This is kind of funny:
India fears that China might try to carry out a lightning campaign (a few days, or a week), and then offer peace terms (with China keeping all or part of Arunachal Pradesh). Since neither country would be willing to start a full scale nuclear war over Arunachal Pradesh (a rural area with a population of about a million people, spread among 84,000 square kilometers of mountains and valleys), the "grab and parley" strategy has to be taken seriously. In the meantime, China keeps finding ways to annoy India over this issue.I'd mentioned that I thought Kargil was the impetus to India's Cold Start thinking that would allow the Indian army to react quickly to a small attack with a portion of India's army rather than requiring a lengthy mobilization that might be too late to address a "grab and parlay" strategy.
Meanwhile, India seems quite confident that they can handle China if a war breaks out in this mountainous wilderness. Partly that's because India is playing defense here, which always confers an advantage. But India's big advantage is that it has recent (1999) combat experience in mountain warfare. ...
That 1999 war got little publicity, so it's generally unknown outside India how much that experience changed the Indian armed forces.
India appears confident. But they were pretty confident before that 1962 whomping they endured. So I don't know if India actually did get better enough to be able to dominate China in a small ground war in the mountains.
Anyway, China has reason to be annoyed with another one of their pet Rottweilers (North Korea already gives America and Japan an excuse to build missile defenses that are useful against China); and India should send flowers to the Pakistanis for making them better able to defeat China.
