A-5 test launch cancelled

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Just learned that the test firing of the canisterized Agni-5 that was earlier scheduled for yesterday and postponed virtually at the last hour, has now been cancelled altogether, at least in the present time window. This decision at the highest levels of govt was owing to Washington’s supposed allergy to rising powers displaying their distant strike capabilities. The K-4 SLBM fired from a moored underwater pontoon tube system tested March 8 was, unlike the A-5, not in a ready state of induction. A-5, hermetically sealed in a canister with a dummy warhead, was set to be launched from its mobile platform to its full range, whence the Modi PMO’s hesitation.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Defence Industry, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Navy, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Nuclear Weapons, Strategic Forces Command, United States, US., Weapons | 13 Comments

Missile test-launch schedule altered

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

A second test firing of a cannisterized Agni-5 IRBM, which was announced by DRDO early Feb without the date being revealed, was scheduled from Balasore on the Odisha coast today. It didn’t take place. Instead, a 700km A-1 MRBM was launched, perhaps, as consolation. The talk is the instructions for this change came from PMO which was concerned US President Barack Obama would have been upset by the symbolically “provocative” action of firing a long range missile in the run-up to the nuclear security summit in Washington, thereby imperiling the “success” of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s trip, March 31-April 1.

The problem though is DRDO’s launch schedule cannot so casually be trifled with because there’s high level of preparations that are involved. As mentioned in a previous blog the window for the test firings is for this week. It remains to be seen if the A-5 was merely postponed or taken off the table altogether and should the cannisterized A-5 launch not happen in the next few days, then those in the know claim it’d be a good indication of the BJP govt bending to US’ will much as its predecessor Congress Party regime had done during its tenure, and the desire to please the US Govt is uppermost in its mind rather than the national interest.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, disarmament, domestic politics, DRDO, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Ocean, Missiles, nonproliferation, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, society, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Weapons | 5 Comments

Securing realism at the Washington summit

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The United States President Barack Obama, perhaps, to justify his winning the Nobel Peace Prize for just one peroration in Prague in April 2009 initiated the so-called nuclear security summits. Ironically, in the speech, he did not promise any progress towards a “world without nuclear weapons”, but mentioned the need for nuclear governance measures within the confines of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to protect “vulnerable nuclear material”. It is something these summits have pondered, and the last of which — Obama’s diplomatic swan song is scheduled in Washington appropriately for Fool’s Day (March 31-April 1). Except, measures to keep nukes away from terrorists and madmen only underline the iniquitous nuclear status quo and, where disarmament is concerned, amounts to putting the cart before the horse.

New Delhi’s enthusiasm for these summits is incomprehensible. Animated less by national interest than a desire to join the causes dear to the US, Indian prime ministers have been imprudent, ignoring the wisdom of staying aloof from such international conferences that invariably end up eroding India’s freedom of strategic action and room for foreign policy manoeuvre. Responsible for negotiating the deleterious nuclear deal with the US, which stymied the country’s development of thermonuclear weapons fetched India nothing in return — neither the rights and privileges of a nuclear weapons state nor the membership of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, as assured by the July 18, 2005 joint statement signed between then US President George W Bush and then prime minister Manmohan Singh. Singh, however, attended the first two of these summits.

As if to prove he is no laggard in conceding sovereign nuclear policy ground, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has prepared for the Washington conference by formally committing to join the Convention on Supplementary Compensation (CSC). This gesture, while doubtless pleasing to the US government and Western nuclear industry leaders, who can expect to sell India nuclear power plants worth tens of billions of dollars, violates the 2010 Nuclear Liability Act. This made foreign vendors accountable for accidents sourced to deficient or flawed nuclear reactors and related technologies they supply, and does not limit their compensation to victims, as the CSC does to $300 million. Modi’s flouting the Act means the Indian taxpayer not only pays through his nose for technologically faulty imported nuclear reactors but, in the case of nuclear accidents, also for compensatory payouts in excess of the CSC cap, which could potentially run into billions of dollars.

Nuclear governance presumes a stable nuclear order. But the extant regime has always been roiled by the ongoing strategic force modernisation and augmentation programmes of the five NPT-recognised nuclear weapons states (P5). It has destroyed Article VI of the NPT requiring disarmament negotiations in good faith by the P5 and hence the treaty itself.

The US is investing $1 trillion to rebuild its strategic triad over 30 years or $35 billion annually, including the upgrading of the B61 Mod 12 tactical nuclear bomb, designing new “tailored yield” thermonuclear warheads, developing next generation strategic bomber and nuclear-powered submarines in order to achieve, what deputy secretary of defence Bob Work called “technological overmatch” against Russia and China. Russia is spending some $16 billion a year in sharpening its nuclear attack capability, stressing the centrality of its modernised arsenal in future wars and as means of compensating for its conventional military inferiority (thereby neatly reversing its thrust of the Cold War when it enjoyed a massive conventional military edge). Moscow has embarked on a new strategic bomber (Tu-PAK DA) project, and deployed the advanced Borei-class ballistic nuclear missile firing nuclear submarine (SSBN), and the Topol-M Inter-Continental range Ballistic Missile (ICBM) that President Vladimir Putin has deemed “indefensible”.

China with an annual expenditure in excess of $10 billion on its newly named Strategic Rocket Forces is the only P5 state increasing the size of its nuclear arms inventory besides fielding new fusion warheads on DF-21A and DF-31 missiles, and the JL-2 submarine-launched missile from the new Jin-class SSBN. Meanwhile, Britain and France, each with yearly budgets for strategic forces of around $7 billion, are seeking to modernise their thermonuclear warheads by sharing in fusion weapons advancement infrastructure (Teutates programme), such as the multi-axes hydrographic-radiographic testing EPURE facility at Valduc with second and third laser streams becoming operational by 2019 and 2022, respectively in the inertial confinement fusion facility in Bordeaux. The British nuclear weapons establishment at Aldermaston has just improved the W76-1Mk-4 hydrogen warhead for hardened targets, and installed the Orion laser that is a thousand times more powerful than the Helen system it replaced.

The militant tilt of the P5 aside, China continues to undermine India’s nuclear security by transferring to Pakistan design expertise to configure new missiles and miniaturise its fission warheads. The Modi government, much like its predecessor, has reacted to the skewing of the international and regional nuclear military “correlation of forces” by actually strengthening the decrepit NPT system that has victimised India by, among other things, reiterating the testing moratorium. Disowning a treaty it is not signatory to, resuming open-ended testing to extend the country’s thermonuclear muscle and reach, and responding, however belatedly, to China’s proliferation excesses with tit-for-tat transfer of critical nuclear missile technologies to countries such as Vietnam, on the Chinese periphery, is the way to go. But New Delhi seems content only with occasionally tom-tomming India’s ICBM and thermonuclear punch when, in fact, absence of evidence indicates evidence of absence of any such capabilities.

It is time Modi departed from the traditional script and spoke candidly at the Washington summit about the irreparable NPT regime and hinted at India’s options. He may win himself and the country leverage and respect by speaking the truth.
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Published in the Hindustan Times, March 15, 2016 at “http://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/securing-realism-at-the-washington-summit/story-of5K9XPAwZuEAXIWmtD77H.html, and and in the print edition entitled “Let’s rewrite the script now”.

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India in America’s coils?

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

This is a piece on the likelihood and the ramifications of the Modi govt signing the so-called “foundational agreements” starting with the Logistics Support Agreement (LSA), published today (March 11, 2016) in thecitizen.in — ‘India’s First Independent Online Daily’, at http://www.thecitizen.in/index.php/NewsDetail/index/1/7109/India-in-Americas-Coils. It is a topic I have been writing about for several years now, and explored in some depth in my new book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ as well. But apparently it is not a matter of concern for many people in the country.
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It is a devastating turn of events – the indication that the Bharatiya Janata Party government will soon sign the three so-called “foundational” accords with the United States that Washington has been fiercely pushing in the past decade.

The Logistics Support Agreement (LSA) is first in line. The other two agreements are the CISMOA (Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement) and BECA (Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for geospatial information and data).

LSA, the most significant of these, will permit the military forces of each country to resupply and replenish, and stage operations out of the other’s military air bases, land facilities, and ports. CISMOA will allow integration of the communications networks and systems enabling the two sides, for example, to mount military actions together, assist unit and higher echelon commanders to converse in peacetime and war, using real time communications links, and to share classified data and information. BECA will, in the main, facilitate the exchange of sensitive information picked up by sensors on satellites and other space-based platforms.

There are some tactical military advantages to accepting some of these accords, such as BECA which will, with digitized maps, cue Indian missiles and combat aircraft to target coordinates. But there are many more negative geopolitical and strategic consequences to becoming America’s military ally in all but name. These aspects have not been publicly discussed and the government is getting a free pass to drastically change India’s geostrategics and foreign policy. But first a bit of recent history to contextualize this development.

In India ideology has always been conflated with foreign policy and suggests that elected governments in New Delhi are motivated only minimally by concerns of national interest. Thus, left-of-centre Congress party governments, besides “socialist” policy nostrums and statist solutions for socio-economic ills of the country, have invariably aligned foreign and defence policies with what used to be the Soviet Bloc and, post-Cold War, owing to inertia in official thinking, with Russia.

Likewise, the ideologically right-leaning Bharatiya Janata Party when in power talked individual initiative and free enterprise at home and sported a US (and generally, West)-friendly attitude abroad. Even so, different party and coalition regimes never overstepped the bounds of the “consensus” view of not closing in with any great power. Balance of power has always been preferred in the external realm and, whenever possible, India has also acted as balancer in the global system to maintain equilibrium. It made for an accretion in India’s political, diplomatic, and military leverage and heft, and obtained a stable international “correlation of forces” which, because it was prevented from ever tipping over, did not permanently favour any particular power and skew the game.

This policy stance and world view began wavering in the last decade. The Congress Party government under Manmohan Singh in 2004-2014, instead of gently steering the policy back to mid-channel, as it were, followed up on the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led BJP government’s NSSP (Next Steps in the Strategic Partnership) initiative, made quite extraordinary concessions to the United States for the civilian nuclear cooperation deal. This deal predicated on New Delhi’s sticking with the so-called “voluntary moratorium” announced by Vajpayee after the 1998 Shakti series of nuclear tests, a decision made with little forethought even less strategic foresight, hobbled not just India’s thermonuclear weapons capability and the indigenous nuclear industry based on reactors run on natural uranium and the abundant locally available thorium to attain energy independence envisaged by the 1955 three-stage Bhabha Plan, but lofted America into the central position in the country’s geopolitics and foreign policy.

As this analyst had predicted, the disastrous nuclear deal led to growing pressures on the Indian government to mesh Indian policy interests with those of Washington and to ground intimate military cooperation and coordination supposedly to address common threats – China and Islamic terrorism, in the foundational agreements. The Barack Obama Administration also cleverly weaved the issue of India’s access to US high-technology and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Make in India’ rhetoric into the emerging matrix, saying that without these accords the Indian demand for high-technology collaboration wouldn’t materialize.

The trouble is these accords will mainly achieve for the US its grand strategic objective of reducing India, in effect, to a client state, like, well, Pakistan! It is a denouement the country had avoided in the Fifties and Sixties when it survived on US aid largesse and “ship to mouth” American PL 480 grain and, more recently, during the otherwise pliant dispensation of Manmohan Singh owing to the stonewalling by the Leftist defence minister, A.K. Antony.

So, what’s the problem? LSA requires portions of the host country’s air and land bases set aside for use by its military units and of ports where its ships will berth, to be literally taken over by American personnel with responsibility for any and all activity in these delineated zones coming under exclusive US authority. Thus, the US exercises near absolute control of parts of the Pakistan Air Force base at Jacobabad.

This arrangement is meant to ensure security of US military assets and secrecy of missions undertaken by them. In essence, the host country loses sovereign control over portions of its own territory. True, with local sensitivities in mind, the LSA with India may be tweaked for dual or joint control with US activity in these areas possibly coming under some sort of attenuated Indian oversight. But it will not dilute the fact that a foreign power will wield authority in India, which last happened when the British colonials lorded over this country.

What India gets in return – the ability of Indian naval ships and submarines to be resupplied in Diego Garcia, say, and for aircraft to refuel there, will doubtless extend India’s maritime density and presence and air surveillance reach. But the garnering of such facilities begs the larger geostrategic question as to why New Delhi has not established naval and air bases in North and South Agalega Islands the Mauritius government long ago offered India, and on the northern Mozambique coast where Maputo has been urging India to emplace its naval units. The Agalega and Mozambiqan bases would make the Indian military independent of any need for a mid-oceanic resupply option provided by Diego Garcia, courtesy the US.

Why be beholden to a foreign power whose interests do not overlap with India’s, when the country can have distant and separate military presence in Mauritius and the East African littoral? Besides, the Indian military oriented to territorial defence, will nowhere utilize the far flung US bases and military resources as much as the more actively deployed US military units in the Indian Ocean and West Asia will use Indian bases. So, on balance which country’s interests does the LSA actually serve?

CISMOA is extraneous to the need for the simple reason that the lack of a shared communications grid has not stopped interoperability from being realized by jerry-built solutions, which have proved adequate. In the annual Malabar naval exercises, for instance, Indian and US ships communicate through the US-supplied Centrix interface plugged into Indian vessels and manned by American seamen to permit ship-to-ship and command communications.

Moreover, some sections of the Indian armed forces have so far resisted the idea of integrating communications system because of the not unreasonable fear it will permit US “penetration” of the Indian military command, control, and communications net to the highest levels, and the insertion of cyber warfare-capable, remotely activated, “bugs” that can extract, store, and transmit classified information, and sabotage it.

BECA will become redundant once the entire Indian constellation of some 13 satellites is up which will happen inside of another five years. With the successful launch of the sixth IRNSS satellite the system is more than half way there, and has sub-metre photo imagery capacity and a footprint covering the entire sea and landmass of Asia relevant to India’s security concerns.

There will, however, be a more telling fallout. A miffed Russia, already apprehensive about India’s increasing military closeness to the US and the West, may decide to shrink technology transfer and assistance programmes in the most sensitive and critical strategic armament areas, such as in developing a powerful highly enriched uranium-fueled nuclear power plant to run the second Kochi-built aircraft carrier, the 65,000 ton-class INS Vishal. Really crucial high value technology help is not, under any circumstances, something Washington will render for love or money. A sufficiently riled Moscow could virtually instantly bring the Indian conventional military, strategic forces, DRDO, and defence industry to its knees (and its senses?) by withdrawing its support and collaborative help.

Then there’s the fact that US military presence on Indian soil will attract the attentions of jihadis and Islamist radicals, ranging from the al-Qaeda and Islamic State, to the garden variety terrorist outfits — Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, and its ilk, and their local offshoots. Because India will be responsible for the overall security of American military materiel and manpower in India, the central, state and local Indian government, police, and intelligence agencies will have their hands full trying to keep Americans and their property safe. And any shortfalls in security leading to successful terrorist attacks on American personnel and assets will blow up in New Delhi’s face.

It is not certain the Modi government has considered any of the politico-military ramifications of signing the three agreements and their social impact, properly assessed the dire internal security risks of terrorists targeting the American presence, nor pondered the political and diplomatic costs and the debilitating effects of India being perceived in the world as an American appendage rather than as a proud and independent country and emerging great power in Asia to rival China.

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K-4 launched but media not informed

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

As anticipated in previous blog, the K-4 SLBM was successfully test-fired from an underwater pontoon off Vizag on Monday, March 7. The govt/DRDO have still to inform the media/press about it. The logic behind such rationing of publicity, however, escapes me. Sure, a failed launch is best kept under wraps. But the success of what is a decisive nuclear warhead delivery system from submerged platform is something that needs to be crowed about a bit, just so everybody knows. May be GOI/DRDO will later, if not sooner, get to this task.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Defence Industry, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Navy, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Nuclear Weapons, South Asia, Strategic Forces Command, Weapons | 6 Comments

Slew of Missile firings?

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

In the next week or so, a slew of missile test-firings will take place. The submarine-launched K-4, which other than its publicized launches has been test-fired a number of times without public notice, will be triggered again. The most important design characteristic of the K-4 are the rocket motors around the nose-cone that literally pull the missile up out of the water. This can be seen in a video — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_feco6vn7E&feature=youtu.be. In it one can clearly see the water being forcefully ejected after the K-4 has cleared the water surface. Those who know say this is a uniquely Russian SLBM design feature to get the missile out of the water and to increase its boost velocity.

But, more important still is the Agni-5 — the most significant advanced missile in the inventory, which was supposed to have been fired last Fall, and will finally be tested with another launch. The Kasturirangan metric for induction of a missile after a minimum of three successive and successful test firings means, this missile — absent a snafu — will be ready to enter service as well, firming up the strategic triad.

The question is why this sudden spate of missile tests — assuming, of course, the firings actually obtain? The reason for the A-5 not being fired around October 2015, I had speculated then, was to avoid riling Washington. But with the Obama Admin pushing the F-16 sale to Pakistan and generally not sharing the sense of urgency in stifling the Pakistan Army-sponsored terrorist gangs, such as LeT, et al, Modi has apparently decided to flex Indian muscle. The Indian govt’s declining to join Japan and the US navies in exercises in the seas around the Philippines meant to send a clear message to China to rein in its ambitions in the South China Sea followed quickly by the missile launches, is to signal the US not to take Delhi for granted.

Whether this is a one-off thing rather than a sustained policy of standing up for the national interest, remains to be seen. After all, Modi is headed for the so-called “nuclear security summit” in Washington — Obama’s diplomatic swansong this month end and what he says there will, in fact, reveal the country’s formal stance. If, as is expected, he’ll join in the nonproliferation chorus then it’ll become obvious he is less keen to preserve the country’s options than in pleasing the West. To show Delhi means business, Modi should green signal preparations for the test-firing of the Agni-6 ICBM able to carry a three-ton payload of MIRVs, the development of which to-date has been, at best, leisurely, at worst, criminal. For too long the impression has been given by successive Indian govts of a pliant India that’s easy to manipulate and, hence, to disregard. Modi should rethink the policy of intimacy with the US and the West, especially if it ends up losing the country its freedom of action.

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Review in ‘American Diplomacy’

Posted on March 5, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Featured Review of my book –‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ in ‘American Diplomacy’, February 2016, by Jon Dorschner, former US diplomat and currently Professor in International Relations and South Asian Studies, School of Government & Public Policy, University of Arizona, Tucson; at http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2016/0106/rv/book02_dorschner.html
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Bharat Karnad is a substantive Indian intellectual with a strong pedigree. He is a professional analyst with the prestigious Indian think tank the Centre for Policy Research, who specializes in military/security affairs, particularly nuclear weapons policy. The Indian government and military frequently rely on Karnad to provide lucid policy recommendations. His two previous books concentrated on nuclear arms policy. His current work goes a step further.

In Why India is not a Great Power (Yet), Karnad presents a specific research thesis. He first makes the case that while India has for some time possessed the potential to become a great power, it has to date failed to do so. He then provides a number of reasons for this failure, and concludes with a list of specific policy recommendations to end this impasse.

Karnad is an unabashed and self-proclaimed conservative, who is proud to assert his right wing credentials. As such, he is a strong believer in traditional International Relations principles and has little patience for left of center IR scholars trying to break out of the traditional matrix and devise a new paradigm. This well-written and well-documented work resembles the classic IR books of Henry Kissinger and Karnad shares Kissinger’s ideological orientation. For Karnad, 19th Century realism has lost none of its ideological and explanatory power, and remains the only viable international relations system. The book is valuable because Karnad systematically applies these principles to his thesis, opening up a serious topic for debate.

Karnad is a committed Indian nationalist. As such, he is suspicious of the United States. He does not want to see India allied with the U.S., which he characterizes as a duplicitous and self-interested power that is inherently unreliable. Instead, India should assert its independence and become one of the poles in an emerging multipolar world. He asserts that India “cannot afford to be detached from the international system which is tending towards bipolarity—after the short interregnum of U.S. dominance—with China the other pole. To make sure the international system trends towards multipolarity instead and India is not swamped by China in Asia, New Delhi will have to utilize its hard power more strenuously.”1

As a doctrinaire realist, Karnad sees no reason why liberal concerns such as the environment and human rights should play a role in Indian policy formulation. Therefore, while quick to reject close ties between India and the U.S., he advocates that India work closely with Iran and Russia to achieve mutual ends, despite the fact that these two countries have ties to terrorism, human rights abuse, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

As a classical realist in the Kissinger mode, Karnad rank orders the world’s nation states, with the “great powers” at the top. In this worldview, every state should maximize its potential and strive to reach the highest rank. To such realists, every state seeks power, and the two principal determinants of power are economic success and a strong military. For Karnad the purpose of prosperity is not merely to raise living standards, but to fund the powerful military that is the prerequisite for national success.

Karnad contends that India failed to harness its economic and military potential because Indian governmental and military elites lack assertiveness. To achieve great power status, he argues, India must embrace aggression. “India will have to discard its tendency to please Washington and Beijing, and become more disruptive in Asia and globally because that’s what great powers and would-be great powers do—they break eggs to make the great power omelette.”2 Karnad attributes India’s failure of will to its colonial legacy and the subsequent domination by the left wing Congress Party and its leader Jawaharlal Nehru.

As an unabashed right wing ideologue, Karnad wears his views on his sleeve. He lays India’s failures on the doorstep of the Congress Party and its leftist allies and supporters. He firmly rejects the underlying principals of Congress foreign, security, and economic policy, and sees the ascent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as a breath of fresh air that could potentially reverse decades of wrong policies.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh epitomizes everything wrong with the Congress Party in Karnad’s eyes. Karnad criticizes Singh and his government for their inherent unwillingness to meet the threat posed by a resurgent China, reluctance to embrace nuclear weapons as a foreign policy and military tool, strong belief in the efficacy of “soft power,” and willingness to be a “free rider,” accepting the tacit protection of an American nuclear umbrella, while skirting the need to develop sufficient military force for self protection. He also derides India’s Nehruvian legacy and heaps contempt on Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, who he believes emasculated India with his fuzzy headed promulgation of non-violence and rejection of industrial capitalism.

This work is not a nuanced exposition that tries to look at issues from all sides. There are no shades of gray. The world is black and white. To become a great power, India must embrace military power. It must reject its current obsession with Pakistan and realize that a military confrontation with China is all but inevitable. If India is not strong, Karnad asserts, it is inviting Chinese domination. Karnad contends that China is pursuing a clever policy of continually asserting its power, while reassuring India of its good intentions. “Indian foreign policy is also handicapped by a beguiling naiveté of seeing the world in terms of friendly powers and states such as China that are geostrategic adversaries but who can be won over by the soft touch.”34

Economically, Karnad has overwhelming faith in capitalism and the power of the markets. Like so many policy analysts and much of the world’s policy elite, he believes that economic liberalization will unleash unlimited economic growth. “Once the reverse thrusters are taken off, as promised by Modi, a surging Indian economy will increase government revenues, making more funds available for education, skilling and social welfare programs, and for discriminate expenditures to gain a consequential military.”4 He asserts that once India totally rejects its Nehruvian socialist inheritance, (strong labor unions, planned economy, regulation, public sector) and gives free rein to capitalism, it will set off a prolonged period of unprecedented economic growth that will provide sufficient resources to not only eliminate Indian poverty once and for all, but pay for a totally restructured and powerful military equipped with state of the art military technology.

Having laid out his basic thesis, Karnad provides a plethora of specific policy recommendations. This makes the book particularly valuable. I found some recommendations to be dangerous if not ludicrous. These include, immediately testing thermonuclear weapons, planting nuclear mines in the Himalayas, and providing state of the art military technology to Asian states as part of a China containment policy. Particularly disturbing is Karnad’s casual rejection of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT) and his chilling descriptions of the tactical use of nuclear weapons. He seems to see no inherent danger in the continuing spread of nuclear weapons to more and more countries. He sees no reasons why India should embrace nonproliferation or try to work to stem the spread of nuclear weapons. Karnad also casually recommends that India reject participation in worldwide efforts to stem climate change, and that India abandon environmental regulations if they in any way impede India’s untrammeled economic development.

I applaud Karnad’s willingness to present a long list of policy recommendations, even when some appear outlandish. This shows a great mind at work and is a principal task of policy analysts.

I also find some of his recommendations refreshing and worthy of serious consideration by policy makers. For example, Karnad’s analysis of the failings of India’s military procurement policy is spot on. Karnad wonders why India spends huge sums purchasing military hardware from other countries, when it is perfectly capable of self-sufficiency. He points out that India has successfully produced sophisticated satellites, missiles, and aircraft, and asks why it continues to buy tanks, airplanes, and artillery at great expense from other countries. He rightfully asserts that not only does this make India dependent on other countries for spare parts, ammunition and maintenance; it hobbles the Indian economy and wastes valuable resources that could better be spent elsewhere. Karnad is correct. India should be self-sufficient in military research and production. It should integrate its public and private sectors and harness its talent and resources to create almost everything required by its armed forces. It is also true that India’s defense sector could then produce military hardware much cheaper than that produced by other countries that would be very attractive to militaries of other developing countries.

Karnad also calls for India to once and for all end its military obsession with Pakistan, dismantling two of the three “strike corps” deployed along the Pakistan border and reorienting them into mountain forces that could defend India against Chinese incursions along the contested Himalayan border. Karnad is correct in asserting that this could reassure Pakistan that India has no designs on its national integrity and perhaps inaugurate a much-needed era of bilateral cooperation between these two contending states.

Karnad also calls for the creation of three adjoining “Monroe doctrines” designed to hedge in China and defend the rest of Asia against Chinese territorial expansion. India would be responsible for policing the Indian Ocean, while ASEAN and Japan would look after East Asia. As part of this concept, Karnad wants India to formally ally with Japan and the countries of Southeast Asia (most particularly Vietnam) to include basing rights for the Indian navy, training, joint exercises, and the provision of Indian manufactured military hardware to these friendly states on bargain terms. This would certainly end India’s “free rider” status and would amount to India stepping up to the plate and assuming its fair share in the construction of an indigenous Asian defense system not reliant solely on American military power and the American nuclear umbrella. This is a concept with some merit and deserves serious discussion and consideration.

One aspect of Karnad’s ideological orientation that I find refreshing is his refutation of the BJP’s Hindu nationalism. Karnad is an Indian nationalist. He does not differentiate between Indians of differing ethnicities and religious orientations. He looks at all Indians the same. He has no patience for the Hindu nationalists’ pejorative characterization of Muslims, Christians and other non-Hindu minorities as second-class citizens or not real Indians. This is fully consistent with Karnad’s realist orientation, which sees no role for religion in the formulation of foreign policy and views religious nationalism as antithetical to the national interest.

This book is a valuable addition to the literature on modern India and sketches out in great detail a possible foreign policy approach. It is certainly intriguing to see what foreign policy decisions India would take if its policy elites were classical realists. It provides real food for thought.

While the book is well written and well documented, it did not need to be this long. There is considerable repetition of basic points and American readers could find it overly wordy. The Indian drafting style does not emphasize conciseness to the same extent as the American. An American editor would have cut the book by up to several hundred pages. I suspect that the book’s length and repetition is at least partially due to the fact that Karnad mined his many published articles and did some cutting and pasting while preparing the manuscript.

Notes
1. Page 518
2. page 520
3. page 516
4. page 517

American Diplomacy is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to American Diplomacy.

A native of Tucson, Arizona, Jon P. Dorschner earned a PhD. in South Asian studies from the University of Arizona. He currently teaches South Asian Studies and International Relations at his alma mater, and publishes articles and books on South Asian subjects. From 1983 until 2011, he was a career Foreign Service Officer. A Political Officer, Dr. Dorschner’s career specialties were internal politics and political/military affairs. He served in Germany, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, the United States Military Academy at West Point and Washington. From 2003-2007 he headed the Internal Politics Unit at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, India. In 2007-2008 Dr. Dorschner completed a one-year assignment on an Italian Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Tallil, Iraq. From 2009-2011 he served as an Economic Officer, in Berlin, Germany.

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Force 18 Multi-nation Military Drill: Will Indian Army Host Well?

Posted on March 2, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

‘Force 18’, initially labelled ‘FTX-2016’, is an ambitious military training exercise involving army units from eighteen countries – ten members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN,) plus eight observer states – India, Japan, Korea, China, Russia, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. It is scheduled to be held from 2-8 March, in Pune, headquarters of the Indian Army’s Southern Command.

It is interesting that India was readily accepted as the host, planner and manager of the first such war game. May be because India is crucial to maintaining the geopolitical balance in the extended region, and serve as a bridge between China and the United States. It is, moreover, the preferred strategic partner for the littoral states on the South China Sea, as it riles Beijing less to see these countries concert with India than with the US.

It is curious that so many otherwise adversarial armies agreed to be a part of this drill. Perhaps, none of the major military powers – China, US and Russia – wanted to be left out of a group, which could emerge as the lynchpin in a stable Asian order.

Preparations for Force 18 began in September last year with an Indian team, led by Brigadier Ashok Narula. It involved articulating the tasks, defining the tactical manoeuvres, and laying down the benchmarks. Twenty-five foreign army personnel were brought in for training, acquainted with the exercise plan and the separate, distinct roles assigned to various country units in detail. Trainees were taught to recognise and how to go about realizing the planned action parameters. These trainees returned to prepare and train their units for ‘Force 18’.

Achieving a modicum of interoperability between these disparate armies in bilateral/multilateral peacekeeping and mine clearance operations under the aegis of the United Nations in conflict zones is the ostensible aim of this massive exercise. But it will be more a test of the Indian army’s logistics management.

A Unique Military Drill

It is curious that so many otherwise adversarial armies agreed to be a part of a multinational drill.
None of the major military powers – China, US and Russia – wanted to be left out of a group, which could emerge as the focal point of geopolitics.

The Objective

Interoperability, after all, is a function of familiarity with each other’s best practices and standard operating procedures (SOPs). The first such exercise, in the event, will have the very basic goal of not getting in each other’s way. Many more such military exercises will be needed before the relevant capabilities of the ‘Force 18’ constituents can be meshed.

Observing, interacting and working with each other at close quarters on common military tasks will enable the more advanced, technologically savvy, organisationally flexible, integrated and network-centred militaries to emerge as models to emulate. All this is theory, but will the exercise proceed smoothly in practice?

Adversaries Come Together

There are intriguing aspects of this massive multi-nation military exercise. First, how will these militaries, vastly differing from each other in military culture, ethos and way of doing things, dovetail their attitudes, operating systems and SOPs?

And secondly, how will they perform their assigned collective tasks while remaining careful not to reveal too much of their own specialised weapons, weapons handling skills and modes of command and control and communications in the field, lest this information be used against them during possible tussles in the future?

It is hardly a secret that India and China are at odds, or that ASEAN, backed by the US, are on a collision course with China in the South China Sea. And, that America is at loggerheads with Russia in Syria, and in a revived confrontation redolent of the Cold War, in Europe. Or that Japan is in a condition of near-permanent hostility over the Senkaku/Diayou Islands with China, and more passively with Russia over the Kurile Islands that Stalin ordered to be occupied at the fag end of World War II.

Strong animosities even in peacetime military exercises can, however, translate into rumbles. Violent incidents can be sparked by young, charged-up soldiers over imagined slights, and the situation can quickly get out of hand if the host Indian Army managers fail, for whatever reasons, to maintain control, and the participating troops lose their sense of equanimity. It could well be that – rather than the 18 disparate land force units together honing their respective peacekeeping skills, the Indian side will be kept busy with maintaining peace between them!
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Published in ‘The Quint’ March 2, 2016; at http://www.thequint.com/opinion/2016/03/02/force-18-multi-nation-military-drill-will-indian-army-host-well

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Australia, China, China military, Culture, Cyber & Space, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Army, Japan, Northeast Asia, Russia, russian military, society, South Asia, South East Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Vietnam, Western militaries | 4 Comments

IAF’s trainer medley

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Defmin Parrikar’s decisive push for the indigenous HTT-40 as basic trainer — MOD ordering over 70 of this aircraft before a prototype is up and flying, is a good thing alright, but also demolishes IAF’s plan for a two (foreign) aircraft training regime — the norm of most modern air forces the world over. This plan involved the Swiss Pilatus PC-7 as basic trainer-cum-its upgraded variants Mk-II/PC-21 for the intermediate stage (where pilots are trained to pull out of a spin, etc) and the ex-British, HAL assembled, Hawk as the jet trainer before transitioning the entrant-level pilots to advance training in specific aircraft (MiG-21 bis, MiG-29, Jaguar, Su-30, Mirage 2000) at the squadron level. This would have made sense if IAF, at the time of securing Pilatus, had chosen the more sophisticated Mk-II/PC-21 version that’d have done duty in both the basic and intermediate trainer flying stages. Instead IAF, as is its wont, thinking short-term (to get MOD’s approval for the Pilatus buy) plonked (in “Charlie” Browne’s time as CAS) for some 70-odd of the cheaper PC-7 turboprops, in the expectation that MOD would be stampeded in time into OKing the purchase of an additional 100, higher priced, Mk-IIs/PC-21s. The Parrikar decision apparently nixes this latter option. The question then is can IAF do with just HTT-40 and Hawk as the two trainer aircraft — one turbo-prop, the other jet?

HAL/ADA should have long ago gotten into the business of designing, developing, and producing a successor to the HPT-32 Deepak and HJT-16 Kiran 1, 1A, and Mk-II jet trainers, with over 118, 72, and 61 respectively in service. The question is why did this NOT happen? Well, we know the answer, because IAF preferred Western aircraft for all stages of pilot training. Hence, the Deepak HPT-32 and Kiran Mk-II with a Bristol-Siddely Orpheus jet engine that originally powered the license-produced Gnat never had follow-on Indian aircraft, with IAF actively discouraging the development of indigenous turboprop and jet successors, leaving GOI with no alternative other than to import first the Hawk and later the Pilatus.

This is an old, tested, and proven IAF tactic of preempting development and production of indigenously designed aircraft, shouting and screaming publicly about “voids” and otherwise scaring the govt of the day into permitting buys from abroad. Politicians have been complicit in this game to make the IAF and the military generally dependent on external suppliers. Parrikar has sought change. He is trying to temper IAF’s antipathy by insisting that IAF make-do with HTT-40/Pilatus PC-7 and the Hawk, and that there aren’t enough resources for Mk-II/PC-21 in this scheme of things. And to make HTT-40 financially viable, is driving a weaponised version of it for use in COIN ops and for export.

A whole generation of IAF pilots, in the Russian mode, trained in HPT-32s and Kirans before joining squadron service and becoming familiar with combat aircraft.

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Need for Punitive laws & measures

Posted on February 23, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The breakdown in law and order in Haryana reflected in the indiscriminate but deliberate destruction of public and private property by agitating Jats should trigger thinking about whether or not a reversion to British-era methods is necessary. Political protests in India inevitably lead to buses and public facilities being torched, roads and rail tracks dug up and “mindless” violence perpetrated by some socially enraged group or the other. It is ironic that the wealthy kulak, land-owning, classes in various states (like the middle caste Jats, Patidars in Gujarat, Kapus in Andhra, etc) are seeking quotas in government jobs, when job reservation originally was designed to right social inequities of long standing in a caste-fragmented society. Except with the original injunction in the Constitution restricting quotas to only 10 years being indefinitely extended guaranteeing certain aggrieved sections employment in a time-wise open-ended fashion, and with the job market bleak, and GOI unable to rev up the manufacturing sector, more people are looking to the state for work rather than trusting in private enterprise, individual talent and toil to make something of themselves.

This quelling of personal initiative is the insidious effect of rooting Nehruvian socialism in a milieu the British had for the purpose of legitimating their alien rule prepared the ground for — the cultivation of government as ‘mai-baap sarkar’. CR Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) and his small cohort of right-of-centre ideologues, who formed the Swatantra Party, had warned this would happen and advised Nehru in the Fifties to refrain from invariably plonking for statist solutions for all social and economic problems. Piloo Mody, Rajaji’s more effervescent colleague, in the Seventies pilloried Indira Gandhi for further extending the reach of the state.

The point about Nehru’s socialism is that it introduced the notion of strikes before there was a properly installed and functioning manufacturing sector, leave alone an organized labour movement. It gave rise to the labour aristocracy of the relatively few in the workforce periodically holding the state to ransom. But the strikes were never peaceful — possibility of violence and destruction of public property was always imminent. It was but a short step before such organized sector shenanigans were emulated by socio-political empowerment movements seeking quotas, etc., except the threat of hooliganism is accepted as par for the course for any agitation, and has now become part of the woof and weave of confrontational politics as mainstream politics and politicking. This trend is an internal security threat because adversaries can sponsor and nurse agitations to keep the State and its agencies preoccupied and off-balance.

It is the sort of hooliganism, unique to South Asia, that needs to be put an end to by appropriately punitive laws. Here the British-era measures recommend themselves. Often in riot-affected areas where the local people indulged in mindless destruction of public and private property, the colonial administration would extract financial compensation from the leaders of the agitation that went haywire by, for instance, expropriating their land and property and then auctioning these off, imposing special taxes, to finance restoration of law and order and as restitution for damage and destruction of public and private property. It is time laws were enacted to once again make this possible.

Of course, this won’t happen because usually there is a political hand behind all such public acts of sustained violence. In Haryana, the previous chief minister, Hooda and his henchmen, are supposed to have prompted and overseen this agitation in order to embarrass and weaken the newly elected BJP govt. and, in any case, all political parties want to keep this option in reserve to call up when in opposition.

The Courts in Kerala had some years back charged the political party that had led the an agitation which resulted in destruction of public amenities, and imposed financial cost on it. Not sure what happened to that case, or how things have since panned out in that state. But north India where violence is resorted to at the slightest provocation is deserving of more stringent laws that will not only punish agitators with heavy-handed police treatment but make leaders, social groups, such as caste panchayats, political parties, and movements responsible for any violent and destructive actions. Imposing costs on big social groups will have a salutary effect that no amount of pleading for peaceful protest can.

Posted in Culture, Indian democracy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, SAARC, society, South Asia | 10 Comments