It is essential to realize just how different the world looks from New Delhi. From the US perspective looking across the vast Pacific, for example, a hypothetical hostile China is primarily a naval problem: The Pentagon concept that de facto focuses on conflict with China is even called “Air-Sea Battle.” From an Indian perspective looking across the Himalayas, however, Chinese hostility is hardly hypothetical, and it’s an entirely terrestrial border dispute – assuming that neither side starts flinging nukes.
While Pakistan has always been India’s primary threat, China steamrollered India in 1962 and the Himalayan boundary remains disputed to this day, with regular Chinese incursions. Just this April, People’s Liberation Army troops marched 12 miles into Indian-claimed territory and set up camp there for three weeks, watched warily by Indian soldiers.
“As it is in many of the Asia-Pacific countries, the army is the dominant service” in India, Gen. Odierno noted pointedly. “It is by far the largest service, it is by far the most influential.”
In contrast to how US defense spending is divided into roughly equal shares for each military department (Army, Air Force, and Navy/Marines), the Indian Army historically consumes more than half of India’s defense spending. In the proposed 2013-2014 budget, the Army share shrank slightly, but it still gets 49 percent. The Air Force is a distant second at 28 percent, despite years of steady growth, and the Indian Navy actually shrinks to under 18 percent. (The remaining 5 percent goes to defense-wide activities, primarily research and development).
“The Chinese-Indian confrontations are all on land,” said Norman Polmar, a leading naval historian and analyst. “There’s no naval confrontation between the two because there’s no naval intersection between the two.”
That could change, however, as both Beijing and New Delhi increase their naval capabilities and ambitions. “The land border [is] a source of irritation, but I don’t think that’s what drives the real competition, ” said CSIS’s Baker, disagreeing with Polmar. “I think the competition ultimately is maritime.”
In the oil-rich and much-contested South China Sea, for example, an Indian company is backing Vietnamese exploration of areas claimed by China. Last year India’s top admiral, D.K. Joshi, went so far as to say his fleet stood “prepared” to defend India’s energy interests there. It was a dubious claim in terms of the Indian military’s actual ability to intervene – Baker dismisses it as “bluster” – but it still that provoked a harsh Chinese response.
For China’s part, the People’s Republic depends on the uninterrupted flow of Middle Eastern oil eastwards across the Indian Ocean and through the Strait of Malacca. (So do US allies like Japan and South Korea). Growing Chinese investments in ports around the region – in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar (Burma) – have spurred Indian anxieties about being encircled by a Chinese “string of pearls.”
“Indeed,” scholar Iskander Rehman wrote wrily in 2012, “a first-time traveler to India could be forgiven for believing that India is on the verge of being subjected to a sudden wave of Chinese amphibious landings.” Now a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Rehman is deeply skeptical about potential Sino-Indian naval conflict. He emphasizes that India’s chief maritime problem remains Pakistan, from whose shores sailed the perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai attack.
That said, the Indian Navy has never been a mere coastal defense force and lately “has been pursuing an ambitious and impressive modernization program,” Rehman told me. The goal: “a 160 ship fleet, with 300 aircraft, structured around three carrier groups, by 2022.” (By comparison, the US Navy has ten carriers – a historic low – and over 3,700 aircraft).
India’s ambitions, however, often exceed its grasp. Currently, India has a single geriatric carrier, an ex-Royal Navy ship first laid down in World War II. But it has bought the unfinished Soviet carrier Gorshkov (a smaller cousin to China’s carrier, the ex-Soviet Varyag, which has not yet entered service). The refurbished carrier should – after much delay – enter Indian service as the Vikramaditya this year, equipped with Russian-built MiG-29K fighters that far outclass India’s current Harrier jumpjets. Two Indian-designed carriers are also in the works, but they are even more delayed, and Rehman predicts the first won’t enter service “until 2018 at the earliest.”
India also has two nuclear-powered submarines – one Russian import and one built domestically – and a dozen conventionally powered ones, with ambitious plans for a fleet of five ballistic-missile subs as a nuclear deterrent. It is also building a variety of corvettes, frigates, and destroyers. But in case after case, Rehman said, “these programs have been plagued by inefficiency, delays and severe cost overruns.”