the larger will be the array of options available to meet different military contingencies, and why is that not preferable to limiting one’s choices?

Because for every incident, the Indian response is “massive retaliation”, it didn’t take Pakistan, for instance, long to work out that it can get away with “small” provocations and, hypothetically, even initiation of low-yield nuclear weapons use on aggressing Indian formations on its own territory because massive retaliation is simply too disproportionate a reply to be credible. This is the reason why “minimum deterrence” and secondary precepts (No First Use, etc.) are worth discarding in substance, if not as rhetoric.

There’s a desperate need, moreover, for a large and diverse arsenal with nuclear weapons in every yield bracket, and tactical doctrines for their use. Deterrence may be the desired end-state, but nuclear war fighting and the Strategic Forces Command practicing and preparing for this eventuality – are the means of enforcing it. Parroting the “not for war fighting” mantra may be the politically correct thing to do, and reassuring to the political leadership, but to actually stick to it would be for India to lose the strategic nuclear game before it begins.

[Published September 13, 2012 in the ‘Asian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists/nuclear-correctnmess-495 and in the ‘Deccan Chronicle’ at www.deccanchronicle.com/columnists/bharat-karnad/nuclear-correctness ]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Strategic Forces Command | 18 Comments

Vikramaditya delay & IN Sqdn 303

Posted on September 12, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Just got back from the College of Naval Warfare at INS Mandovi, Goa, after a talk at the CORE (Combined Operational Review and Evaluation) program. There learned that Carrier Vikramaditya (ex-Gorshkov) won’t be inducted before April-May 2013. A Russian crew is putting it through its paces in sea trials which’ll be followed by an elaborate certification process.  But the MiG-29K complement (IN Squadron 303)  is in; with Indian Navy pilots already logged over 1,700 hours of flying time off the moored Kuznetzov in Russian waters. A static deck is about ready as well at Dabolim with the ski jump and arrestor wire for carrier-simulated landings and takeoffs, so the pilots needn’t go to Russia to practice use of the 29Ks.

Spotted half a squadron of IAF’s  navalized Jags at Dabolim. Working up coordination?

Posted in India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, Military Acquisitions, Relations with Russia, Technology transfer | Leave a comment