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.
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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!

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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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Do not label foreign-made military hardware as ‘indigenous’

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

The country is coming to terms with the gradualist Prime Minister Narendra ‘Change does not happen all of a sudden’ Modi, who is relying on the existing decrepit apparatus of State, unimaginative policy establishment, and the government’s usual lackadaisical way of doing business to deliver results.
Even Modi’s flagship ‘Make in India’ programme is being driven into the ground by the old approach in the defence sphere of licence-manufacture now garbed in different rhetoric. Thus, in a ‘Navy Day’ newspaper supplement featuring a piece titled ‘Indigenisation of P75 is a good example of ‘Make in India’’, Bernard Buisson, managing director of the French government-backed private sector naval defence major DCNS (Direction des Constructions Navales), clarifies that by “indigenous” he means that local companies will do what defence public sector units (DPSUs) have been doing for the last 60 years — importing various components and ‘screwdrivering’ them together as per supplied blueprints.

If the French or any other foreign firm wins the contract, the resulting P-75i submarine will be about as ‘indigenous’ as the DCNS Scorpene boat currently produced by the Mazagon Dockyard, the slew of combat aircraft (British Jaguar and Hawk, Russian MiG-21, MiG-27, and Su-30MKI) assembled by Hindustan Aerospace Ltd, the Swedish Bofors gun outputted by the ordnance factories or the Russian T-72 tank by the Avadi Heavy Vehicle factory. Without the home-based design engineering element, foreign developed military hardware mislabelled ‘indigenous’ will continue to keep India a captive of foreign vendors, and the Indian government will be played for a fool it unfortunately has shown itself to be in these matters, even as the prospect of a truly indigenous, comprehensively capable, Indian defence industry keeps receding.

These conclusions are reached on the basis of recent developments. There is the Dhirendra Singh Committee report on reforming the defence procurement procedure. It has brazenly recommended cutting the political executive out of all procurement decisions and making the armed services solely responsible for them. This will ensure the Indian military remains industrial age, sub-strategic, cued to the wrong threat (Pakistan), and incapable of transforming itself in line with new technologies. Next, the defence ministry taskforce chaired by former DRDO chief VK Atre, asked to come up with an alternative to the disastrous ‘lowest tender’ system, has managed to at once subvert the government’s intention and retain for the DRDO-DPSU combine its primacy by keeping many private sector companies from competing for armament-development contracts with onerous entry-level financial conditions. And belatedly, the government has discovered ‘military diplomacy’. It has formed a committee led by deputy national security adviser Arvind Gupta to suggest ways to extract advanced technology from reluctant vendor states by using, as I have long advocated, our expensive armament buys as leverage, and mobilising Indian embassies to push exports of Indian-made arms to developing countries.

\The nested problems, however, are many. Gupta, a diplomat, will be hampered by the foreign service’s traditional antipathy to the military intruding into its turf. Also, it doesn’t seem that all departments of government making capital purchases abroad are being brought into the leveraging ambit as they should be. Hence, the civil aviation ministry, for example, is apparently free to permit — as it has just announced — private airlines to buy hundreds of passenger aircraft directly from Boeing or Airbus, costing hundreds of billions of dollars, without binding either of these companies to the offsets rule applying to military procurement (mandating 30-50% of the contract value to be ploughed back into India by way of designated technology transfers and co-production deals). And finally, how are developing states to be induced into buying India-made weapons systems when the Indian armed services don’t?
By way of a template for technology transactions, the Gupta Committee needs to study how China built its aerospace industry by buying McConnell-Douglas MD-80/90 aircraft in the 1980s in return for the American firm transferring its design and production technologies in toto, including the then cutting-edge design/computer-assisted manufacture technologies. That deal ended McConnell-Douglas’ run as an aircraft producer (it merged with Boeing) while germinating in China a major transport aircraft design, development, and manufacture hub.

But the Indian government seems institutionally incapable of assessing technological trends and prioritising technologies for absorption, mustering the fixity of purpose, or configuring a clear-eyed, cold-blooded, strategy and ruthlessly wielding the country’s political and economic clout in a buyer’s market. Instead, it is sending out confused signals. How were the representatives of Indian companies accompanying defence minister Manohar Parrikar to Washington, for instance, supposed to fish for possible US partners without any certainty of project contracts in light of the Atre Committee tilt? Worse, New Delhi is paying more attention than is prudent to Washington’s argument that signing the ‘foundational agreements’ — Logistics Support Agreement, Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement for sharing geospatial data, and Communications Interoperability Security Memorandum of Agreement — will spur the ‘Make in India’ programme when, actually, they will insert the US into the Indian military’s operational loop and violate sovereignty. And, it is being swayed by the American pitch for things like the electromagnetic aircraft launch system on gigantic carriers that are extraneous to India’s security needs and interests.

Keeping in mind the imperative to strengthen the design engineering capability, it makes more sense to seek substantive US inputs into commercialising Indian-designed systems, such as the Tejas Mk-II fighter, (the abandoned) Kaveri jet engine, and in developing the navy warship directorate’s own 75i submarine design.
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Published in the Hindustan Times, December 24, 2015 in the print edition with the title “Economic clout as the currency” at http://www.hindustantimes.com/editorials/do-not-label-foreign-made-military-hardware-as-indigenous/story-tfhfakFmVymXNSNZk5pvAJ.html

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Endangering the Russia connection

Posted on December 23, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

On the eve of his trip to Moscow, Prime Minister Narendra Modi did well to remind the country that in time of desperate need Russia helped with military hardware and technical assistance in strategic programmes when no other country would. Gratitude, perhaps, counts for little in international affairs. But correct geostrategics is critical — something the Indian Foreign Office and, increasingly, the NSA Ajit Doval, handling foreign policy, seem often to forget.

A basic geostrategic constant is the fact that while the US, Russia and China are big and powerful powers, China is the obvious security and economic challenge to India, and in dealing with it, it is the continentally proximal Russia, with the ready ability to play off China and Pakistan against India, that matters more than the distantly seaward America. Russia’s record of assistance in sensitive strategic technology projects, moreover, remains unmatched by any power. Because the military supply relationship has been central to bilateral reflations, these policy fundamentals require iteration considering the tendency of the Modi regime is to take Moscow for granted and benefit Western defence companies at the expense of their Russian counterparts in the dog-eat-dog world of capital military sales — this even though economics dictate, as in the case of the Su-30MKI, that it is a far better option every which way and even in performance terms than the Rafale the PM unwisely and ill-advisedly committed to — by way of a personal initiative — on his trip to Paris earlier in the year, thereby majorly screwing up the laid down the Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft shortlisting and selection process geared by the IAF from the start to favour some Western aircraft or the other. But that’s a different story!

The above is by way of prelude — to set the context, as it were — for mistakes Modi may make in his Kremlin meeting with President Vladimir Putin, and what he expects to gain from it. The fact is, on the international scene, India is seen as a sort of rich yokel, a perennially dim-witted fool, who can be easily taken to the cleaners — divested of his monies with jingly-jangly, prohibitively expensive, armaments whose acquisitions make little sense. To wit, the Rafale! So, everybody pitches this and sells that as the answer to India’s security problems, with the government and the PM’s Office in particular — bereft of dispassionate outside experts without vested service and other interests on its staff and a knowledge base of its own and, hence, minus any deep understanding about geostrategics or about the genuine security-defence needs, relying on the armed services whose proven myopia is now creeping into the realm of the legendary. It is another matter that the Indian taxpayer ends up paying for their acquisition follies even as the country gains zilch in terms of its strategic military standing and capabilities.

The game being military procurement seller states will lie, cheat, induce us to sign lopsided contracts, take our money and then fail to deliver on contracted technology transfer, etc, without compunction, as has routinely happened in the past. GOI is not unaware of it. But how is it leveraging its manifest buyer’s clout? Pathetically, the NSA/Foreign Office is confident that the transfer of cutting-edge nuclear submarine technology, for instance, can be extracted from France in return for signing on with the Rafale — this according to a news report. If the past deals and contractual agreements with French and Western suppliers generally were to be dissected, the obvious would be discovered, namely, that the one thing these countries have always protected with the utmost zeal is their technology, being ultra careful to restrict transfers, and then in extreme circumstances, to only sell dated technology from which no further sales-revenue is possible. It explains why the US has been so reluctant to transfer advanced military technology and just pushes G2G (govt-to-govt) Foreign Military Sales (of C-17 and C-130J air transporters, Apache, Sikorsky Seahawk, and heavy-lift Chinook helos) and, when it comes to transferring tech, talks of joint programmes to develop batteries and small-time drones, playing on this govt’s phobia and claiming G2G means absence of hanky-panky! True, the technology producers in the US, more than in France UK, etc, are private firms for whom commercial sales and profits thereof make more sense than passing technology and helping a potential competitor in the global arms bazaar to set up. This is why S. Jayshankar and his MEA cohorts’ confidence in their ability to negotiate substantive technology transfer by holding the Rafale as bait, and by dangling Russia as alternative source of advanced weapons platforms (such as the SSN –N-powered attack submarines) and armaments is so misplaced. Can Messrs. Doval, Jayshankar & Co. manage to get the onpassing of nuclear submarine technology mentioned as a conditionality in the contract for the Rafale or in the French company DCNS’ bid for the conventional 75i submarine project, or in any legal deed, for that matter, the two sovereign govts could sign? That’s about as likely as India’s getting into the UN Security Council by begging for a permanent seat with every passing small and big power. That this hurts national self-respect is seemingly no one’s concern.

But, it is on such ridiculous premises that India’s foreign and military policies are run. Russia has been forthright, as regards the SSN. Russia has long voiced its willingness to lease an Akula-class boat — the Iribis, with the hull upgraded to Mk-III standard and reconfigured, if required, to fire Nirbhay cruise missiles (as an SSGN) and including sophisticated sensors in its nose, for instance, to detect thermoclines — the differently-temperatured layers in the waters of the “closed”, warm water, Indian Ocean, which makes it easier for submarines to lurk in them undetected for especially easy kills of surface combatants. But the Navy wants a Yassen-class SSN, when there are only two such boats in existence, both in Russian naval service. So Yassen won’t happen, unless Modi sweetens the deal enough for one of these submersibles to be detached for use by the Indian Navy. Such a sweetener, Moscow has hinted, could be Delhi’s taking up the $3.7 billion offer for three Sukhoi-50 PAK FA Fifth generation aircraft along with total transfer of technology — source codes and all, to any Indian entity– not excluding private Indian defence industrial companies. Can any other offer on the table from anywhere compare with such a composite deal? Does the NSA-MEA combo believe the French, Americans, the British or anybody else can top it? Really????

The most telling deal on the anvil is actually the low-key one Tata’s are negotiating with the Sukhoi Division of Russia’s United Aviation Corporation to manufacture nuts and bolts up, all the spares necessary to hereafter keep the Su-30MKIs in the Indian Air Force flying. In one fell swoop it will remove the ulcer afflicting the military supply relationship with Russia — the genuine concern about the spares shortages that have always plagued the serviceability and operational readiness of Russian/Soviet armaments in Indian employ. This could be the model for other Indian industrial majors to tie up for the spares for the T-72/T-90 tanks, for example.

The $3-4 billion purchase of the S-400 missile system which’s a great anti-aircraft system, but no good in the anti-missile defence (AMD) role — then again there’s no system anywhere able to take out incoming ballistic missiles, or 200 Kamov utility helos, 4 additional Talwar-class frigates, etc. are fine but are only a palliative for more serious ills. Moscow is convinced Delhi is climbing on to the Western arms bandwagon — which will mean the end of Moscow’s special relationship with India. These fears will not be addressed by buying more 1000 MW VVER reactors for the Kudankulum complex.

Hope Modi makes a course correction to ensure principally that all arms buys from any source go into strengthening not just the country’s defence manufacturing sector but in beefing up its design engineering capability — this last being the big void of arms dependency India stepped into when GOI first acquiesced in IAF’s mean-minded killing of the indigenously designed Marut HF-24 Mk-II in the Seventies. And Russia has so far proven the best bet in exporting “know how” aspects of technology rather than, as is done by Western firms and govts, trust in the “know who” factor to fetch them rich arms contracts..

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Response to Dr. Carafano’s review

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Following is the response to James Carafano’s review of my book that I have posted at http://nationalinterest.org/feature/indias-machiavellian-moment-14691?page=show.
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Bharat Karnad •

Dr. Carafano has been generous in his review of my book, and I thank him for it. His main disagreement is about whether India is too big and consequential in the 21st Century effectively to play the US off against China, as it did during the Cold War when the country was admittedly “peripheral” to the interests of both the US and the Soviet Union and could, therefore, gain from the competing attentions of both, i.e., afford to play the nonaligned card. However, the implicit premise of the book in the Machiavellian context is precisely that China and Russia are too big, too powerful, and too proximal to India for New Delhi to alienate both by joining the American-led Western “club” even if this fetches it many “benefits” of a “real strategic relationship”with the US.

Per Machiavelli, a Prince primarily needs two things: military prowess (hard power) and what he calls luck or “fortune” (what I call the software of hard power), to improve his rank order and, by way of strategy, differentiated treatment of nobles at the Court . In this paradigm, if the prince is substituted by nation-state, Court by the extant global order, and nobles by the current great powers — the five Security Council members, India as an aspiring great power would best enhance its “fortune” by creating for itself both the space for maneuver and the latitude for action with deft foreign and military policies based on contingent cooperation with the extant big powers and by playing the balancer, taking care to see it is always on the right side of the changing “correlation of forces”. Indeed, it is India’s bigness and potential heft and its capacity to tilt the “correlation” this way or that as between the US and China, the US and China+Russia, and at the regional level between Iran and Israel, etc, that makes India “ïndispensable” to the global and regional balance of power systems as well as the international economy, and an entity none of the big powers or regional powers can ignore. It is this situation that provides India with opportunities. To capitalize on them, however, requires, as I argue in the book, that India arm itself with a sense of its own worth and a grand strategic vision, pursue agile Asia-girdling geopolitics and an elastic and calculative strategy and game-plan, acquire meaningful conventional and thermonuclear military capabilities able to blunt the major China threat and, hence, neutralize minor regional adversaries (such as Pakistan), and become genuinely self-sufficient in arms.

In the event, for India to side wholly with the US as Dr. Carafano counsels, could lose the country its “strategic autonomy” and curtail its strategic policy options. Whatever else it might do, it will not help India become a great power.

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‘India’s Machiavellian Moment’

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

My book — ‘Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet)’, reviewed by James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, Washington, DC,for ‘The National Interest’ at http://nationalinterest.org/feature/indias-machiavellian-moment-14691?page=show
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What distinguishes Bharat Karnad’s thinking about the future of India is that he is a true realist in the Machiavellian manner.
James Jay Carafano
December 20, 2015

Bharat Karnad is a professor of National Security Studies at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi—and the Machiavelli of India. His new book, “Why India is Not a Great Power (Yet),” lays out everything that’s wrong with his country’s foreign policy, bureaucracy and defense establishment and how to fix it.

What distinguishes Karnad’s thinking about the future place of India in the world is that he is a true realist in the Machiavellian manner. Realism is often confused with being realistic. That’s just wrong. Strategic thinkers of every stripe think they are realistic. Being realistic is figuring out what works. Realism is about why it works.

Realists contend ‘power’ serves as the operative force governing the relationship between states. Everything else—structure, treaties, bargains, deals, rules, sanctions, relationships, wars—are all just tools of statecraft. The hand that turns the tool is power.

When it comes to believing in power, Karnad is very much living in the Machiavellian moment. He is fixated on sweeping away generations of Indian geo-strategic architecture that prop up the policies of a non-aligned state obsessed with soft-peddling its influence. Karnad wants India to wield hard power like a hammer.

Machiavelli has been hated by history for just saying that power matters most. Frederick the Great, (ironically probably the most cold-blooded realist of eighteenth-century Europe) wrote a chapter-by-chapter critique rebuking Machiavelli’s every thought. The modern British philosopher Isaiah Berlin penned a famous essay on Machiavelli’s questionable morals.

Karnad has had his share of critics as well. When it comes to sub-continent security policy, the professor is far from the madding crowd. “Amongst thinkers who relish the notion of a non-aggressive, soft treading India,” notes one reviewer, “Karnad’s book will spark a fresh round of tut-tuting.” He is about as hawkish as they come, including advocating building atomic landmines to block an enemy’s passage to India.

But Machiavelli didn’t believe in power without moral purpose. Neither does Karnad. Sure, Machiavelli lauded princes who lied and murdered, not because might was right, but because they were trying to get it right. Machiavelli was sick and tired of tiny Italian city-states and their citizens being pushed around, exploited and subjugated by greater powers. He was looking for leaders who could unite the states and stand up to outsiders. Likewise, Karnad wants India to give up its smiley face of foreign policy not for the sake of being more powerful, but for the sake of India.

The Renaissance Florentine and the Post-Cold War Indian are also both prescient in their prescriptions for what ought to be done. If the Italians could have pulled themselves together in a single state they might have been spared centuries of being ravaged by each other and outsiders. Karnad warns his country needs to whip itself into shape and put out a “don’t mess with India” sign before others start encroaching on India’s space.

The backbone of Karnad’s thesis is a set of arguments he has developed for years: Pakistan has preoccupied India for far too long; China represents the greatest challenge to the future of Indian security and ought to be the focus of the country’s military and strategic planning; India needs a stronger and more reliable nuclear deterrent; the military ought to extend the country’s security perimeter by basing and joint operations with its neighbors; and New Delhi ought to have a strong strategic relationship with Washington. These are all bold ideas grounded in the realist perspective that hard power has an important role to play in enhancing Indian security.

While Karnad may be a good realist, there are good arguments that not everything in his 500-plus page tome is realistic. He insists, for example, that India can maintain sound strategic relationships with Israel and Iran, the United States and Russia. That might have been true when India was peripheral enough to the core interests of powers that a certain amount of infidelity didn’t matter much. New Delhi could play on both sides of the fence. That may no longer be true. Karnad can’t expect, for example, that the United States will share its very best military technology with a government that still thinks it’s okay to be buddy-buddy with Tehran and Moscow. That’s not to say that India should be prevented from having any dealings with both powers; after all, the United States does. But the hard truth is if New Delhi wants the benefits of real strategic relationship from the United States, it is going to have to join the club.

India ought to make the hard choice. There are real benefits for both the United States and India in managing their relationships with China. After all, containing Beijing is a nutty and impractical idea. On the other hand, demonstrating solidarity against Chinese efforts to rewrite international norms for their own purposes makes a great deal of sense. The most promising initiative would be a “Quad Dialogue,” a forum for developing cooperative, synchronized policies among India, Australia, Japan and the United States. These are the key Indo-Pacific powers that can get and keep China’s attention.

Beyond devising a diplomatic forum like the quad, the United States needs not only to revitalize its own military capabilities in the region, it has to invest in India becoming a first-class military power. U.S.-India defense cooperation could transform the global arms industry, not only delivering New Delhi the forces it needs, but developing a real export capacity as well.

In the end, Indian realism needs a dose of reality about the future of the U.S.-India relationship. Without that, Karnad risks a fate like Machiavelli’s: seeing the moment pass and the potential for greatness go unrealized in his lifetime.
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James Jay Carafano is vice president of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy and the E. W. Richardson Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

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Wonky priorities with Japan

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Bharat Karnad

Shinzo Abe’s very politic schtick in Banaras re: “Clean Ganga” by further messing up the river by pouring milk, etc into it by way of Hindu ritual is, well, understandable — what choice did he have? But Modi and the Indian government’s permanent bee-in-the-bonnet — signing nuclear agreements with every passing state in order to get “advanced” reactor technology, however, is getting to be an intolerable joke. One of the persisting hypocrisies Tokyo indulges in mostly by habit, even as it climbs on to the cusp of obtaining nuclear weapons itself in the face of two things — a rampaging China and a retrenching America that has a hard time looking after its own security, let alone secure the futures of its Asian allies such as Japan. So Tokyo insists on far more stringent conditions for nuclear trade with anybody than almost any other supplier state. Technology-wise, Tokyo has little to offer except perhaps in the area of reactor safety. But its conditionalities — are they not insisting on Delhi signing the additional protocol? — are simply too onerous for India to accept unless Modi is willing to give away the last negotiating card and what remains of the leverage the Congress-Manmohan Singh regime so thoughtlessly surrendered with the useless nuclear deal with the US.
Far from changing gears and reversing direction Modi, among all the other continuities in his foreign policy run by the same persons who had “negotiated” the N-deal, is going full steam down the same road.

Not to be outdone by the predecessor govt’s wrong attitude, the BJP in power has just as wonky priorities. It has signed the deal for the Shinkansen “bullet train” tech to be implemented on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad sector, beating out the Shinkansen-derived Chinese high-speed railway tech, with a $12 billion loan on low interest. So, what’s wrong with this? Consider the alternative usages this amount could have been put to — for the full electrification of trunk lines. Or to double-track some important rail routes that are still single line and require complicated scheduling schemes which get routinely disrupted resulting in most trains running late/very late. Or, it could have been channeled into modernizing/digitalizing the signalling systems. Or, invested in procuring new radar guidance technology to run trains at speeds even in foggy weather, or in developing the vacuum technology to collect night soil (to be vacuumed out at major stops, as in passenger aircraft), which is splayed all over the tracks through holes in the floors that pass for toilets on Indian railways. Instead, we’ll have a shiny new train making the short 200 mile to-and-fro run as Modi’s gift to his home state and a testament to bad choices the Indian government invariably makes no matter who is in power. This is to say nothing about the sheer diseconomics of this damn-fool venture.

And there’s less than meets the eye on security cooperation, especially with regard to ramping up naval links and to get going on the US-2 Shinmeiwa flying boat project that’s been on the table for over a decade now. We should provide incentives to have India become the economical manufacturing base and source of sales of this aircraft for a world-wide market of littoral states. And there’s no mention anywhere of moves and measures to realize Abe’s trademark concept of the ‘security diamond’ of India, Japan, Australia and the United States as the bulwark of security in the Indo-Pacific.

Not sure, in the end, what was achieved except more ground has been ceded on the nuclear front, at which rate India will be reduced as in much else to an entity of minimal consequence.

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