Air Marshal on joyride or after flying bounty

Posted on February 25, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

A frontline Mirage 2000 combat aircraft piloted by Air Marshal Anil Chopra,  head of   Personnel  at Air HQrs and Commodore Commandant,  of the oldest, most pampered, unit of IAF — No. 1 Squadron, Gwalior, went down yesterday.  “Snag in the engine”was trotted out as the reason for the mishap. This is hard to believe considering the Mirage facilities — air-conditioned hangars with surroundings that many Mirage pilots boast are more antiseptic than most hospitals in India — are top-rated. What may be really to blame are two factors: (1) Air Mshl Chopra was earning his “flying bounty” — an allowance even long-in-the-tooth senior officers, who have long since specialised in flying desks, draw with all the attendant risks — meaning, you are simply no longer young with the necessary quick silver reflexes to handle a fly-by-wire fighter, and hence endanger self and co-pilot, and are in danger of totaling the plane, which last happened — a writeoff. But the lure of the bounty by logging the mandatory minimum hours in the air is too much for these gentlemen to resist. And/or (2) as Commodoe-Commandant and retiring soon, a last flight or two to re-experience the highs of combat aircraft flying.

Could the CO, No. 1 Squadron, have not permitted Air Mshl Chopra to fly. In theory, yes, but he would have been aware that, as head of Personnel, Chopra could have sidelined his career were he so inclined. In the circumstances, why risk alienating a man also CC of the Squadron? The net result is the loss of an aircraft worth over $200 million (replacement value at minimum) to the national exchecquer . Can a national fighting asset be so cavalierly treated by senior IAF officers intent on joy rides (if the bounty notion is discounted for the nonce)? Indeed, should such advanced aircraft, which can go into a maneuver with a slight twitch of the pilot’s hand, be permitted to be flown other than by the young officers in their professional flying prime? It’s time IAF strictly followed a protocol and penalized senior officers for asserting the prerogatives of seniority and violating strictures against flying, and start by making an example of Air Marshal Chopra.

Posted in Indian Air Force | 2 Comments

Smugglers funding Jaitapur N-protest?

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

The Kudankulam nuclear complex is stuck at the pre-commissioning stage because of the protest around those parts organized by NGOs whom Manmohan Singh has identified as being funded by cash-rich American NGOs with the agenda of torpedoing the PM’s ambitious nuclear electricity generation plan.  Unused to the people derailing a govt program, Moscow is upset that GOI has so far chosen to do nothing other than prevaricate. But at a workshop today, a senior DAE official on the sidelines, offered the view that Uday Kumar, the agitation leader, has a dubious background, but that the plant opening will not be delayed beyond a couple of months. With the squeezing of the Indian NGOs by linking them, correctly, with Western NGOs the protestors will  apparently soon be cleared out. The critical factor will be CM Jayalaltha’s reaction. Tamil Nadu has peak demand power deficit that KK-1 and KK-2 can meet. But equally, her political interests are better served by further needling the coalition setup at th centre.

Investigation of the N-protestors has other than in Kudankulum, also revealed, this official informed me, that in Jaitapur, Maharashtra, the protest ostensibly led by local fisherfolk, is being funded by smugglers from the Konkan area who use the proximal coast as landing ground for their contraband they bring in from Dubai and elsewhere because they fear they will be compelled to move out of the area altogether. The complicating factor for the Congress  party in Delhi is that this protest is piggybacking on the political fight between the Maharashtra Nav Nirmnan Sena of Raj Thackeray and the local Congress party Maharashtra State minister, Rane.  The trouble with all this is the manifest weakness of the central govt and the desire of the PM to make the proverbial omelette w/o breaking eggs. Well, good luck!

Posted in India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Nuclear Policy & Strategy | 1 Comment

Fighting terror the Babu-way

Posted on February 24, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

It is an unequal fight. On one side are the terrorists of various ideological hues from the small numbers of raging Islamist extremists stalking the cities to the equally angry and committed Maoists controlling parts of the countryside. They are lean, mean, intent, and able to create mayhem at will in a country where order breaks down at the slightest hint of trouble and who seem to have ready access to explosive materials and arms and ammunition.

On the other side, ostensibly protecting the country and people are fat and flabby but proliferating state and central police, para-military and intelligence outfits who are invariably surprised by any new terrorist action no matter how often these incidents have occurred in the past. In contrast the innumerable police and intelligence organizations, tasked to know what the terrorists are up to, and to pre-empt them if they can and fight them if they must, are each led by serried ranks of babus, specialising mostly in fighting each other to a standstill,  which means in time-critical situations, decisions do not get made and actions are not ordered. What ensues is unflagging counter-terrorism rhetoric of politicians even as any attempt at institutionalizing coordinated intelligence collection and anti-terrorist actions rarely gets off the ground. The terrorists in India must feel lucky in the opponents they face.

It has been over three years since 26/11 but the layered system of maritime security is still mostly on paper. The navy is stretched by the overarching responsibility for preventing ingress by terrorists, the Coast Guard is squeezed by the navy and even more by the multiple but substantively nonexistent state police agencies and assets ashore and in the brown water tier of coastal defence. It seems anti-terrorism is another excuse for babus to make money, as the controversy over the acquisition by Maharashtra government of defective body armour reveals. So, whenever the Pakistani Lashkars feel up to mounting another Mumbai operation, the odds are the jihadi teams will move in on their targets unmolested.

More important than the actual fighting units – deficient as they are in many respects — is intelligence-gathering, which role the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC) was originally meant to augment and streamline. Having cleared the bureaucratic hurdles erected by other organizations in the intelligence business, the NCTC now finds itself caught in the federal structuralist trap that the Home Ministry did not have the wit or the wisdom to see it was stepping into by not getting the assent of state governments. That’s the minimum that should have been done considering the Constitution, notwithstanding Article 73, principally accords states the responsibility for the “law and order” function. In mulling the division of labour, the Constituent Assembly, influenced by the realism and rootedness of Sardar Vallabhhai Patel, reasonably decided that being nearer to the ground and more familiar with local conditions than the remote central regime, state governments should be charged with maintaining law and order in their jurisdictions.

NCTC, however, grew beyond its core idea as an intelligence coordination unit and, doubtless prompted by Home Minister C. Chidambaram, benefited from bureaucratic aggrandizement. Along the way, it acquired the coercive police role of arrest and seizure of property as well. Not content with being merely an intelligence czar, the ambitious Mr. Chidambaram, has sought by means of an enlarged NCTC to become, the internal security overlord at the expense of the Constitutionally-empowered state governments. But before NCTC’s role inflation, the usual turf battles between competing intelligence agencies — Intelligence Bureau, Research & Analysis Wing, Central Bureau of Investigation, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, etc. that had held up realization of NCTC for some two odd years, obtained.  The “White Paper” drafted by the Home Ministry to dilate on the concept did endless rounds and was amended at every turn. The result was the last version had few similarities with the first one, and the NCTC’s supposed responsibilities had grown in tandem with the disagreements over its expanding brief and turf. Pushed by Chidambaram, Intelligence Bureau (IB) won out and was, not surprisingly, designated the nodal agency. This has happened concurrent with IB’s other pyrrhic victory — success in denying the National Technical Research Organization, the institution expressly created in the wake of the 1999 Kargil fiasco, and equipped with the requisite electronic scanning, tapping, and processing capability and skilled manpower, being denied legal sanction to undertake comprehensive electronic surveillance on its own.  Central Board of Direct Taxes, Narcotics Control Board, among six or seven other agencies are, however, so authorized. Go figure! It reinforces the notion that the Indian system is the country’s best facilitator of terrorism.

Little wonder NCTC has spurred resistance to it and not just by state governments ruled by opposition parties. With Omar Abdullah in Kashmir joining Mamata Banneji in West Bengal and the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham party making common cause with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Jayalalitha, in opposing NCTC, the game is tilted decisively against it. What is noteworthy is that the protesting states – Gujarat, Odisha, Bihar, Jammu & Kashmir, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, have land or maritime borders to police, and/or are engaged in tackling Maoists.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s assurances mean for nothing considering the near zero influence he has in his own government, especially with his senior cabinet colleagues. Further, because IB is virtually the handmaiden of the Home Minister, the opposition-ruled states have particularly to fear the misuse of the IB dominated-NCTC by Chidambaram and the ruling Congress Party at the Centre with a long record of manipulating central agencies, to settle scores, subvert law and order within their bailiwicks. The incumbent state governments could be tarred with either not doing enough to contain the terrorist threat or doing too much with the ensuing leaks to the media, about weak state governments or of biased state police running amuck, becoming grist for politics in the run-up to the 2014 general elections. In the event, NCTC minus states’ approval seems destined for the dust heap.

[Published as “Äs Babus fight terror” in the ‘New Indian Express’ Feb 24, 2012 at http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/op-ed/as-babus-fight-terror/366405.html ]

Posted in Internal Security | Leave a comment

Dominoes falling to China

Posted on February 18, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Does India ever do anything on its 0wn initiative, proactively to protect its interests? Apparently not. Because almost every time you see India doing something in the extended neighborhood, it is in response to counteract what China has done. Take the latest little coup in the Maldives. MEA woke up only after realizing that Beijing had a large and growing diplomatic presence in Male, and that the transfer of power — in part the handiwork of Pakistani militant Islamic groups radicalizing powerful sections of that country’s society, had actually facilitated a Chinese naval presence with offer of R&R (rest and replenishment) rights for its naval ships in the Indian Ocean on the atoll and thereby insinuating itself into the Maldivan security calculus in the anti-piracy role, etc. that Delhi reared up, sending its Joint Secretary (West) to quiet the situation down and obtain from the present ruling dispensation the promise of elections that will give an India-friendly Mohammad Nasheed an opportunity to return to power. A similar  reaction-to-Chinese moves justification has been offered by the Manmohan Singh government for building the border roads infrastructure, the proposed railways connecting border provinces with the Indian mainland, and its attempts to recover lost ground in Myanmar. For the supposedly big power in the region, this is ridiculous. Either India goes aggressively proactive, or Delhi can wait on the sideline — as it is used to doing — and rue the loss of previously India-friendly regimes and pro-India assets in the near-abroad as these fall, like tipped Dominoes, into Beijing’s lap.

Posted in Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Ocean | Leave a comment

Steep Challenge

Posted on February 16, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

That the Iran-Israel fight has been brought to India’s shores by whosoever wanted to spring a surprise on the Israelis  is a tragedy.

The open attack on the Israeli embassy official in highly-policed Lutyens Delhi may be the harbinger of the Israeli conflict with Iran, and the Islamic world generally, extending to Indian cities. Whether this is a like Iranian response to the plastique-killings of a couple of its nuclear scientists on Tehran streets in recent years is not germane to India’s diplomatic predicament. India is in no position to alienate Iran, even less, Israel.

Navigating around the shoals of Israeli national security sensitivities and Iran’s desire for retribution is a grave challenge for this country. The ministry of external affairs, which for years now has maintained a heads-down, low-key posture, determined to give offence to nobody, finds itself shoved rudely on to the centrestage, having to tackle a delicate problem created by two friends of India irreconcilably at odds with each other. It is true that in the absence of prior information about this strike, the Indian authorities could have done nothing to prevent it. Being an open, free-wheeling democratic country there’s no way that tabs can be kept on every foreigner entering India or, alternatively, maintain surveillance on intelligence agencies operating from friendly country embassies in Delhi. Nor could local collaborators cultivated by these foreign agencies over time have been pre-emptively collared. Much as external affairs minister S.M. Krishna averred that India would not like to get “sucked” into third party squabbles, there may be no easy way of escaping such a denouement, in the main because of what the two countries believe is at stake. Israel, for all its chutzpah and “two eyes for an eye” attitude, is an incredibly small country — at 22,578 square kms in size, it is 11,438 sq kms smaller than the Union Territory of Delhi. Its margin for safety being infinitesimally small, it brooks no error in assessing and anticipating threats and, once identified, in eliminating them. This is a habit of mind defined by geography and quite unlike subcontinent-sized India’s attitude to physical security of the state which is lax to the point of exasperation. Thus, to apply Indian standards of security to Israel would be to leave it exposed to extinction — which, incidentally, is what the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in high dudgeon, periodically promises. Tel Aviv, however, believes it cannot risk assuming that this is just rousing rhetoric. In fact, time and again the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, acting on the principle of zeroing out all risks to the state, has systematically killed all those threatening Israel in any way. Hezbollah leader Imad Mugniyeh was assassinated in 2008, and leading scientists and engineers working on any long-range mass destruction weapons programmes in adversary states, have regularly been bumped off, even as the Israeli Air Force has bombed plutonium reactors (Osirak outside Baghdad in 1982, Syrian reactor under construction last year), and sabotaged the Iranian uranium centrifuges with the stuxnet computer virus. Earlier, in March 1990, the extraordinarily-gifted Canadian designer of rockets and long-range artillery, Gerald Bull, who was helping Saddam Hussein build an improbably powerful 150-metre-long gun (350 mm calibre, one metre bore) that could hit Israel or, fired vertically, place a projectile/satellite in space (“Project Babylon”) and also a multi-stage rocket cobbled together from Soviet Scud short-range missile parts, was killed in Brussels with shots to the head. The Iranian efforts targeting Israel are evidently not as sophisticated, considering that an Israeli embassy accounts official was car-bombed in retaliation for the fatal attacks on its prized nuclear scientists. Whatever the real intent of its nuclear programme, Iran is on the cusp of attaining weapons status. On a conducted tour of some of its nuclear facilities, along with a few other Indian visitors a couple of years back, a senior scientist at the heavy water production plant in Arak when asked by me about Iran’s nuclear intentions, casually replied: “We are following the Indian model”! My own take is that the Iranian nuclear impulses are civilisational in nature. As legatees of the great Persian empires of Darius and Xerxes, Iranians feel they cannot be denied security sufficiency. It is not a justification that washes with the Israelis, however. The Israel-Iran tussle played out this week on Indian territory, in effect, leaves Delhi up a creek. India can no more do without Iranian oil (meeting some 16 per cent of the country’s energy needs) and, potentially, gas via the Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, and land access to Afghanistan and Central Asia afforded through the Chabahar port. Neither can it afford to have Israel turn off the high-technology spigot and get the influential Jewish lobby in the US all upset. The latter, after all, helped India set up US-India Political Action Committee, a counterpart institution in Washington to the legendary America-Israel Political Action Committee as a means of shaping America’s South Asian policy. That this fight has been brought to India’s shores by whosoever wanted to spring a surprise on the Israelis, is a tragedy. If Mossad is determined covertly to take out the perpetrators and Indian collaborators, if any, there really is not much Delhi can do, but it will ramp up an unending action-reaction sequence of escalating violence that India simply cannot tolerate. But because two friendly states are involved, India’s best bet may be to urge Tel Aviv to restrict its fight with Iran to their region and to share the names of any Iranian nationals and Indian or other country accomplices that the Israeli intelligence may have with the Delhi Police so they can be apprehended and punished as per Indian laws. That should assuage the Israelis who, hopefully, are not unaware of the serious dilemma confronting the Indian government. Tehran should be requested to refrain from any provocative actions in India against third country citizens, and given assurances that similar representations have been made to Tel Aviv. It is imperative that India enlarge its own internal security intelligence focus, establish a special cell to monitor suspected persons, organisations and developments related to the Israel-Iran conflict, and publicly proclaim a policy that makes it clear that this country will not be made the site for a clash of strictly West Asian interests.

[Published with the title “Tricky waters” on Feb 16, 2012 in ‘The Asian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists/tricky-waters-986 and in ‘The Deccan Chronicle’ at www.deccanchronicle.com/columnists/bharat-karnad/tricky-waters ]

Posted in India's strategic thinking and policy, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Internal Security | 1 Comment

Iranian Nuclear TV imagery and meaning

Posted on February 15, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Indian TV channels are carrying television coverage of Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad inspecting certain nuclear installations publicly revealed for the first time. But the careful coverage was limited to showing uranium centrifuges — which the Iranian TV commentator claimed were “4th generation”, and a pool to store spent fuel from a  boiling water type LEU reactor, run on indigeneously-produced fuel rods, able to output, it was repeatedly stressed, isotopes for medical use, especially for radiotherapy to cure “850,000” cancer patients in the country. All this is very well. But it is plutonium that is really relevant for weapons making and, in this respect, there was a “no show” of any related facilities, such as pu reprocesing, pu heavy water moderated reactors, etc. By stressing peaceful N-uses, Tehran is trying to rally international support against a  preemptive strike, and may have prevented such an attack  for the nonce, any way by Israel assisted by US sensors and terminal guidance paraphernalia. It has bought Iran some time. Even so, this time element may be crucial, because there’s no doubt Iran, which has been on the cusp for several years, has about reached the weapons threshold. I remember what a senior scientist at the heavy water plant in Arak told me when I was taken around that installation, along with a few other Indian visitors a couple of years back on a conducted tour.  In response to my question about Iran’s N-intentions, he replied: “We are following the Indian model”!

Posted in indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia | 2 Comments

Army’s “succession plan”?

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

In his letter to the Supreme Court opposing the Army Chief, General V.K. Singh’s case for relevant official records to show his correct date of birth, Attorney General Goolam Vahnavati referred to a mysterious “succession plan” that he said the authorities were determined to protect. The so-called “succession plan” has validity only if the Government of India first acknowledges that it has outsourced the selection of Chief of Army Staff to a couple of former army chiefs. If such is the case, then it is a most alarming development and it is surprising it has drawn so little attention.

Whatever the merits of this succession plan, it is predicated on a basic fact of military life, namely that, all other things being equal, the reigning Service chief decides the fate of three star-rank officers by assigning or, for whatever reasons of his own, denying them prize posts. The Defence Minister and his Ministry, in this situation, act as mere rubber stamps. To cite an example from some two decades back, the finest armoured commander the Indian Army has produced, the no-nonsense Lieutenant General Hanut Singh, never made Army Commander, in the main, because his seniors and colleagues who had had enough of his outspokenness, branded him “chaplain General” for his religious rituals carried out privately on his time, and sidetracked his career. Hanut ended up as Commandant, Armoured Corps Centre and School, Ahmednagar. The Defence Minister at the time, K.C. Pant, recalls that the army hierarchy was dead set against Hanut being given theatre command, which opposition, he says, he could not ignore.

Without getting into too much detail, the saga in the present case enters the critical stage with the freshly minted Lieutenant General Vijay Kumar Singh being handed command of the prestigious II Corps in 2006, which required his prior acquiescence in, as far as he was concerned, the wrong birth-date. It pushed him into first of the three significant compromises he willingly made when he could have, but did not, condition his successive promotions and acceptance of commands (ad seriatim, as General Officer Commanding — II Corps, General Officer-Commanding-in-Chief, Eastern Command, and finally COAS) on the Military Secretary’s Office modifying its records to show 1951 as his year of birth, which he had steadfastly maintained from the time of his commissioning. He can be faulted for “over-weaning ambition” for instead accepting the ambiguous promises made by the serving Chiefs of Staff, Generals J. J. Singh in 2006 and Deepak Kapoor in 2008 when last V.K. Singh took command of the Eastern Army, that they would take care of business. Neither of them did, and the age issue festered until now when it is a full-blown crisis that the Supreme Court will rule on today. It, of course, did not help that V.K. Singh’s personal relations with Kapoor, never very warm, chilled when the former succeeded in collaring the latter’s Adjutant General and confidante, Lt. Gen. Avdesh Prakash, in the Sukna land scam.

The beneficiary of General V.K. Singh’s uncorrected date of birth, it turns out, is his successor at Eastern Command, Lieutenant General Bikram Singh, who like him at the time he became COAS, is the senior most serving officer in the army and putative army chief should he retire as per the incorrect year of birth, by May-end 2012. The murky and interesting part of the story is this:  Assuming Bikram Singh was the man J.J. Singh hoped, down the line, to install as army chief then the latter had the motivation to disregard V.K. Singh’s protestations and keep the birth year anomaly intact.  No love lost between them, Kapoor had no reason to help V.K. Singh resolve this problem either. In both instances, the serving COASs were remiss in not acting in conformity with the army ethos requiring the senior officer to play scrupulously fair with and safeguard the interests of a junior officer, especially with so much at stake for latter. This then was the “succession plan”. This plan insofar as it was ostensibly obtained by design, premeditation, and careful calculation, raises the troubling issue about it being allowed to supercede the government’s right to appoint a COAS.  Put another way, the question is should the government not have exercised its exclusive right to appoint an officer of its choice, even alighting on Bikram Singh if it so wished, rather than anointing someone pre-selected by a former army chief as per a succession plan it was in the know of and decided to back? It is an issue that’s at the heart of civilian control over the military in a democracy.

The government decides on the criterion to stress — merit or seniority – when filling high level posts. The norm is for the person to be first chosen and for the selection criterion to be trotted out later. Thus, Shyam Saran was elevated as Foreign Secretary, for instance, on the basis of merit, but his successor, Nirupama Rao, was favoured on the basis of seniority. To decide whom to appoint and why, is entirely the government’s outlook and prerogative.  It is the uncertainty attending on the government’s decision that led Punjab politicians to canvas strongly with the government for Lieutenant General J.J. Singh’s promotion as COAS in 2005. It is, however, a dangerous precedent for the government to accede to an apparently motivated selection by a former COAS. With Vahnavati  going public with the “succession plan”, appointing Bikram Singh as COAS will reinforce the impression of a government too dumb to see the stratagem behind the uncorrected birth-year and too weak and distracted to select an army chief on its own.

On this issue as in others, A.K. Antony is revealed as a Defence Minister who trusts his intuition and informed judgement less but advice and notings on files by civil servants in his Ministry more. Politicians are supposed to be masters at instantly “reading” people and situations. But Antony is showing himself as lacking in this basic skill-set — bad advertisement for a supposedly strong political leader.

[Published in ‘The New Indian Express’ on February 10, 2012 but entitled “A fishy succession plan” at http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/op-ed/a-fishy-succession-plan/361914.html ]

Posted in civil-military relations, Indian Army, Indian Politics | 6 Comments

Unclear nuclear answers

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

At a small gathering yesterday (Feb 8) evening ostensibly called to provide the head of the French Atomic Energy Commission, Bernard Bigot, the opportunity to give safety assurances on the European Pressurised Reactor complex that the French Co., Areva, will construct at Jaitapur on the Konkan coast, the main safety feature he explained was the “islanding” of the “hard core” of the six reactors, each of 1,000 MW capacity, that will enable them to withstand “peak ground acceleration” of 0.25g should an earthquake strike.  Srikumar Banerjee, Chmn, AEC, who was chairing the Meet, said he was entirely unaware of the “hard core” concept which, he said, he had heard the first time only that morning in meetings with Bigot. Bigot was unable, however, to even hazard a guess about what the unit-cost of electricity produced by the Jaitapur complex will be — “it remains to be negotiated”, he said, as the final contract is yet to be signed. But R.B. Grover of DAE, the chief Indian interlocuter was confident it’d not exceed Rs 2.70 per unit that is the laid down standard for electricity from all sources. That the Jaitapur power will be available at this price sounds a bit fantastical to me! Grover also ventured that NPCIL and Indian Companies will be responsible for 40% of the work by value.

Posted in Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Technology transfer | Leave a comment

Art of deal-making

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

//

India and the United States resemble an old, estranged, couple who are too irked by each other’s frets and foibles to stay together but aware of too many shared interests to live apart. Their relations reek of familiarity even in their differences. These impressions are reinforced every time one engages with official Washington as happened last week whilst attending a conference as part of which I, along with three other Indian invitees, had the opportunity to discuss issues currently troubling bilateral ties with Republican congressman Steve Chabot, chairman of the sub-committee on West Asia and South Asia of the House Foreign Relations Committee and his staff, and separately with senior advisers to several US senators.

Apparently, India’s Medium-range Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) decision shortlisting Rafale and Eurofighter, with the former finally being selected, at the expense of the Lockheed F-16IN and the Boeing F/A-18IN, still rankles. Plainly, the US strategic community is perplexed that so important a decision was made not on “political grounds” as they believed should have been done, but on “technical” basis. They felt specially aggrieved because, or so it was hinted, the Manmohan Singh government had assured Washington that an US plane would be chosen. As a result, the Obama administration was primed to politically cash in on the deal as were many American legislators, Mr Chabot among them.

The congressman from Ohio’s 1st congressional district, Mr Chabot, vented his displeasure, indicating that the engines for both the US-sourced aircraft — the F-414 engine in the F/A-18 and the F-110 engine in the F-16, would have come from the GE factory in his constituency. I pointed out that GE’s Evendale facility in Cincinnati had already been afforded considerable business by India with orders for the GE F-404 engine for the Mk-I version of the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft, the GE F-414 engine for the Mk-II version, and the LM2500 marine gas turbine power plant in the CODOG (Combined diesel or gas) configuration driving the indigenous Shivalik-class stealth frigates with the Indian Navy. Mr Chabot may know little about specific defence deals, but his protest proves that all politics is local. What matters to influential US lawmakers are less the common values and the geopolitical convergence of interests animating Indo-US relations — though these provide the justification — than the reality of commercial deals that generate jobs.

It leads one to wonder if the reluctance of the US government to part with source codes, flight control laws, and other super-sensitive information as part of a comprehensive transfer of technology deal — one of the reasons for rejecting the US aircraft, could have been moderated by carefully cultivating strategically important US senators and congressmen, and orchestrating sufficient pressure from the Capitol Hill. A senior official of an US aerospace major, speaking to me on the sidelines of the conference, emphatically suggested as much. Indeed, he went on to castigate both the US government for imposing a ceiling on technologies that could be sold to India, and the Indian government for quietly accepting these limits instead of forcefully using the “leverage” India has to insist, demand, and otherwise extract more advanced technology than what US companies are permitted to sell.

He further averred that India did not quite appreciate the leverage it has. Riled by the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS) consortium (Eurofighter) and Dassault Avions (Rafale) not being similarly constrained, the US aviation industry official stated unequivocally that American aerospace companies would willingly sell sophisticated technology, source codes and all, to India; the trick, he said, lay in Delhi mounting sustained government-to-government pressure on Washington in tandem with the Indian embassy channelling to important US legislators election campaign funds generated by politically active and wealthy non-resident Indians and NRI associations in America.

There will always be some payoffs from such pressure tactics. But the US government does not, on principle, allow even its closest Nato allies to access its cutting-edge technologies, so India stands little chance, realistically, of doing so, no matter what’s at stake and how much it is willing to put out. In the event, a far better way to reap technology benefits is to do so indirectly, by mining the American military’s incomparable operational experience with advanced systems and its high-tech savvy.

In fact, the US armed services’ eagerness to render this sort of assistance is reflected in a pioneering venture involving the naval variant of the Tejas. The Indian Navy had reportedly considered consulting with EADS and Dassault in areas such as determining the location of the arrester hook-landing system, ways to test this system, “aerodynamic fixes” to improve carrier takeoff and landing, optimising landing gear design to handle larger operating weight, integrating operational payload, reduction of aircraft weight, selecting an alternative engine for a better power-to-weight ratio, etc. The US Navy, which has the most extensive carrier aviation experience, was finally approached for advice.

The Indian Navy’s gambit paid off. Its Letter of Request, while occasioning a short but intense debate in the Office of the US Chief of Naval Operations, elicited a positive response. A Letter of Agreement and consultancy contract soon followed, and veteran US naval aviators, deputed for the job, began working seamlessly on the Light Combat Aircraft many months back. The reason for the success of this scheme, according to a Pentagon officer, was that all relevant decisions on the Indian side — from initial contact, drafting the consultancy contract, to payments and arrangements for hosting the American naval aviators — emanated from a single source, the officer heading the programme, Commodore C.D. Balaji, with the redtape-inclined defence ministry having no role.

Given its success, this seems an excellent means of encouraging high-value, home-grown, military R&D projects and enabling them to gain from practical knowledge and hands-on expertise transferred by stalwarts of the US forces. It is a model Air Force and Army will do well to emulate: create a stake in, and take charge of, projects that will produce in-country worthwhile military hardware.

[published simultaneously in ‘The Asian Age’ at www.asianage.com/columnists.art-deal-making-480 and in ‘The Deccan Chronicle’, Thursday, February 2, 2012]

Posted in Defence Industry, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, Military Acquisitions, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer | Leave a comment

Talk in Princeton by Bharat Karnad on strategic security issues -video

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Bharat Karnad

Complete Video (in 10 segments) of my talk on India’s strategic security issues at what was billed as a “Jirga” in Princeton on November 13, 2011, arranged by Bharat-rakshak Forum habitues residing in the NY/NJ area may be accessed at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL31BA8C2D60DA2052 . For some reason various URLs do not work. Best to reach www.youtube.com and type in “Talk by Bharat Karnad”.  

Posted in Defence Industry, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian Navy, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Military Acquisitions, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Relations with Russia, Special Forces, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West | 3 Comments