Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Make India's Navy Great

The best thing America could do to help India's navy resist Chinese ambitions to stretch its reach across the Indian Ocean to Africa and the Middle East would be to help India reform their completely inadequate naval shipbuilding:

India has long had problems designing and building larger warships (frigates, carriers, subs). For decades India blamed colonialism for the decline of the Indian shipbuilding industry. But after other nations, with even less history of shipbuilding (China, South Korea), became world leaders in the industry Indians began to accept that the problems were Indian and not the fault of British colonialism (which brought the industrial revolution to India, where that industrialization process declined after the British left). By the 1990s the Indian government agreed that internal reforms were needed and since then India has made a lot of progress but is still way behind countries like China, Taiwan and South Korea in ship building and new tech in general.

Although we have enough problems to fix ourselves, we could help.