At the end of a marathon meeting, the Cabinet Committee on Security initiated a comprehensive, well-funded plan to bolster India’s land, air and naval forces to counter China’s rising military prowess. The plan is historic, coming after years of dithering by an Indian establishment seemingly paralysed by memories of the country’s humiliating defeat at the hands of the Chinese in a brief but brutal war in 1962.
Since the CCS plan was launched, there have been significant and wide-ranging signs that Indian policymakers are finally willing to realistically assess possible military responses to China’s rise. One clear example is a new division of troops aimed exclusively at the border region of the two great powers. India is now mid-way through raising two mountain divisions for the north-eastern border area with China, with the two divisions pencilled in to be ready for deployment by the middle of next year.
The goal is to plug existing gaps in India’s preparedness along the Arunachal Pradesh-China frontier, and the two divisions, consisting of about 20,000 well-armed troops, will include a squadron of India’s armoured spearhead—Soviet-built T-90 tanks and a regiment of artillery. They will be backed by enhanced command, control, communications and intelligence (C4I) capabilities aimed at covering the Tibet region.
But that’s certainly not all.
The Indian Air Force has over the past year deployed 36 Su-30MKI, its most advanced multi-role fighter aircraft, to Tezpur in the country’s north-east in response to the People’s Liberation Army Air Force’s seven airbases in Tibet and southern China.
Meanwhile, the Indian Navy is working to counter the growing clout of the PLA Navy. The current thinking at Indian naval headquarters is that China will move to aggressively increase its presence in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) to secure its extended energy supply lines (despite its name, military planners in Beijing don’t feel India has ownership of this expanse of water).
The air force component is clearly not good enough yet, and 36 advanced fighters is a drop in the bucket.
I looked at the basic situation India faces regarding China, recently. The military build up needs to be based on the fact that the Himalayas prevent China or India from waging decisive land campaigns against the other. Border areas need to be reinforced, however, to prevent China from waging a rapid, limited campaign to bite off chunks of land and then calling for a ceasefire under the threat of nuclear escalation to cement the limited gains.
But the lack of a major land campaign threat means that India can downgrade their army while shifting army resources to the north and east to confront China and their ally Burma. More limited resources can be left to hold the Pakistanis and preserve a more limited offensive capability there to expel Pakistani invaders or conduct limited offensives.
Just a note on the article's boast about the divisions going to the northeast, a squadron of tanks is hardly impressive--that's what we'd call a company. But for the rough terrain they are heading for, that's not a big deal--it isn't tank country, apparently.
As for at sea, India's navy has the edge in the Indian Ocean already, and could cut China's lines of communication through that ocean right now. Gaining the ability to operate in the South China Sea would pose a real threat to the Chinese in time of war.
India's most urgent need, in my opinion, is upgrading their air force so that they can gain air superiority over the land frontier. Do that and the Chinese will have problems moving their forces even on their own side of the border, let alone moving into India; and will have to face being bombed rather than dishing it out to Indian troops.
It is a long way from Hindi-Chini Bhai-Bhai. And a long time since the rising power of India needed to fixate on Pakistan as their main conventional military challenge.
UPDATE: And then there's the nuclear angle. If China and India go to US_Soviet levels of a nuclear arms race, the danger will be really high. Conside that China and India won't have the luxury of a whole twenty minutes of flight time from land-based ICBMs that we and the Soviets had in the Cold War.
And consider that India and China won't even have the theoretical half step toward total nuclear war of a theater nuclear war as we had in Europe where the main conventional battlefield for us was. As bad as a theater nuclear war would have been for those European states unlucky enough to be in the theater, at least for the Soviets and Americans the bombs weren't exploding on their respective territory, allowing (again, theoretically) a possible fire break before escalation to total nuclear war between us and the Soviets. India and China border each other so even tactical use of nukes will be an attack on someone's home country, which could mean an automatic pressure for retaliation on strategic targets.
For India and China, they have a lot of incentive to abandon the triad of nuclear deterrence that we've maintained (bombers, land-based missiles, and sub-based missiles) and weight the stool heavily on the submarine leg to reduce the incentive for the other side to strike bases in India and China in a crisis.
