ARMING WITHOUT AIMING: INDIA’S MILITARY MODERNIZATION: Book Launch Event on September 9, 2010 @Brookings Institute
Ashley Tellis @Transcript Page 17:
It {This book} comes at a great time because
I think it is fair to say that at the moment, Indian defense policy is in crisis. It’s in crisis
for at least two reasons. One,
the external environment that India had planned its military forces for since independence is steadily changing before the eyes of Indian policymakers. The
kind of threats India is going to face from Pakistan, which are threats that emerge increasingly from weakness, are not the kind of threats that the Indian military is the best instrument to cope with. And the kinds of capabilities that India is going to face on the Chinese front, which traditionally were premised on the assumption of persistent Chinese weakness, are actually being transformed as we speak into fundamental Chinese strengths, emerging Chinese strengths. And it is still
not clear at this point whether India’s military capacities will enable it to hold its own vis-à-vis a modern Chinese military, particularly if China’s political and strategic intentions towards India were to change.
So, there are
clearly changes in the external environment that are taking place as we speak and, if for no other reason, ought to
confront Indian policymakers with the need to revisit the premises on which their military modernization has been undertaken over the last two decades.
There’s a second dimension of change which is just as significant, and that is, it is becoming quite clear now that there is significant internal sclerosis in India’s defense decision-making in a wide range of issue areas and this has the consequence of preventing India from being able to utilize the military capabilities that it actually has into political outcomes that it would seek to procure. And this goes fundamentally to issues of state capacity which I’m going to talk about in a few minutes. So, when one looks at the nature of the beast,
the only element of continuity that I see still persisting in Indian defense policy is the point that Michael made with great emphasis, that is India’s strong cultural impulses to restraint still remain more or less intact.
We are not assured that these cultural impulses and the propensity to restraint will survive in perpetuity, but
for the foreseeable future the fact that India chose not to respond to the tragedy of Bombay through the use of force leaves one to be at least cautiously optimistic that when it comes to broad cultural propensities about the use of force, change in this area is going to be slower than otherwise.
But in the other two areas, the
changes in the external environment and
changes in terms of India’s own internal capacities to deal with external threats, I think
the story is more pessimistic. And so
this book comes at a time when the Indian state is, in a sense, grappling with how best to deal with these challenges.
And I must say
it comes from on top of a great deal of Indian writing and Indian soul-searching in the last five years, particularly actually starting since after the war over Kargil, but increasing in the last five years. But
the Indian state now has the resources to go out and buy the toys that its military may want to buy and this has led to a great deal of intellectual ferment with different constituencies within India asking whether the toys that are sought to be bought are, in fact, the right and appropriate toys for the task.
So, the task before me this afternoon is to just share with you some reflections on
how, in the scheme of things, one is
to assess India’s defense capacity given that it is slowly rising as an emerging power. And I would argue that there are
two ways to do it: One is to
do it with a lot of arm waving and essentially convey to you my prejudices; the
other is to kind of structure it in the form of questions that I think anyone needs to ask, and the book does the latter. And so I want to walk you through the questions that I think are pertinent to answering the question.
There are four tests that I think Indian defense policy has to meet if it is to be judged as appropriate to India’s strategic environment. The first is,
does India have an appropriate grand strategy for dealing with the world? Does it have the capacity to develop this grand strategy? This would be
question number one.
Question number two would be,
does the Indian state have the capacity to mobilize the resources required to procure the range of military instruments necessary to achieve its political aims? This is the resource mobilization question.
Question number three is a particularly difficult one and it
deals with institutional capacity and it comes in three forms.
Does the Indian state have the institutional capacity to efficiently allocate the resources it mobilizes towards creating the right kind of military instruments? Does the Indian state have the institutional capacity to assess what is appropriate defense strategy, force requirements, and military technology? And does the Indian state have the institutional capacity to direct its military instruments in times of war and peace to secure certain political aims? These are very difficult and very complex questions, but critical. And
the fourth question is, can the Indian state maintain armed forces that are capable of deploying the right kind of military capabilities and capable of implementing the right kind of military strategies? So,
if one is to do a net assessment of whether Indian military modernization is appropriate to the objectives that the nation seeks to achieve on the international stage, I think one systematically has to go through the hard work of, in a sense, answering these questions. I won’t try to answer these questions in any detail here because I’ll keep you for much longer than you've signed up for, but I want to give you what I think are
my summary conclusions and tie these to some of the themes that occur in the book.
On the first question of whether India has the capacity to develop a grand strategy and whether it has done so, I think
the correct answer, from my point of view, is that India has done tolerably well on this question. It does not have deeply articulated grand strategies, but
it’s got principles that guide its foreign policy. And its objectives and in the main, broadly speaking, the entire Indian establishment shares a rough coherence with the objectives that India seeks to achieve, so it’s done tolerably well on this score.
On the second question of does the Indian state have the capacity to mobilize resources to achieve the military aims it seeks, the
Indian state has actually done reasonably well, particularly relative to its peers. And if you look at both Pakistan and China as just being two exemplars,
you find, by some simple metrics like India’s ratios of tax to GDP, India actually does better than both China and Pakistan. And, in fact,
it’s perversely
demonstrated by the fact that today the Indian armed forces have a glut of resources that they often find themselves unable to spend. So, in a way, that is quite radically different from the ’70s.
The Indian state today has money. Whether it has the capacity to spend it efficiently is, of course, a question that I will come to next.
The third question, which is the hard question because it deals with the squishy issues of state capacity, the question of whether the institutional capacity exists to do each of the three things that I flagged,
first, does it have the capacity to efficiently allocate and mobilize resources? My view is that the Indian state does quite poorly on this score. Does the Indian state have the capacity to assess defense strategy, force requirements, and military technology? I think the Indian state does quite poorly on this score. And on
the third issue of whether the Indian state has the capacity to direct its military instruments appropriately in war and peace, I think what can be said is that the Indian state does tolerably, but not particularly well.
I would have to take a lot of time to amplify these conclusions, but
if there is a single theme that comes through in the book that explains why India’s performance in these areas has been less than optimal, I think one can flag the issue of civil military relations. And
Steve’s book does a remarkable job of showing how the Indian state and its peculiar pattern of civil-military relations has prevented the state from achieving the kind of strategic outputs that it should, by nature, enjoy because of the resources it brings into play.
Now,
there’s an important asterisk when one advances this
conclusion and
the asterisk is this: It is not that the Indian state is unaware of the constraints imposed by its peculiar pattern of civil-military relations. In fact, the Indian state is very well aware of the constraints. But it is a deliberate choice on the part of state managers to accept some degree of liability where it comes to military effectiveness in order to preserve inviolate the principle of strong civilian control. And so the point to keep in mind is that this is not entirely accidental, it’s deliberate.
Which, of course,
now raises a second question, which is, whatever the exigencies that drove these choices at the time of India’s founding, are these exigencies still in place that justify a continuation of these patterns of civil-military relations? And to my mind,
this is where the future of India’s external environment is going to play a great role, that to the degree that Indian feels pressed because its external environment turns out to be far more hostile than it was in the founding years of the country’s post-independence era, then to that degree one would hope that the current pattern of civil-military relations will also change.
Let me say a few words about the last area which is,
is the Indian state capable of maintaining armed forces with the appropriate military capabilities and capable of implementing effective military strategies? My judgment here is that the Indian military actually does very well and actually quite better than many of its peers. The book spends quite a bit of time focusing on this dimension of Indian military effectiveness, and
I think sometimes Sunil and Steve may have been a tad too harsh with respect to the judgments they have drawn. My own view is that
the Indian military, divorced of grand strategy, divorced of issues of political control, when addressed and assessed purely as a war fighting machine, is actually far more effective than people give them credit for. And one of the things that we have learned in the United States in the last eight years because of our increased interaction with the Indian military is that although India is a third world state by all the nominal indicators of what it takes to be third world, its armed forces are not your generic, run of the mill, third world armed forces. They are far more sophisticated than that. They are certainly not at the level of where the armed forces of the great powers are, but they’re not exactly also-rans either.
Where does all this leave us?
It leaves me, personally, with a certain qualified optimism. And the reasons for my qualified optimism is that, first, the book does India and students of India a yeoman service because it casts, sometimes, a harsh spotlight on things that need to be fixed. And
Indians being voracious readers and even deeper parsers of everything that’s published in the West, I’m sure will look at this book very closely and it will become one more element in the mix of the debate.
Second, I think we have to be careful about being too harsh because India is just taking baby steps on the road to great power status.
India’s rise in material capabilities is, honestly speaking, barely a decade old and so it will take some time before its ideational and institutional capacities keep pace with its material transformations. The material transformations will come first. And if the environment plays the role that I expect it will, it will force a transformation in the ideational and the institutional capabilities.
Lastly,
if India fails to get its act together, it will be confronted by crises and it will be confronted by geopolitical failure and ironically in the context of Indian history, crises, in the case of India, have had catalyzing effects, that is, they’ve been far more effective harbingers of change than normalcy. And so a
little crisis along the way may not be an altogether bad thing.
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. Anyways, India is too big to be a tail and that gives it leverage.
