Hanut Singh dishonoured

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Just a few months after his death the memory of the late great Lt Gen Hanut Singh (CO, Poona Horsein 1971 ops; GOC II Corps 1987 Exercise Brasstacks) stands dishonoured. The Armoured Corps Centre and School, Ahmednagar, to honour its most reputable commandant and the army’s most renowned armoured commander in its history since independence, decided to memorialize the General — the epitome of competence in command, and of steadfast integrity and unimpeachable character, with an annual lecture. But this the finest of gentleman-officers the army has known finds that no one in the army or government wants to so remember him. Two high-placed persons who were approached to deliver the inaugural ‘Lt Gen Hanut Singh Lecture’ declined to do so. Finally, the former Vice Chief of the Army Staff Lt Gen Philip Campose, a mechanized infantry officer (1/8 Gurkha) has been roped in to give the talk scheduled for Monday, January 18.

In other words, not one stalwart from the BJP Govt or from the retired cavalry officer cadre could be found to do Hanut’s memory the honour it richly deserves. This is the fate suffered by the most exemplary of mobile warfare exponents in the Indian Army — he wrote the manual for armoured operations — and unarguably the most effective battlefield commander the country has seen. There lies Hanut then, with no one from even his own combat arm willing to publicly sing his praises for the service he rendered the army and country.

Feel really sorry and ashamed.

Posted in civil-military relations, Culture, domestic politics, Indian Politics, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia | 3 Comments

Chasing the “bandicoot”: All tactics, no strategy, & a no change-regime (after Pathankot)

Posted on January 10, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s inspection tour of the Pathankot air base yesterday — the scene of the usual, snafu-ridden, effort to subdue the infiltrating JeM terrorist team, and his endorsement of his NSA Ajit Doval’s handling of the crisis situation (“Noted with satisfaction the decision-making and its execution, the considerations that went into our tactical response. Also noted coordination among various field units”) suggests that, as that song in ‘3 Idiots’ went — “Aaall is welll!!”, nothing needs to be changed.

Implicit then is the belief that because everything worked tickety-boo there is no requirement for reviving the anti-terrorism centre (National Counter-Terrorism Centre) as the central decision-making and coordinating agency, and for instituting SOPs (standard operating procedures) that would apply across situations so every agency with interest/jurisdiction hews to the same response plotline rather than each organization going off on its own or, as happened in Pathankot, standing down, doing very little, awaiting instructions, and being aware enough of Doval to not take initiative for fear of upsetting whatever plan he may have up his sleeve.

In the event, the Pathankot response was a meandering one, wasted valuable time, involved misuse of available resources — airlifting NSG troops rather than using the army units in the immediate vicinity as the cutting edge of the effort (with the Lt. Col. heading the NSG effort ignoring the obvious possibility of the JeM militants boob-trapping their bodies to increase adversary attrition post-their elimination and losing his life in the bargain).

Perhaps, it was silly to expect things would be different after this newest terrorist event. Or that Doval would suppress his RAW/IB “field agent’s” impulses and not insert himself centrally into the proceedings, forsake direct control of the unfolding event by not dispatching NSG rather than working with the proximal army unit through the army line of command, and hence being forced to share the credit, rather than monopolize it. Of course, the downside of this approach is what actually happened — the profusion of command and control mistakes, and the confused ops to flush out and corner the JeM jihadis that prevailed, which is being laid at Doval’s door.

True, Modi had no option than to back Doval and the manner in which the latter tackled the unraveling events. After all as PM, he cannot be expected to be conversant with national security matters in any great detail. Which is all the more reason for PMs to pick persons as NSAs who are conversant with the larger issues in the strategic context. The danger of appointing policemen or militarymen to the apex position is reflected, say, in General Pervez Musharraf’s Kargil adventure — commendable tactics, bad strategy. The negatives were apparent — and so analysed in my new book ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’ during another policman MK “Mike” Narayanan’s tenure as NSA to Manmohan Singh. Mike was mostly preoccupied with placing which policeman in what billet in RAW, IB, here and abroad, etc. When he did venture into the external realm, he ended up pushing the nuclear deal with the US to the detriment of the country’s thermonuclear pretensions and its deterrence stance.

Doval is more ambitious but his limitations are not dissimilar to Narayanan’s in that he believes every problem has a tactical, policing, small-time solution when, in fact, national security policy making should properly be concerned with an instinctive understanding of internal, regional and international developments that meshes with historical understanding of how circumstances may pan out. Doval has been nothing if not vocal. Hear his numerous videographed speeches on youtube.com, and what you come away with are ideas that have been there in the public realm for a while but now packaged with lashings of Hinduistic ideology and Pakistan-bashing.

And that’s the whole problem right there in a nutshell, isn’t it? Beating up on Pakistan rhetorically and in public speeches, promising retribution, is good theatre but does not make for sustainable national security thinking and policy, not when China is right there, standing with a club in its hands while Delhi chases the local “bandicoot” and ruffles the scenery.

The more debilitating aspect of the Indian reaction to the more important undercurrents is to rely on Washington to “read the riot act” to Islamabad and get it to to respond appropriately. Can there be a more de-spiriting and national self-defeating response than this?

Deal with Pakistan on its own terms with relentless covert warfare actions. Don’t squawk and complain, and act the supplicant, and plead with America to bring the Pakistanis in line. Seeking out Washington’s help in absolutely any circumstances is what Delhi should not ever do because it hands Washington the leverage to use against India. India should take care of its business by itself — the one thing Delhi and Indian governments/political leaders since independence have not done nor, after repeated bad experiences, have learnt to do.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Culture, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian democracy, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, SAARC, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Terrorism, United States, US. | 6 Comments

Taking the wrong tack after Pathankot

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The Indian govt having conveyed “actionable intelligence” to Islamabad, the MEA spokesman announced, using that hag of a phrase, “the ball is in Pakistan’s court” which, in the South Asian context, means nothing. Have just come off a TV show (on News X) where there was a great deal of huffing and puffing by two retired militarymen — a major general and an air marshal both of whom called the Pathankot terrorist intrusion än act of war” deserving of harsh reaction. But, when specifically asked, neither was able to say just what kind of action they’d rather the Modi regime take. This is the problem with a lot of public military posturing — it stops at hollow histrionics. It has become part of the routine!

The fact is Nawaz Sharif is up a tree — he feels he needs to respond positively to Modi’s Lahore stopover initiative but is in no position to get the Pak Army-ISI combo to relent. So there’s unlikely to be the sort of action that would satisfy Delhi by way of a mea culpa and show of contrition.

Is the option then to call off the foreign secretary-level talks scheduled for Jan 15 the only thing available option to stop the baying by the opposition and salve national honour? This is what the Modi govt may end up doing but it would be wrong for the obvious reason that it would be to play into the hands of the elements in the Pak military establishment seeking to perpetuate the status quo.

But the status quo is potentially beneficial to the Pak-Army-ISI nexus only if its slate of sponsored terrorist actions fails to fetch a series of equal or intensityh and loss-wise greater covert reaction. As I have been stressing, in the age of covert warfare Indian conventional military retaliation is a non-starter. But a sustained strategy of covert actions at all levels and especially actions to take out the ISI-nursed monster by eliminating its hydra-heads every time a new one crops up, but without extending these actions to those outside the terrorist outfit leadership ranks will have two immediate effects: (1) By targeting only terrorist leaders and property within Pakistan and in PoK it will establish the reaction threshold minus any escalatory possibilities (because by definition terror outfits are outlaws that Islamabad cannot formally claim as its own creatures), and (2) Suggest to the Pak govt that Delhi is quite willing to play the covert-asymmetric warfare game if that is what it wants, but in the final analysis Pakistan will lose both because of disparity of resources and because of the many more exploitable faultlines in Pak society.

By separating the dialogue process from the covert warfare scene, the signal will go out and loud and clear to GHQ-Rawalpindi that the Indian govt is happy to talk and just as willing to wield the concealable wagh-nakh (as Shivaji did to tear open the Bijapur commander Afzal Khan’s entrails). Just issuing loud meaningless threats or demands makes India look vulnerable, particularly when nothing of note ever follows.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Culture, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, society, South Asia, Special Forces, Terrorism | 12 Comments

NKorea/Pakistan’s thermonuclear test details

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

The International Monitoring System based at Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia (comprising 5 primary and 13 auxiliary seismic stations, 4 infrasound stations, 8 radionuclide stations, 1 radionuclide laboratory), downwind from the North Korean Hanggyong mountain test site, has detected tritium. It confirms that the test Pyongyang was preparing for, and which the North Korean supremo Kim Jong Eun today confirmed, was of a hydrogen device, as warned in my blog on the subject three days ago. The seismic reading of 5.1 on the Richter Scale, in that rock hard substratum, translates to yield in the 50-100 kiloton range.

What experts believe is that given the relatively small yield for a fusion design but an apparently nearly flawless performance of the critical radiation channel that directs the fission energy from an atomic explosion into the tritium fuel package (that is the two stage system) in order to set off a full thermonuclear burn, the very good possibility is that the Pakistani designers have achieved something even more challenging — a successful tailored yield device and that too in miniaturized form!

This is a remarkable technical achievement even with Chinese weapons experts assisting and helping in configuring the design and vetting it before final engineering, for Pakistan to get right at the first shot — something India failed to do, whatever R. Chidambaram may say by way of obfuscatory explanations about the S-1 test in May, 1998.

But this is not the end. There is a certain method here. The 2013 test carried out in North Korea was of an FBF (fusion-assisted fission) device. The present one was “the lower-bound test of a dial-a yield TN weapon.” Far from being the terminus, there’s likely to be still another test in the series which will be full-fledged thermonuclear, and this new test could be conducted as early as July (or thereabouts) 2016 — i.e., just some six-odd months from now.

The strategic implications of Pakistan going fully thermonuclear with tested and proven weapons, courtesy the North Koreans and their making their test site available to the Pak Army’s SPD (Strategic Plans Division)-run nuclear weapons programme and hence providing Islamabad with plausible deniability — a brilliant working of the ‘rogue triad’ of China, Pakistan and North Korea, are too daunting to consider. For starters, it nullifies the official Indian doctrine’s misplaced reliance on “massive retaliation” as credible deterrence.
When an adversary confronts you with a proven and tested high yield weapon and you have only a notional fusion weapon that may or may not work — thanks to the lack of open-ended testing owing to the test moratorium persisted with by now four successive govts (including, so far the Modi regime) since the Shakti series of tests 17 years ago, then we have a problem.

The crucial difference is an incomprehensibly contented India habituated to thinking and acting small and minimal, sat still, thinking it had accomplished every thing, and is now where it was in May 1998 in terms of a noncredible thermonuclear arsenal. On the other hand, an unsatisfied Pakistan, displaying the sort of strategic verve and imagination absent in GOI, sought out other means of getting the weapons inventory it desired, and found a way out from under the US sanctions overhang in cahoots with its willing partners — China and North Korea.

Delhi sought Washington’s suffocating embrace and now finds itself inferior strategic weapons-wise to a rump state carved out of India some 70 years ago but one with a far stronger will, a formidable sense of its national self, and an infinitely greater flair for playing the international power game.

Guess where that leaves India?

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Culture, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Politics, Northeast Asia, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, Russia, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, United States, US., Weapons | 8 Comments

Interoperability out of Gwadar

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

On Dec 31, 2015- Jan 1, 2016, two ships of Pakistan Navy’s grandly labeled “25th Destroyer Flotilla” with lead ship PNS Shamsher (and a supply ship) exercised off Shanghai with two vessels of the Chinese East Sea Fleet. This was the first of its kind event, hailed by the Chinese press as increasing “interoperability” between these forces. Because Pakistan Navy is unlikely ever to become a major force, leave alone a presence in the Indian Ocean, its very rare forays east of Malacca amount to little. However, the fact that interoperability is on the minds of the naval brass of the two countries suggests that frequent joint naval exercises are meant to hone their ability to cooperate not in the waters nearer China but off Gwadar. This development is not unconnected with Pak Navy chief Admiral Mohammad Zakaullah emphasizing his service’s determination to protect this Baluch port and ensure the CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) connecting the Pak coast with Xinjiang and Chinese-occupied Tibet, with CPEC as sort of a southerly extension of the Karakoram Highway to the warm waters of the northern Arabian Sea, is obtained, at least, seaward without a hitch. In the context of CPEC, moreover, increasing naval collaboration could well eventuate in the permanent deployment of Chinese PLA-Navy ships in Gwadar.

Hence, greater the imperative for the Modi govt to get going on building up Iranian Chahbahar port, some 70 miles up the coast, as base for possible Indian naval use outflanking PLAN-PN in Gwadar. But Delhi is showing no urgency about coming to terms with Tehran, and fortifying the Gulf-end of India’s maritime security architecture. True, Iranians have upped the ante now that they are released from Western sanctions. This was bound to happen — the reason why I was pleading in the past decade and more to clinch a deal for Chahbahar on favourable terms at a time when no other country was willing to do business with Iran, and build up diplomatic capital and goodwill. As elsewhere, the then Manmohan Singh regime was keener to please Washington than to advance the national interest.

So now we are stuck with having to cut a deal on much harsher terms but there’s no getting around it. But better this access than no access at all to Chahbahar — which will lead to this country’s Afghanistan-Central Asia policy options (with promise of an alternative north-south route, with such transit being denied through Pakistan) going up in smoke.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Central Asia, China, China military, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Navy, Indian Ocean, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Iran and West Asia, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, South East Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Tibet, West Asia | Leave a comment

Pathankot mysteries and “befitting” reply

Posted on January 5, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Like after every intruding terrorist induced-crisis, in the latest one in Pathankot, that’s perhaps seeing closure now, one discerned a despairing pattern of prior intelligence, wrong cues, and absence of coordination between a multiplicity of agencies — Border Security Force, Punjab Police, National Security Guard, each with their separate field intelligence outfits, and all tasked with dealing with terrorism incidents but each succeeding only in getting in the other’s way. The army with a large presence in the area, meanwhile, was not called in other than as after thought. And, by way of comic relief, there were the familiar interventions prematurely to congratulate “our” brave men tackling the terrorists followed by harrumphing promises of a “befitting reply” (from Home Minister Rajnath Singh and RSS favourite Road & Transport minister Nitin Gadkari) followed by silence and then embarrassed admission of security “lapses” (by defence minister Manohar Parrikar)

There’s no point in saying the same thing after every crisis that nobody in state or central government learns from previous such fiascos. This is an institutional reality and a cross the Indian people bear with amazing stoicism, because there’s not a hint from anyone in govt that some serious reorganization will be afoot to integrate intelligence services and counter-terror activities of innumerable central and state agencies, and of Operating Procedures standardized across all situations to be followed by every agency so each crisis is not dealt with as sui generis requiring specialized treatment. The NTRO/NATGRID, perhaps, picked up the first clues, NIA passed them on to the state — but whether also to BSF guarding the LoC from Gurdaspur to Pathankot, is not at all clear and, even if it did, nothing in any case was done. Further, there was no centralized counter-terror organization to immediately take over as the command post — the sort of role the Anti-Terrorism Centre mooted by the predecessor Congress party govt was supposed to play, but cannot because it is hollow.

Whence, several mysteries:

(1) The Gurdaspur-Pathankot sector has seen as many as five such terrorist intrusions since 2013, so why has this area been the sector of choice for ingressing into India? If BSF claims some of the photographic sensors were off — have these been off line since the first of these incidents in 2013? If so, why did BSF not immediately repair/replace the sensors? And while BSF is in the line of fire, why hasn’t the DG, BSF, along with the Kashmir head of the force, and the sector commander not been summarily dismissed and charged with criminal negligence?

(2) Superintendent of Police, Gurdaspur, Salwinder Singh — consider this: He stops his official car with the blue VIP light on the roof self-importantly flashing to, what amounts to, giving a lift to the four terrorists (in this team) — surely against all rules and even common sense. He then somehow talks himself out of captivity — sweet talker this!, is dropped off conveniently in the dark even as his travelling companion is knifed and thrown out of the car, while the SP’s cook is let off. Salwinder then promptly informs the higher ups in Punjab Police about the intruding terrorists on the prowl. But his call is disbelieved because of the SP’s “colourful” nature/past/record (not clear which, but his jeweler companion in this night time journey hints at colourful being a synonym for corrupt). The seriously troubling aspects are whether Salwinder, the BSF sector commander, and the rest of that bunch were not Keystone Cops by design, meaning, that perhaps they all were on the payroll of the Pakistani ISI/underworld smuggling drugs and dope into Punjab and the rest of India, which route was occasionally used to funnel in terrorists instead. This needs investigation and harsh follow-up action. Could Salwinder have been posted there by an Akali Dal govt minister reputed to be the “dope king” of Punjab to ease the illegal heroin flow through this part of the border?

(3) Parrikar in Pathankot mentioned that the five Defence Security Corps (DSC) personnel were gunned down because of “bad luck”. As a former DCOAS told me the DSC is manned by “army discards”. Even so, could they be so devoid of the basic soldierly competence to saunter into the terrorists’ gunsights?

(4) And where was the IAF’s Garud Special Force — other than the one person who was killed in the exchange of fire, and how did it perform its duties over the expanse of the air base stretching over 2,000 acres and with a nearly 30-mile long perimeter without any CCTVs mounting a 24/7 watch not just over the aircraft on the tarmac, but the rest of the base as well?

(5) And, finally, for what reasons was the NSG judged by NSA Doval as the potentially more effective force to deal with the heavily armed terrorists than the army units in the vicinity and familiar with the terrain specifics, and definitely having as much competence, if not more, in defusing explosive packages? It is perhaps explosives handling that the DG,Punjab Police was hinting at in his press meet this evening when he talked of why NSG came onto the scene rather abruptly.
——–
What should be India’s “befitting” reply:

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has risked barbs and further political diminution on the national stage for the sake of keeping the dialogue channel open to Pakistan, rather than do the easy thing and suspend something that has not even got underway. India desperately needs to shield bilateral relations with Pakistan from the attempts of the deep state in Pakistan — the Pakistan Army and its singular mischief arm, ISI, to enable the forging of strong trade and commercial ties with that country as a means of nursing a Pakistani economic stake that, along with the civil society in Pakistan could, in time, become a counterweight to the army in Pakistan. But that day’s a long way off yet.

So, what’s the best befitting reply to be? As I have been saying over 30 years — it is kutayuddha or covert and asymmetric warfare. If GHQ-Rawalpindi finds dividend in launching the Azhar Masoods and Hafiz Sayeeds and their groups across the border, why has Delhi stayed its hand these many years of responding to 26/11 type of excesses and Pathankot-type armed intrusions by bumping off these terrorist figureheads rather than trying to capture them and indulging in related antics? Precision kills by clandestine agents and means are not all that difficult to execute. But to order such actions requires a strong will and that has been the black hole, turning India into a terrorist punching bag. It is such befitting response that, alas, will not be forthcoming.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Culture, domestic politics, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, Indian Army, Indian democracy, Indian ecobomic situation, Indian para-military forces, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, SAARC, society, South Asia, Terrorism | 7 Comments

A thermonuclear test by the ‘rogue triad’ imminent?

Posted on January 3, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

In February 2013, I had warned about the China-Pakistan-North Korea “rogue triad testing an FBF (fusion boosted fission) device at the North Korean test site in the Hamyongg Mountain range in the northeast of that country. I had referred to the fact that the Punggye complex at the site, complete with the instrumentation bunker, closely resembled the Ras Koh complex in the Chagai Hills. And the extreme likelihood of China transferring the tritium and highly-enriched uranium (HEU) needed for the device designed by Pakistani scientists and vetted by Chinese nuclear weaponeers, by road across the mountainous border with North Korea in the Jiangsu province to avoid aerial detection. I had said that that the 30KT yield recorded by sensors of the pure FBF device actually proved better than the Indian S-1 hydrogen test in 1998. (See “https://bharatkarnad.com/2013/02/08/rogue-triad-and-h-bomb-tests/ and https://bharatkarnad.com/2013/02/12/nokopak-h-bomb-test-superior-to-indian-s-1/).

The rogue triad is now upping its game. There is now evidence of a new angled deep tunnel being bored in the Hamyongg mountains to best buffer shock waves in rocky stratum, and suggests preparations for a thermonuclear test. If it succeeds, Pakistan will have access to bonafide two-stage thermonuclear weapons tested by the nuclear outlaw North Korea on its territory, and hence attracting no sanctions or other other harsh reaction. China is in the top tier and immune to American pressures. And it will achieve for the Pakistan Army something it has been pushing the Pak N-weapons establishment quickly to attain — equalization with India, and bridging the remaining qualitative gap with India — this even though, post-1998 moratorium on testing, the Indian thermonuclear weapon is more fiction than fact in that some fundamental design problems relating, for instance, to the radiation channel remain. These are amenable to solutions worked on with computational means, but the rejigged design still needs to be proved and its performance cannot be verified except with a battery of new open-ended testing of fusion designs incorporating the engineering and other changes.

And new tests is what GOI — advised by R Chidambaram who has stayed on as S&T adviser to PM and continues to misguide the Indian govt about the non-necessity of new tests — is not permitting, fearful that it will upset the applecart of the N-deal with Washington and sink Indo-US “strategic” relations, not that this country has gained much from the special relationship with the US.

In any case, Delhi, I suppose, won’t wake up or do anything meaningful, until the Special Plans Division, Chaklala, announces fusion weapons in its armoury and announces their yield range and their raison d’etre, as Lt Gen Khalid Kidwai, longtime SPD head, did vis a vis tactical nukes at the 2015 Carnegie event. The slumbering-lumbering Indian nuclear weapons programme will be caught in a catch-up cycle which it has been trapped in since J. Nehru failed to test and weaponize after reaching the weapons threshold with the plutonium reprocessing plant in March 1964 and ten years later when Indira Gandhi refused to conduct further tests after the single 1974 test, being deterred, for political reasons, from going ahead and weaponizing. It will then be outclassed in a comprehensive way by its Pakistani counterpart. In this scenario of design-wise flawed, untested, and potentially nonfunctioning Indian thermonuclear weapons, the incomparable delivery systems in the Indian Agni missiles will be able to carry the nation’s security interests only so far. This will be the outcome because GHQ, Rawalpindi-qua-Pak govt, has always taken nuclear security more seriously than the strategically confused, fog-brained, nuclear deterrence illiterate, Indian government.

This is not turning out well for India.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, disarmament, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's Pakistan Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, nuclear industry, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, Pakistan military, Pakistan nuclear forces, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with South East Asia & Far East, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, United States, US., Weapons | 11 Comments

IAF and MOD, predictably, blowing it at the Bahrain air show

Posted on January 2, 2016 by Bharat Karnad

Are you aware that the C-17 heavy lift, long range, air lifter and the Embraer aircraft are Indian products the country should be proud of and represent great success stories of the govt-sector-dominated Indian aerospace sector? No? Some of you may protest, claim that, actually, Lockheed Martin of the US and the Embraer Corp of Brazil are the progenitors of these transport aircraft. But Air Shows are meant to showcase aviation technologies developed by countries and feature the unveiling of the latest, most advanced, aircraft and aerial platforms and allied technologies to impress the gaggle of potential customers. And, at the Bahrain Air Show slated for later in the month, the Indian Air Force is dispatching a C-17 and an Embraer aircraft as the entries under its name, taking ownership for products they have no relationship with other than as a customer!!! OK, the Embraer platform is being developed by the Centre for Airborne Studies, Bangalore, with a top-mounted SLAR (Side-Looking Airborne Radar) with a good slant range, and this SLAR tech is worth an air show exposure. But C-17? And that too an avionics-wise de-rated transporter — what uniquely Indian technology does it contain, and what is remotely Indian about this aircraft other than the pilots in its cockpit?!!!

This farce will be played out in the context of the genuinely Indian designed and developed 4.5 generation, bulk composite, combat aircraft — the first one created in-country after the cold-blooded killing by the IAF of the Marut Mk-II in the Seventies, entering the lists at the Bahrain Air Show but as DRDO entry, with the IAF treating the LCA as a leper it wants to have nothing to do with! There will be two of the Tejas at Bahrain that will be put through its paces, even as the Embraer will be handled by Suneet Krishna, a former Mirage pilot and the most experienced of the Tejas pilots recently shunted to CABS.

What it says about the IAF is plain enough — that it takes pride in foreign-produced goods while taking every opportunity to denigrate and show down the home-grown LCA. In many ways, the IAF leadership is beyond repair — it has long been the dead weight pulling down the country’s indigenous efforts at arms independence. But what does it really say about Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his chosen defmin, Manohar Parrikar, an IIT alumnus no less, that after making a “political decision” to send the Tejas to Bahrain, they lacked
the gumption to tell the IAF brass — the entire caboodle under ACM Arup Raha — to either fall fully behind the Tejas, back it, take ownership of it, and run it in Bahrain and subsequent air shows as IAF’s own, and hereafter take over the aircraft certification process and speed it to early squadron service, or be cashiered.

This is the sort of attitude MOD/GOI needs to adopt towards the military with respect to “Made in India” (as different from “Make in India” — the usual Meccano model of assembly, perfected by HAL and other Defence Public Sector Units). Because on its own, the armed services will not switch to Indian-designed and made weapons systems — as import-fixation now comprises their institutional DNA and that of MOD/GOI — something facilitated by the inducements and goodies foreign vendors routinely offer senior uniformed officers and civilian MOD officials and, not to forget, politicians (mercifully, not in the present BJP govt) in the procurement loop.

The IAF may consider itself as superior to the only competition it thinks it can reasonably handle — the Fizaýa — Pakistan Air Force (because, from its force disposition it apparently thinks the Chinese PLAAF way above its league), but in war it may be in for a surprise. PAF takes pride in the Chinese near-junk MiG-21 derivative, the JF-17 Thunderbird, jointly designed with the Chinese and built at the Kamra air complex, taking it to Western Air Shows (starting with in Paris last year, where it pulled some great maneuvers — watch the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqJ5satwBYY — with Sqdn Ldr Zeeshan going vertical almost as soon as the wheels leave ground — scintillating stuff, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzvkYsKSEIc ). An air force that takes pride and shows respect for its own country’s aircraft, is a service that, in a fight, will reflect the strength of its conviction and, technologically and by way of self-sufficiency, speed the advancement of the country’s aerospace sector and help it emerge as an air power to reckon with. As for IAF — it showboats on foreign aircraft, knowing fully well that how well it fares in operations is hostage principally to good relations with the supplier country which, incidentally, can turn adverse any time Delhi fails to dance to its tune (whence, spares can be closed off at any time of its choosing).

The trouble is with a succession of Indian PMs showing themselves adept at dancing to the tunes variously of Washington, Moscow, Paris, London (and for no earthly reason one can think of, even Beijing), IAF thinks it will never have any trouble. Think again, Vayu Bhavan, for a change, think; for India’s sake, THINK!

Posted in arms exports, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, civil-military relations, Culture, Defence Industry, DRDO, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's China Policy, India's strategic thinking and policy, Indian Air Force, indian policy -- Israel, Iran and West Asia, Military Acquisitions, Pakistan, Pakistan military, Russia, russian assistance, society, South Asia, Strategic Relations with the US & West, Technology transfer, United States, US., Weapons, West Asia | 4 Comments

India lacks guts on Brahmos to Vietnam

Posted on December 31, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Since around early 2000s I have been advocating the sale of nuclear-warheaded Brahmos supersonic anti-ship missile to Vietnam as a payback to China for its nuclear missile-arming Pakistan. The strategic need for this was detailed in my 2002 book ‘Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security’ (Macmillan, a 2nd edition published in 2005) and again in my 2008 book ‘Índia’s Nuclear Policy'(Praeger, 2008)

The strategically-challenged Indian govts of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Congress Party’s Manmohan Singh sat on it making some excuse or the other. In 2011, when the Vietnamese govt first formally sought this missile from Delhi PM Manmohan Singh, more concerned with China’s adverse reaction than India’s national interest, raised the issue of Russian apprehension of such sale to stymie the request. Except some four years later, the Russian resistance to such sale magically disappeared — because there wasn’t any such barrier in the first place. In May 2015, Indian Defmin Manohar Parrikar signed an agreement with his visiting Vietnamese counterpart General Phung Quang Thanh that talked of maritime security cooperation without mentioning the fact that the BJP govt of Narendra Modi had finally acceded to Hanoi’s request for the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile.

Seven months later no Brahmos missile is in Vietnamese hands, and no Indian military technical team has visited Hanoi to firm up the means of transfer and to set up the infrastructure for the coast-based Brahmos batteries. The Modi dispensation is proving as strategically dense as its predecessor, delaying the sale and offering India’s non-membership in the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) as excuse for non-implementation of the Brahmos understanding. Delhi’s keen-ness about joining MTCR and thereby restricting its options to transferring longer-range Agni and other missiles to countries on China’s periphery in need of deterring China, cannot be explained except in terms of the traditional strategic spinelessness and myopia — a terminal affliction.

But MTCR is an excuse because, sotto voce, Indian officials freely divulge the real reason for the delay of the sale — American pressure. Now why would Washington object to an Indian weapons sale injurious to Chinese adventurism in the South China Sea? Because the US would rather Hanoi opt for American weapons as a security solution instead, that’s why. And Modi, like Manmohan Singh, will apparently do nothing to rile the US.

Meanwhile, Hanoi is not waiting around for Delhi to muster the guts it doesn’t have. It has got Russia to speedily ship 25 of the promised 50 sub-launched Klub-class anti-ship missile — the M-54E Klub-S (range 220km) or 3M-54E1 (range 300km), and the land attack 3M Klub4E (range 300km). And it has embarked the first of the six Kilo 636 submarines procured from Russia on patrols in the waters off its coast with the Klub supersonic missiles on board, to prevent China’s venturing against its oil rigs in that area. And the situation grows tense with the elite corps-sized Vietnamese Army formation — the 308 Division (of the legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap) guarding the 1400 km long mountainous border with China, getting into battle-ready condition because Hanoi smells trouble from that quarter.

And India once again fluffs an opportunity to show it can stand up to China by standing besides friendly frontline states. For Modi and his PMO to believe that China will back India as a permanent member of the UN security council if it desists from arming states on its borders with decisive armaments is to merely confirm the view of the Indian govt as populated by dreamers and lotus-eaters. China will not allow India entry into the Security council no matter what. Delhi better appreciate this fact and act disruptively to upend not just Chinese designs on Asia, but also keep the US at bay by doing things that need doing, especially those things Washington wishes India not do.

What are the things the Modi govt can and should immediately do? (1) ship out both anti-ship and land attack variants of the Brahmos missile to Vietnam on a priority basis, (2) arm some of the Brahmos land attack missiles with fuel air explosive warheads that DRDO developed some 20 years back — it will instill in the PLAN the fear of God — because a strike by these weapons on the Sanya South Sea Fleet HQrs will devastate that entire base — the sort of thing that will give the CMC in Zhongnanhai the willies, and (3) equip the Vietnamese Army 308 Division with the 700 km range Agni-1s. This will be sufficiently credible deterrence against the PLA pushing in as it did in 1979, except now it will get a bloodier nose. The Vietnamese are not like Indians with their tails between their legs when confronting China.

But would such measures materialize anytime soon? Not a spitball’s chance in hell! Because that would be a very different, great power India, and not a country that bends to the whims of this or that power, and stays its hand at the slightest hint of trouble.

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How Modi can make his Pak venture profitable

Posted on December 25, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

The biggest opportunity Prime Minister Modi has created to drag India-Pakistan relations into a semblance of normalcy some 17 months after inviting Pakistan PM Nawaz Sharif to his over-grand investiture ceremony is his decision to accept the latter’s invitation to touch down in Lahore (on his way back from Russia via Kabul), take a helo hop to Raiwind for a bit of jaw-jaw, before heading back to Lahore and flight back home — rather than merely overflying the neigbouring country and offering the usual pro forma good wishes to the executive head and people of Pakistan from the aircraft. Both Sharif and Modi are politicians and seek to capitalize on a good thing when they espy one — and a rapprochement, they apparently believe, will help both of them politically. Nothing’s going right for the Indian PM at home, for Pakistan little is going right in the external realm. For the Modi-Sharif duo mutual bonhomie, whatever else it does, is positively disruptive of the trend they are victims of. Whether or not this will turbocharge the “comprehensive” dialogue between the two states in terms of actually producing results on the various disputes — Sir Creek, Siachen, J&K, down the line, it will have the immediate impact in Modi’s case of befuddling and pushing back against the Hindu fringe-types who have hijacked his development agenda with completely irrelevant notions revolving around beef-eating, cow slaughter, Ram temple. For Sharif, warm personal relations combats the impression abroad of a Pakistan as nursery of jihadi terrorists — one step away from joining the Islamic State ranks in the Levant, and committing more Paris/San Barnardino kind of armed atrocities in the US and Western Europe.

If Modi wants this thaw to result in more than a slight easing of relations, then the reason why Sharif informed Pak Army Chief General Raheel Sharif only a couple of hours before Modi landed in Lahore and then to ensure security at the airport, sanitization of the air space for the two PMs to take a short copter trip to Sharif’s home ground in rural Raiwind, and secure the land corridor for their return trip by road to Lahore airport, has to be addressed. As I have long maintained, Pakistan’s fears and India-phobia will have to be dealt with on GHQ Rawalpindi’s terms.

Again as I have been advocating for some three decades now, the most effective way to do that is unilaterally to begin shrinking the army’s three strike corps to a single hefty armoured corps, and using up the thus freed up manpower and materiel resources to form two additional offensive mountain corps for a total of three such offensive corps for deployment versus the Chinese PLA in the Himalayas and across the Tibetan plateau. And follow up this stunning initiative by again unilaterally removing the forward-stationed nuclear warheaded Prithvi SRBMs (short range ballistic missiles) from the country’s Western border. The Pak Army will be hard put thereafter to claim that India poses a credible military threat when the large bulk of its land forces are facing China-ward.

These two actions will be opposed hand and foot by the policy establishment of the permanent secretariat in the govt, the Foreign Office, and the military because this will mean transformative change they are unhappy undergoing. But these actions, I have argued, are in no way Pollyanna-ish because the option of covert warfare will continue to be available to the two countries. But it will eliminate the basic hurdle preventing mutual trust from accruing.
BJP ally Shiv Sena’s spokesman wondered, if a little tartly, that they would support Modi’s peace venture vis a vis Pakistan if Modi got Pakistan to hand over the small time Mumbai gangster grown big –Dawood Ibrahim. Dawood, for instance, is of no importance to the Pak Generals and will be willingly sacrificed for the greater corporate good of the Pakistan Army, if it sees Modi doing substantive things to minimize the threat to it from the east. It will be the precursor to the Pakistani economy beginning to plug into and mesh with its Indian counterpart. It will lay the foundations for India as great power. Short of this India is destined to remain — what it has been for most of its existence — a second-rate entity that talks big and acts small, sticking to doing the same things over and over again but expecting different results. And what it has so far done best is — belabour, bully, and alienate small states on its periphery and push them into China’s embrace and then complain that the adjoining states don’t like us!

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