Pratyush wrote: ↑26 Aug 2024 20:55
The problem with being fixated with a specific weapon system is that the full gamut of capacity is getting ignored. At the expense national interest , and the capacity presented by a balanced force structure capable of keeping our sea lanes open anywhere in the world.
The German Kaiser had an idea of building Dreadnaughts to compete with the Royal Navy. Germany lost the war because the fleet was incapable of keeping German sea lines of communication open both in the north sea and the wider oceans of the world in the face of the grand fleet and widely dispersed Royal Navy trade protection cruisers.
The hypothetical SSGN is a one dimensional weapon, the only value it represents is the salvo of on board weapons. However many that it carries. The Navy as is currently is not going to be building several of those with 80 to 100 brahmos each or other cruise missiles. Small numbers of SSGN limited by 8 to 12 cruise missiles per boat represents the worst of all possible worlds. This SSGN is limited to a single salvo. And when used against a prepared enemy, will have a limited impact.
So I submit a different idea.
Completely forego sea based systems and focus purely on land based long range brahmos for Anti ship operations.
I like this idea and have asserted it before to Bharat Karnad on his blog.
India's peninsular landmass naturally juts far out into the Indian Ocean and affords us the ability to project land-based power out into that ocean.
Land-based military forces are the most economical military forces to create, operate, maintain.
Therefore there's a natural economic argument to this approach.
Long-range BrahMos, long-range strike aircraft like Russian Tu-223M bombers which were designed to unleash large salvos of anti-ship missiles.
Missiles & drones are the future - more economical, less manpower required.
We also develop a 5000 km range cruise missile to strike deep into PRC from land based launchers. We save money and don't have to worry about protecting any maritime sea route to or from anywhere in the world. Who cares about tramp merchant men carrying crude or industrial raw materials for the Indian industry anyway.
So, we buy additional cruise missiles for the price we pay for the nuclear submarine.
Win-win. We don't have to build a balanced fleet, no aircraft carriers, no destroyers, no submarines. Money saved here is also invested in cruise missiles.
While you may be showing sarcasm, the reality is that we don't have the ability to act on distant sea lanes unilaterally.
You will make useless investments in this realm just for show, while never achieving any useful return on that investment.
For acting on remote sea lanes, we would need to do it only though multi-lateral action, in which case our investment would be based on what works complementarily with what other multi-lateral partners have.
Investing in such remote unilateral methods & assets would ultimately never get used, and would thus constitute wasted money.
