A-5’s ballistic apogee

Posted on September 17, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

In the wake of the second Agni-5 launch, DRDO chief Avinash Chander confidently averred that India had an ICBM capability. On what basis did he assert this? Experts see it this way: the first stage fired for 90 seconds, getting the missile to 40 kms, the second stage separated at the 155 second stage, getting the A-5 to 110 kms altitude, and the third stage separated after firing for the next approx 135 seconds to reach the missile into space and outside of the earth’s pull, with the built-up momentum taking the A-5 to its ballistic apogee of around 600 kms, and achieving reentry speed of around 6-7 kms per second. Such an altitude was required to depress its 8,000 km lateral range to around 5,500 kms, and is commonly reached by ICBMs, such as the Russian Topol-M, flying depressed trajectories.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Cyber & Space, Defence Industry, DRDO, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Missiles, russian military, South Asia | 3 Comments

Great going A-5!

Posted on September 15, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Avinash Chander, DRDO chief and former head of ASL, Hyderabad, pronounced 2nd test firing of Agni-5 a success. He didn’t elaborate. But he must be particularly happy with several aspects. Firstly, with how well the second stage, 2 m dia composite motor functioned. Two, how nicely the GOC (guidance on chip) once again permitted the missile to attain 10 meter CEP. And most of all, as was pointed out by someone who noticed it in the first launch and which could possibly be seen when the video is released of the 2nd launch, the very rapid climb rate of the missile — characteristic of a submarine-launched missile or an anti-missile defence missile (!!!). It suggests a new propellant with higher specific impulse or, alternately, greater pressure generated in the chamber and, therefore, newer frame design. Going good, A-5!

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Defence Industry, DRDO, Great Power imperatives, India's strategic thinking and policy, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, South Asia, Weapons | 2 Comments

Thumbs up for A-5

Posted on September 14, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Agni-5 IRBM is expected to be fired a second time tomorrow from Wheeler on a depressed trajectory into the Indian Ocean. There are some important issues to consider about this missile. While it’ll eventually be an all-composite (kevlar) system, the unit to be launched Sunday, Sept 15, retains an all-steel first stage including rocket motor, with the second stage, casing, motor and all being composite. While head of DRDO, Avinash Chander, has talked of canisterizing Agnis, including Agni-5, this second launch will be a straight-up launch to collect more data on various aspects of the missile system in flight and to be reassured that the very successful first launch in April-2012 was not a fluke! Moreover, while ASL, Hyderabad, has a lots of experience with the 1 metre dia missile system (on Agni-2 & 3), A-5 is 2 metre dia missile configured to reach 8,000 kms and carry 3-7 MIRVed warheads to extend its reach to ICBM range. Thumbs up for A-5!

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Defence Industry, DRDO, Great Power imperatives, Indian Ocean, Military Acquisitions, Missiles, Nuclear Policy & Strategy, Nuclear Weapons, South Asia | 10 Comments

Obama — saving face

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

After all the heightened drama,war noises, and threatening talk emanating for the last several weeks from Washington of mounting punitive attacks on Syria for Damascus’ alleged úse of chemical weapons (CWs), President Obama seems all set to accept a so-called compromise engineered by Moscow in cahoots with Bashar al-Assad whereby the Syrian govt will surrender its stock of CWs. This is about as plain a face-saving ruse as one can invent when finding oneself, as Obama did, in an impossible political situation. The American people by a decisive majority (59%) have said they do not accept even proven CW-use as provocation for war against Syria. Following the public’s mood, the White House discovered that the US Congress too had stiffened in opposition, and not all the political canvassing and badgering has moved both these sets of opinions an iota. Obama may have saved his face but he is, as a consequence, much reduced. Indeed, many American political pundits have even ventured that this political defeat means the beginning of the phase of Obama’s tenure in office as a lame duck president. And he still has another four years to go!

The fact is the success in hunting down and killing Osama bin Laden apparently filled the US President elected the first time around on an anti-war plank with visions of himself as a great commander-in-chief who relies on instinct to achieve military glory. Except, the American people have had enough of wars on the thinnest of pretexts and will not anymore countenance deployment of the US military to swat flies that turn out to be a nest of gnats. The failures in fighting the al-Qaida-Taliban in Afghanistan and assorted sunni and shia outfits in Iraq has, perhaps, cured the US of believing that there are any more such things as “small wars”. “Small wars” in the Philippines and in the Caribbean in early 20th Century made the reputations of presidents such as Teddy Roosevelt. In initiating similar adventures George W Bush departed a diminished president and Obama is on track for a similar denouement, if he doesn’t mend his ways.

Moreover, assuming there was a popular will for another war, this time in Syria, which could have gotten out of hand with Russian missile destroyers and Russian personnel manning the S-300/S-400 anti-aircraft batteries to blunt the first wave of the expected USAF attack sorties, and the Chinese flotilla of three missile destroyers also in the mix, apart from Britain and France, a reluctant set of NATO allies, and no great support elsewhere for any aggressive American action, where is the money to prosecute the operations? A minimum of a billion dollars a month for the Syrian theatre at a time of deep defence budgetary cuts makes for daunting circumstances. It persuaded Leaders from Obama’s own Democratic Party to counsel caution. Ironic isn’t it that in the event the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, showed Obama the way out?

So, in the wake of all this, it is status quo ante — Bashar Assad stays on in Damascus with renewed Russian military support. Israel which had hoped to ride on Obama’s desire for war by launching missile strikes on Syrian targets, has perforce to back down. And the Syrian rebel army is left, as they should have expected, to the tender mercies of Assad’s forces with tepid materiel assistance trickling in but not enough to upset the military equation. The rebels may still fight on but with progressively bleaker prospects.

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, China military, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, Missiles, Russia, russian assistance, russian military, United States, US., Weapons, West Asia, Western militaries | 4 Comments

Zubin and his Childish enthusiasms

Posted on September 8, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Zubin Mehta, conductor of perhaps the finest orchestra in the world, the Berlin Philharmonic, is happy he made music to bring solace to the people of Kashmir. Had he followed up with the kind of reserve he maintained in the run up to the Srinagar event, he’d have been lauded for his stress on the healing qualities of great Western music rendered by top grade musicians. But he had to open his mouth and spoil the effect. There’s something childishly silly about Mehta’s ventilating his thoughts, among which was the nugget that Article 370 has been a boon and ought to be retained in perpetuity because as he said “can you imagine” what all the settlers from elsewhere in India would have done to the beautiful surroundings of the Valley had 370 not been there to prevent just such a catastrophe?!

Obviously, Mehta, who has spent most of his life outside the country, mostly in salubrious climes, from his personal perspective, considers aesthetics more important than the national interest or the fact of this offending Article in the Constitution turning the Kashmir dispute into a suppurating wound that has become septic after 60-odd years of obvious non-treatment. What is desperately needed is ridding the Constitution off this bothersome provision. May be Zubin saw how his home city of Mumbai has been converted into a vast and expanding slum with shanties and lean-to colonies occupying every spare bit of space in that island city — populated by precisely the kind of outsiders all over, including from the Maharashtra countryside, he does not wish to see flooding into Kashmir — the “Switzerland of Asia”.

But what does Mehta care that Art 370 keeps the dispute with Pakistan simmering and the status of this province within the Union distinct and separate, providing legal license to certain natives of Kashmir to keep their agitation going, even as the people of the Valley survive on handouts from the rest of the Indian people who financially support their “separateness”. The largest quantum of subsidies transferred by the Centre to any Indian state is Kashmir.

The more troubling question is the Motivation of the German Govt to finance this little cultural do amidst the beauty of the Shalimar Gardens in Srinagar. Indeed, before approving of any such event, did the MEA at all wonder about the purpose of it? Did somebody in that Ministry not consider the fact that allowing such an affair would not so much put a stamp of international approval on the relative peace prevailing in Kashmir at the present time as confirm Kashmir’s disputed status and its standing as an issue that can spark conflict between India and Pakistan? Are none of the MEA officials aware of the interest and the effort of the West European “do gooder” states — UK, France, and Germany, to try and slyly push for international mediation on Kashmir?

What Kashmir needs is not just expeditious abrogation of Article 370 but grants of lands all along the LOC to ex-Indian Army soldiers on the condition that the title to these pieces of strategic real estate can only be sold and ownership transferred to other ex-military men. This will, as I have argued in my writings, create a defensible buffer zone preventing the crossovers by terrorists, so-called “azadi”-seekers, and Islamist extremists from POK. It will once and for all put closure on the Kashmir dispute with the Pakistanis having their slice of Kashmir. Remarkably, GOI/MEA these days does not even mention POK as being disputed territory, which only leads the International public to believe that what’s being contested is only Indian Kashmir. More evidence of MEA being on the ball!

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Army, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Terrorism | 5 Comments

Obama’s potentially appalling mistake

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The US learns nothing from its wars, not from all the military disasters it set in train in this millennium — Afghanistan and Iraq that did little else but prepare the ground for the Islamist radical take-over. Yes, Saddam Hussain was a bloodthirsty tyrant but Washington supplied him with the chemical weapons he used against Iran in the decade-long war in the 1980s, and against his own Kurdish population. But it was Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran Washington wanted to hurt then by any and all means, including CWs. In this context, Obama’s first charging Bashar al-Assad with CW use and then, on the basis of this charge mounting a punitive operation, is a bit rich, especially because the irrefutable evidence the US says it has collected, has not been disseminated to an international public, which action would have improved Obama’s creds. The only countries jumping onto the American war bandwagon are, predictably, France and the Britain, who are reduced to being hangers-on in the new century. So countries of West Asia will have to brace for another eruption of violence with the Syrian rebel army now leaning on direct help from the US. It is another matter, that this won’t be enough to displace Assad in Damascus. Worse, is the likelihood that the generally secular rebel forces, with the military situation tilted against them, will in time welcome all the armed and motivated Islamist goons from all over to enlarge their fighting ranks and, soon enough, the rebel army will distinguish itself from the Assad regime because of its al-Qaida precepts and philosophy. Lo and behold, actions against Damascus will spur al-Qaida revival. The denseness of the American policymakers is simply appalling. The irony is that, while the initial phase of drone and Tomahawk cruise missile attacks, and stealth aircraft recce runs is underway, the US armed forces, who are always up for a scuffle with a manifestly weaker foe, are wary of intervening in another scrap that could blow up in the American faces. So, it is Obama, twice elected on an anti-war agenda, then who will be driving the US into another conflict, with what consequences can only be speculated.

In this mess, Russia is weighing in militarily on the side of Assad. One of the warships deployed by Moscow in the Mediterranean is reportedly the Moskva helicopter carrier. Not to be left behind, China is doing its two yuans worth to muddy the waters by sending in a small flotilla offshore of the Levant. What these PLAN vessels will be doing mucking around those waters is hard to fathom, except perhaps to snoop around, pick up operational radar frequencies, stuff like that and generally act as a would-be great power poking its snout in other people’s business without the least chance of making an impact.

This analyst for one hopes Chinese ships get in harm’s way, get shot up, and the PLAN flotilla gets involved in an inadvertent firefight with the USAF and the US Mediterranean Fleet, and otherwise gets its tail in the wringer.

Posted in Afghanistan, Asian geopolitics, China, China military, Cyber & Space, Defence Industry, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, guerilla warfare, Russia, russian military, Terrorism, United States, US., West Asia, Western militaries | 6 Comments

Alternative to “default option”

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Rahul Gandhi, vice-president of the Congress party and its presumptive prime ministerial candidate should his mummy, Sonia, deem the situation ripe for his elevation (because Manmohan Singh is history — “a good man who turned out to be a good-for-nothing man” in Arun Shourie’s memorable words), called his party the voters’ “default option”. Default, by definition, implies failure of an alternative. In the context of the looming general elections, it means that if the Bharatiya Janata Party does not secure a “critical mass” of at least 185 seats in the Lok Sabha, smaller parties would choose once again to rally to the Congress party’s moth-eaten standard, and help it to continue with its policies that have left the country diminished and derelict.

Congress party’s optimism may not be warranted, however, because Prakash Karat has clarified that under no circumstances would the Left Front, still chafing from Manmohan Singh’s 2008 “betrayal” on the nuclear deal with the United States, side with Sonia Congress. It will stoke Mulayam Singh’s PM ambitions; after all his Yadav family party has all along sustained its samajwadi (socialist) pretensions by rubbing up against the Communist parties for a semblance of ideological respectability. But Mulayam has hurt his bonafides by enabling the Congress party to survive in office for nine long years. He cannot afford to botch up his record further by signalling in any way the likelihood of SP propping up a Sonia Congress-led future dispensation, and still expect the Left Front to help hoist him into 7, Race Course Road. In this competition for support of the Left parties in parliament, Mulayam and Sonia Congress are rivals.

With a reviving BJP in Uttar Pradesh, moreover, the coalition Mayawati had stitched together is falling apart with the Brahmin and Muslim voters she had attracted gravitating towards the BJP and Mulayam’s Samajwadi Party (SP) respectively. The underway “polarisation” of the electorate, precipitated principally by SP’s over-the-top strategy of wooing Muslim voters, is reflected in the SP member of parliament Kamal Farooqui’s astonishing charge that the recent arrest of the Indian Mujahideen founder Yasin Bhatkal was because he was Muslim and not a terrorist mastermind. A polarised electorate has, for the duration of the next general elections season, thus become irreversible. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s Ayodhya yatra fiasco, in this context, was a minor distraction, successful only in terms of alerting the majority community to the over-tilt in the approaches of the SP and Congress. This leaves Mayawati with her backward caste (BC) support base, part of which may be drawn to Narendra Modi’s BC roots burnished by his proven administrative acumen and political success. For reasons of UP politics, moreover, Mayawati may be pushed, post-elections, towards tying up with BJP.

These political developments have brightened BJP’s prospects, except for the habit of some of the current party leaders to score self goals and to try and trip up the only worthwhile leader with the chance to make good, the Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi. Many of them may be experienced in the ways of parliament, but simply do not have the mass pull or reach and, more significantly, the ability and the rhetorical wherewithal to connect with the people in the elemental sort of way that Modi effortlessly does. The Congress party’s stratagem of using Gujarat Police DIG DG Vanzara’s resignation letter to implicate Modi in the “fake encounter” case is shoddier still, considering it has rendered the Intelligence Bureau’s modus operandi suspect and made fighting the terrorist menace hostage to its political objective of derailing Modi, whose candidature it fears.

The fact is BJP without Modi helming it seems bereft of new thoughts and policy ideas. Indeed, the parliamentary debates on the food security and land acquisition bills showed up BJP as Congress lite. If institutionalised access to food for the poor, for instance, was deemed a political imperative then it was incumbent on the parliamentary BJP leaders to have fleshed out the party’s own food security programme based on its Chhattisgarh model, worked out the financial liability aspects at least in skeletal terms, and mounted a sustained public campaign on its behalf in the months leading up to the monsoon session of parliament. It would have highlighted the hollowness of the Congress policy of merely bestowing the “right to food” without explaining just what quantum of financial resources would be necessary, how these would be mustered, and the manner in which the central government would help the states defray the massive expense. By forcing the ruling party to bend to the contours of its more practicable Chhattisgarh model-motivated programme, BJP could have legitimately claimed the laurels for the ensuing legislation, and enabled it to turn this issue into electoral gold, rather than reducing chief minister Raman Singh’s flagship Chhattisgarh scheme to a mere debating point.

Surely, it is the main opposition party’s duty to anticipate the agenda of the treasury benches and provide the people with alternative solutions on issues of national import and impact. This, unfortunately, BJP did not do. The irony of the absent right-wing policy alternative to the Congress’s usual unviable nanny-state populist spendthrift ideas is that a manifestly more thoughtful but politically far weaker Swatantra Party led by C R Rajagopalachari provided much richer fare by way of policy choices and political contestation to Nehru in the Fifties as did Piloo Mody to Indira Gandhi in the Sixties.

Narendra Modi’s outlining his “India First” philosophy predicated on economic growth and less government, less corruption but more efficient and effective administration to deliver good governance can be juxtaposed against Rahul Gandhi’s “celebrating” the “victory” offered by the land acquisitions bill to Odisha tribals opposing bauxite and iron ore mining. The contrast between Modi’s and Rahul’s visions, between prosperity spurred by opening up opportunities for economic growth, and meagre returns to a benighted people from a calculated policy of handouts to keep them dependent on mai-baap sarkar cannot be starker. Indians confront the clearest electoral choice since Independence.

[Published in the New Indian Express, Friday, September 6, 2013 at http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/Alternative-to-default-option/2013/09/06/article1769817.ece

Posted in Indian ecobomic situation, Indian Politics, Internal Security, South Asia | 2 Comments

Naivete in extremis

Posted on September 5, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

The naivete of Indian diplomats never ceases to amaze! A one-time diplomat and now adviser to Nitish Kumar, Pavan Verma, on a TV panel discussion charged Amit Shah and, by extension, Narendra Modi, with “proactively” violating the Constitutional rights of suspected terrorists shot in so-called fake encounters in Gujarat with their “proactive counter-terrorism” actions! Left to the likes of Verma, Yasin Bhatkal would no doubt be let off after reading him an Indian version of the American “Miranda rights”! And this Verma fellow made a career of the cynical business of diplomacy? Good lord!

By this reckoning, Indira Gandhi, her cabinet ministers, and party appointees as chief minister, Punjab, should be held directly culpable for the sustained, ruthless, and bloodyminded extra-legal elimination with extreme prejudice of Khalistanis and would-be Khalistanis in the early 1980s, and the carte blanche given DG, KPS Gill, and his extraordinarily brave and courageous subordinates such as Ajit Singh Bhullar, SSP, Tarn Tarn District, who killed himself when having eased the border state from the grip of terrorists, he was hounded by motivated human rights activists after peace returned to the state, even as the Congress Party govts in Punjab and in New Delhi cravenly looked the other way. [All this is brought out by my good friend, NV Subramanian, in his latest piece “Dirty tricks” accessible at http://www.newsinsight.net/Dirtytricks.aspx#page-page-1. Do look it up.]

In any case, what does Verma think counter-terror ops are — a mild disagreement at a cocktail party in Thimpu (where he was ambassador)? With such naivete worn on their sleeves, it is little wonder Indian diplomats are unable to protect the country’s interests abroad, leave alone act sensibly, and make the right policy choices. With this kind of personnel in the GOI, can the country expect to in any way match up with China, whose preferred mode of dealing with even peacefully protesting Tibetans and Uighurs in Xinjiang is a bullet to the head, and no nonsense about it?

[Verma also lately discovered in an op/ed that Pakistan seems to be a far better practitioner of Kautilyan realpolitik with deft handling of the asymmetric instrument of ‘kutayuddha’ or covert war using terrorism, than is India. Per chance, he picked up this nugget from my 2002 book — ‘Nuclear Weapons and Indian Security’.]

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, guerilla warfare, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, South Asia, South East Asia | Leave a comment

F-22 Downed (?) and US-Russian reset

Posted on September 5, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

There are conflicting reports about an US Air Force F-22 Raptor crashing in Jordan in the area bordering Syria. Whether or not such an aircraft was downed presumably by a Syrian S-300/S-400 anti-aircraft missile unit that Russia also touts as an anti-missile missile, the possible role of Russian military personnel active on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s regime will be a matter of conjecture, especially now that an American air strike is imminent.

Assuming the story of the downed F-22 is true, those who know about the complexity in effectively using the Russian S-300/S-400 systems believe that any such success would have to be attributed to the active Russian hand. The presence of Russian military personnel in Syria is not a secret and with two missile destroyers being deployed in the Mediterranean by Moscow, the game of nerves between the Cold War antagonists may now be on. Obama may well launch a concerted and massive aerial strike against Damascus and key Syrian military concentrations and communications hubs, but an air war by itself w/o a follow-on land force insertion will amount to an indecisive operation. Washington is hamstrung in inserting even Special Forces, however, because the US Senate while permitting aerial strikes has barred boots on the ground, and restricted the overall operation to just 90 days.

Moreover, with US-Russian relations becoming testy — reflected in Obama’s signaling the unlikelihood of his meeting Putin on the sidelines of the G-20 summit, the US will have to factor in just what Russia’s reaction would be to waves of decapitating and punitive attacks on a Damascus dispensation Moscow has always had a soft corner for. Interesting to see how this scenario unfolds.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, Europe, Geopolitics, Great Power imperatives, Missiles, Russia, russian assistance, russian military, United States, US., Weapons, West Asia, Western militaries | 3 Comments

Targeted execution of Dawood Ibrahim?

Posted on August 29, 2013 by Bharat Karnad

Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi of the BJP surely startled many viewers in an ABP TV Hindi discussion show “Live Debate” starting at 1800 hours today (Aug 29). In response to a remonstrance by a Pakistani, some Pirzada, that Dawood was not anywhere in his country, Naqvi said “just wait 2 or 3 months” and everybody will see, he said, an occurrence involving the so-called “D-Company” chief that would resemble the action taking out Osama bin Laden by US Special Forces action in Abottabad.

This is the first plain speaking that I know of on the subject of Dawood being eliminated by means of targeted execution. Interested people will, no doubt, wait and see what happens in 3 month timeframe. But such public alerting, while avoidable, will make no difference to the Indian hunters/executioners on Dawood’s trail, even less to the Mumbay criminal kingpin/terrorist ‘coz he has survived to-date principally because he’s well informed (buying off information from any and all sources) and is very mobile to escape offering himself as stationary target. The targeted execution is an option India has always had but has not so far shown the will to carry out against enemies of the Indian state. May be change is in the air and Naqvi was referring to this prospective action by a new dispensation headed by Narendra Modi in Delhi. Just may be India will transition from a soft state to a hard one, where especially rogue elements within the country, and escapees outside the country, will not be spared.

Posted in Asian geopolitics, civil-military relations, guerilla warfare, India's Pakistan Policy, Indian Politics, Internal Security, Pakistan, Pakistan military, South Asia, Terrorism | 7 Comments