Brookings: Experts - Sunil Dasgupta

Arming without Aiming: India's Military Modernization, Revised with a New Preface

Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Brookings Institution Press 2012 223pp.

India has long been motivated to modernize its military, and it now has the resources. But so far, the drive to rebuild has lacked a critical component—strategic military planning. India’s approach of arming without strategic purpose remains viable, however, as it seeks great-power accommodation of its rise and does not want to appear threatening. What should we anticipate from this effort in the future, and what are the likely ramifications? Stephen Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta answer those crucial questions in a book so timely that it reached number two on the nonfiction bestseller list in India.

“Two years after the publication of Arming without Aiming, our view is that India’s strategic restraint and its consequent institutional arrangement remain in place. We do not want to predict that India’s military-strategic restraint will last forever, but we do expect that the deeper problems in Indian defense policy will continue to slow down military modernization.”—from the preface to the paperback edition

Praise for Arming without Aiming:

"Much has been made of the emergence of India on the global stage. In Arming without Aiming, Cohen and Dasgupta provide an expert assessment of what India’s rise means for its unevenly modernizing military, which is destined to become the third largest in the world. Anyone with an interest in the growing rivalry between India and China, or in the impact that a stronger, although still extraordinarily outdated, Indian military will mean for U.S.-India ties, should read this. This is an important book on an important subject, which is likely to remain unparalleled for many years."
—Edward Luce, Washington bureau chief, Financial Times

"India’s rise to power will remain incomplete until it acquires, and develops, the capacity to effectively utilize the full panoply of military power. Although India has made impressive strides in this direction in recent years, Stephen Cohen’s and Sunil Dasgupta’s Arming without Aiming demonstrates how much still needs to be done. This cautionary tale will be required reading for all those concerned about Indian defense policy and military modernization."
—Ashley J. Tellis, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

"The book is an empathetic, objective, and comprehensive narration and analysis of the evolution of Indian defense policy and management. The Indian strategic establishment is groping to find ways and means of safeguarding its progress toward becoming a twenty-first-century knowledge power in an international community still dominated by strategic thought from the World War II era. Steve Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta have brought into bold relief this somewhat inchoate and as yet not fully formulated effort. This will be a required reading for all senior service officers, civil servants, politicians, and academics engaged in Indian security."
—K. Subrahmanyam, Indian defense expert

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Stephen P. Cohen

Sunil Dasgupta

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The Good News in India's Current Civil-Military Dispute

Sunil Dasgupta — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Civil-military disputes may be unseemly and potentially perilous to democracy, but Indians should welcome the feud between Indian army Chief General V K Singh and the Manmohan Singh government.

With India no longer in danger of a military coup, the disagreement is an important—albeit costly—test of policy and institutional efficacy in an area of governance that is normally hidden from public view, often in the name of secrecy.

The seeming scandal bolsters the twin requirements of any national security system: Verifying the principle of civilian control over the armed forces even as it brings scrutiny to the mechanism of providing for defense.

The classic model of civil-military relations is absolutist: Civilian leaders have a right to be wrong, but failure is their burden to bear alone. In practice, however, civil-military relations have always been a two-way street.

Military officers, by virtue of their expertise and avowed apolitical character, can and do appeal directly to the people over the heads of their political masters. Political leaders, in turn, often leave the management of defense to professional military officers, both to avoid hard decisions about a subject matter rife with uncertainty and to shift the responsibility if things go badly.

Consequently, most civil-military disputes follow a similar script: The military leader accuses the politician of sacrificing the country’s security, sometimes with charges of corruption, and the political leader accuses the general of breaching rules that undermine the oath to serve and protect.

Read the full article at India Abroad »

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Sunil Dasgupta

Publication: India Abroad

Image Source: © B Mathur / Reuters

The Fate of India’s Strategic Restraint

Sunil Dasgupta — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:32:00 -0400

In February 2012, India selected a French jet, the Rafale, as the new mainstay fighter for its air force. A month earlier, the country had leased a nuclear submarine from Russia. The acquisition of the fighter aircraft and submarine is part of an ambitious military modernization that has made India the number one arms importer in the world.

This rearmament effort, riding on the nation’s unprecedented economic growth, has prompted some observers to wonder whether India has decided to balance Chinese power in Asia or is seeking to correct the anomaly of strategic parity with Pakistan, a country one fifth its size. Indians themselves want their country to act more assertively, and India’s primary rival, Pakistan, has never bought into neighborly restraint.

So, could we be witnessing the start of an India-China arms race in Asia that would become the defining global conflict of the twenty-first century— as the United States returns to its traditional role of offshore balancer, reduces its overseas presence, and husbands resources for domestic recovery? Could we also be standing on the precipice of a nuclear confrontation with Pakistan?

The answer is: Probably not. India’s rearmament efforts are unlikely to turn the nation into an aggressive power, seeking military balance with China and upending the existing balance with Pakistan. Indeed, not only have India’s political leaders traditionally hesitated to use force as an instrument of foreign policy even when the conditions were right for it, they have neglected to provide clear strategic guidance to the military. In a 2010 book, Stephen P. Cohen and I called this phenomenon “arming without aiming.” We found that the disconnect between strategic purpose and military planning is both shaped by and reinforces military-strategic restraint in India’s foreign policy.

Today, notwithstanding growing uncertainty in South Asia and the recently accelerated arms buildup, New Delhi appears unlikely to abandon this military restraint. Certainly, fears of American withdrawal from the region are making Indians jittery about a resurgence of terrorist threats. At the same time, New Delhi likely will strive to wield its growing economic and international influence in Afghanistan as U.S. troops pull out. Although India’s engagement probably will not rise to the level of military intervention, it might be sufficient to fuel another dangerous rivalry with the Pakistanis in Afghanistan.

Outside of an unlikely new war, however, India’s political leaders will not want to spend the political and monetary capital necessary to transform growing resources into military power and purpose sufficient for a reordering of their country’s strategic condition.

This is not a pessimistic view of India’s prospects in the world. To the contrary, military-strategic restraint has paid off handsomely despite the resulting inefficiencies in defense planning. Restraint has contributed to greater accommodation of India’s rise as a great power in the international community. The rise of China led Singapore, for example, to exhort India to become more engaged in Southeast Asia. Today, even the Russians hesitate to sell advanced weapons to China, but Western firms want to be part of India’s military revival. They are motivated by profit, of course, but also by the recognition that India is unlikely to become hostile to their own nations’ interests.

Most notably, the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, based on a framework agreed to by Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and then-US President George W. Bush in 2005, has legitimized India’s status as a nuclear weapons power, making it the only country to be accommodated this way since 1968, when the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) was concluded. Would a militarily aggressive India have received the same accommodation?

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Sunil Dasgupta

Publication: Current History

On a Wing and a Player: The U.S.-India Military Relationship

Sunil Dasgupta — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared under the same title in The Times of India Crest Edition.

Finally. When the Indian government announced its intention to buy French Dassault Rafale fighter jets this month, it rung in the beginning of the end of a process that actually began in the late 1980s. At $10.4 billion — and expected to grow further as price negotiations continue —the MMRCA deal is the biggest contract for a single weapon in the history of independent India. This new fighter is the marquee item in India’s ambitious plan to spend $100 billion over the next five-to-seven years on new conventional weapons. But the Rafale is not a fighter that the world’s air forces are rushing to acquire, so why is India? Indeed, the heavy, twin-engine Rafale is not the kind of aircraft the IAF wanted to replace its ageing MiGs with anyway.

In 2010, with this fighter acquisition process still ongoing, Stephen Cohen and I had argued in a book that India’s military modernisation appeared to be bereft of military-strategic purpose. India’s rearmament effort was led by its armed forces rather than the political leadership of the country, with the consequence that military research and procurement in the country had been never-ending, haphazard, wasteful, and often corrupt.

In the Rafale decision, from identifying the need to picking out the right aircraft, the entire process took more than two decades. During this time, India’s strategic circumstances changed dramatically. In particular, India entered into a nuclear deterrent relationship with Pakistan and sought détente with China. The IAF changed what it wanted in a new fighter, but it is unclear the degree to which military threats from China and Pakistan shaped that decision.

The original justification for a new aircraft was to replace the MiG-21, a relatively lightweight air interceptor. But the replacement criteria the IAF defined—indeed, the very category of fighters for which it held competitive trials—was for a more versatile and more expensive medium (range/weight) multirole combat aircraft, the MMRCA. Requiring the new aircraft to fulfill multiple roles raises the question, which of these required roles are more important? The MMRCA gives the IAF flexibility, but does so by choosing quality over quantity and that may not be the right choice in India’s relatively low-tech security environment.

The larger issue here is that the IAF should not have to answer these questions on its own. The answers must come from how India’s political leadership defines the country’s security, the kind of wars that it wants the military to fight, and the process by which it reconciles the competing interests of India’s military arms.

One consequence of the choice was to effectively reject the indigenous Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), which its developers had hoped would replace the MiG-21. Except the IAF always regarded it as an underperforming machine. But whether or not the IAF should support indigenous aircraft development by backing the LCA, even if it were inferior, is a decision for political leaders to make. Yet Indian politicians rarely speak publicly on military-strategic matters. My understanding is that they rarely provide the military clear guidance in private either.

Left to itself, the IAF’s choice of going from light to medium aircraft reflects the very capable professionalism of airmen who seek to become better and better because that is what a professional does. But professionalism, and its concomitant pursuit of technological advancement, are lesser motivators of good military planning than security threats.

The absence of clear political direction to the military does not answer the puzzle of the choice of the Rafale over its competitors. In choosing a French aircraft India has also passed on an opportunity to provide some quid to the pro quo in its relations with the United States at a time when bilateral ties have lost the headiness of the Nuclear Deal days.

The Obama administration moved away from treating India as an exceptional nation and focused much more on its China portfolio. Obama’s visit to the country in 2010 did not reverse that perception.

But India remains an attractive partner to the world. India’s defence planning dysfunction, its corollary military-strategic restraint makes its national rise more palatable to the international community than, say, China’s. Today, even the Russians hesitate to sell advanced weapons to China, but suppliers from around the world line up at South Block. They benefit of course, but equally noteworthy is the fact that their governments are not afraid that India will turn these new guns back at them.

There is irony in the fact that India’s broken defence planning contributes to the nation’s rise in a back-handed fashion. To many Indians this is not a trade-off worth making, but it is not one that should be dismissed out of hand.

The Rafale decision has signaled to Washington that India has other options -- if the Obama administration wants a stronger military relationship with India, then it should be more forthcoming with high technology transfers. The loss of the deal has rankled American industry and government sufficiently to warrant a reconsideration of the U.S. technology regime as it applies to India. If India continues to buy more advanced conventional weapons, and if American firms continue to get a fair shot, technology transfers are likely to become easier. The Rafale may have ambiguous military value, but politically it maybe prove to be the force multiplier that the IAF is hoping it will be.

Copyright: Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd, India

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Sunil Dasgupta

Publication: The Times of India, The Crest Edition

Why Mumbai Needs a Mayor

Sunil Dasgupta — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The three bomb blasts that hit Mumbai during rush hour on July 13 highlighted both India's endemic vulnerability to terrorist violence and the serious deficiencies in its security infrastructure that must be addressed to keep the country safe.

Since 2003, Mumbai has suffered four major terrorist attacks, including one in November 2008, during which terrorists killed 164 and injured 308. Although Mumbai seemed to return to normal the day after the most recent bombings (they were relatively small, killing 24 and injuring 131 more), it is hard to live in the city, or have friends and family living there, without feeling that the country's national and state governments are simply unable to fulfill India's security needs. To be sure, defending a city in India from terrorism is a task more Herculean than defending London or New York City. Mumbai is an endless sprawl of millions; the state can hardly provide basic services, let alone protect its citizens. And most astonishingly, Mumbai, like other major Indian cities, does not even have a mayor with the authority and resources to try.

The biggest problem regarding security is the structural division between the national and local governments. The official report on the 2008 attacks criticized them both for failing to maintain ready and capable police forces. It also highlighted the lack of coordination among the police, intelligence agencies, and government once the attacks were under way. Nearly three years later, the Mumbai security forces appeared to have been no better prepared to prevent terrorist attacks.

Read the full article at foreignaffairs.com >>

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Sunil Dasgupta

Publication: Foreign Affairs

A Way Forward in U.S.-India Defense Cooperation

Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400

In an interview with the National Bureau of Asian Research, Stephen Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta argue that to move defense cooperation forward, the United States and India should consider co-developing weapons technology in light of U.S. legislative restrictions on technology transfer.

Could you explain the nature of U.S.-India relations and the role of defense cooperation? How do you envision the future of the relationship?

The U.S.-India relationship is a composite of several important interests: (1) vast social and cultural ties, symbolized by the large Indian-American community, (2) a new economic interdependence, (3) the development of strategic commonality, with both hedging against a rising China and fearful of a declining, but nuclear-armed, Pakistan, and (4) finally, the growth in military and defense ties.

Not all four elements of the relationship have developed at the same pace. With the exceptions of post–nuclear test engagement and the civilian nuclear deal, the unofficial U.S.-India relationship, including people-to-people and economic ties, has outpaced official ties between the two countries. U.S.-India strategic convergence will likely come in the long term, as there are serious short-term differences on Pakistan, China, climate change, energy security, global governance, and economic policy.

Defense cooperation is important because it can bridge long- and short-term differences. Indeed, the nuclear deal bought greater freedom for Washington on its Pakistan policy and could serve this role again as the United States tries to extricate itself from the region. For this to happen, Washington must hold out the large carrot of technology and weapons transfers, which are politically problematic for many reasons, specifically the restrictive domestic legislation on defense hardware. One solution lies in the United States co-developing technology with India, as it does with Israel. Since new technology is not yet developed, it cannot be subjected to restrictive U.S. laws. On the Indian side, a number of things have to happen, including rationalizing the R&D establishment.

What do recent Indian military procurements tell us about the country’s defense outlook and strategic aims?

Most of India’s purchases are replacements for obsolete or broken equipment. However, a few acquisitions of American equipment are notable. The acquisition of a large troop carrier, the INS Jalashwa, formerly a U.S. Marine assault vessel, can provide rapid sealift capacity for Indian forces, presumably allowing for intervention elsewhere in South Asia or the Indian Ocean region. The large Boeing airlifters replace obsolete Soviet aircraft and have greater capabilities.

It remains to be seen whether India will use its new assets to develop a true power-projection capacity. Unless India can start building aircraft carriers on its own, its recent purchase of a carrier and carrier-borne jets from Russia will be largely symbolic. The planned acquisition of a nuclear submarine with nuclear-tipped missiles raises weighty questions about Asian nuclear stability, but this purchase will not come to fruition for many years.

Read the full interview at nbr.org >>

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Publication: The National Bureau of Asian Research

Arms Sales for India

Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:17:00 -0500

Much has been made of U.S. President Barack Obama's pledge to support India's push for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, which was offered during his November trip to India, but the real story from his visit was its implications for bilateral military trade. During the trip, Obama announced that the United States would sell $5 billion worth of U.S. military equipment to India, including ten Boeing C-17 military transport aircraft and GE 404 engines. Although the details are still being worked out, these and other contracts already in the works will propel the United States into the ranks of India's top three military suppliers, alongside Russia and Israel. With India planning to buy $100 billion worth of new weapons over the next ten years, arms sales may be the best way for the United States to revive stagnating U.S.-Indian relations.

Even as nonmilitary trade and investment and social and cultural ties between India and the United States have advanced in recent years, Washington remains of two minds about its relationship with New Delhi. In 2005, U.S. President George W. Bush granted India an unprecedented nuclear deal, offering to assist India's civilian nuclear program in contravention of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The nuclear deal convinced many Indians that the United States could be a viable long-term partner. Bush's adamant resistance to Chinese and international nonproliferation advocates' pressure to abandon the deal cemented his status in India, as did his rebuffs of Pakistani demands for similar treatment.

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Publication: Foreign Affairs

The Drag on India’s Military Growth

Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 13:43:00 -0400

Policy Brief #176

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India's remarkable economic growth and newfound access to arms from abroad have raised the prospect of a major rearmament of the country. But without several policy and organizational changes, India's efforts to modernize its armed forces will not alter the country's ability to deal with critical security threats. Our research suggests that India's military modernization needs a transparent, legitimate and efficient procurement process. Further, a chief of defense staff could reconcile the competing priorities across the three military services. Finally, India's defense research agencies need to be subjected to greater oversight.

Introduction

India’s rapid economic growth and newfound access to military technology, especially by way of its rapprochement with the United States, have raised hopes of a military revival in the country. Against this optimism about the rise of Indian military power stands the reality that India has not been able to alter its military-strategic position despite being one of the world’s largest importers of advanced conventional weapons for three decades.

We believe that civil-military relations in India have focused too heavily on one side of the problem – how to ensure civilian control over the armed forces, while neglecting the other – how to build and field an effective military force. This imbalance in civil-military relations has caused military modernization and reforms to suffer from a lack of political guidance, disunity of purpose and effort and material and intellectual corruption.

The Effects of Strategic Restraint

Sixty years after embarking on a rivalry with Pakistan, India has not been able to alter its strategic relationship with a country less than one-fifth its size. India’s many counterinsurgencies have lasted twenty years on an average, double the worldwide average. Since the 1998 nuclear tests, reports of a growing missile gap with Pakistan have called into question the quality of India’s nuclear deterrent. The high point of Indian military history – the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971– therefore, stands in sharp contrast to the persistent inability of the country to raise effective military forces.

No factor more accounts for the haphazard nature of Indian military modernization than the lack of political leadership on defense, stemming from the doctrine of strategic restraint. Key political leaders rejected the use of force as an instrument of politics in favor of a policy of strategic restraint that minimized the importance of the military.

The Government of India held to its strong anti-militarism despite the reality of conflict and war that followed independence. Much has been made of the downgrading of the service chiefs in the protocol rank, but of greater consequence was the elevation of military science and research as essential to the long-term defense of India over the armed forces themselves. Nehru invited British physicist P.M.S. Blackett to examine the relationship between science and defense. Blackett came back with a report that called for capping Indian defense spending at 2 percent of GDP and limited military modernization. He also recommended state funding and ownership of military research laboratories and established his protégé, Daulat Singh Kothari, as the head of the labs.

Indian defense spending decreased during the 1950s. Of the three services, the Indian Navy received greater attention with negotiations for the acquisition of India’s first aircraft carrier. The Indian Air Force acquired World War II surplus Canberra transport. The Indian Army, the biggest service by a wide margin, went to Congo on a UN peacekeeping mission, but was neglected overall. India had its first defense procurement scandal when buying old jeeps and experienced its first civil-military crisis when an army chief threatened to resign protesting political interference in military matters. The decade culminated in the government’s ‘forward policy’ against China, which Nehru foisted on an unprepared army, and led to the war of 1962 with China that ended in a humiliating Indian defeat.

The foremost lesson of 1962 was that India could not afford further military retrenchment. The Indian government launched a significant military expansion program that doubled the size of the army and raised a fighting air force. With the focus shifting North, the Indian Navy received less attention. A less recognized lesson of the war was that political interference in military matters ought to be limited. The military – and especially the army – asked for and received operational and institutional autonomy, a fact most visible in the wars of 1965 and 1971.

The problem, however, was that the political leadership did not suddenly become more comfortable with the military as an institution; they remained wary of the possibility of a coup d’etat and militarism more generally.

The Indian civil-military relations landscape has changed marginally since. In the eighties, there was a degree of political-military confluence in the Rajiv Gandhi government: Rajiv appointed a military buff, Arun Singh, as the minister of state for defense. At the same time, Krishnaswami Sundarji, an exceptional officer, became the army chief. Together they launched an ambitious program of military modernization in response to Pakistani rearmament and nuclearization. Pakistan’s nuclearization allowed that country to escalate the subconventional conflict in Kashmir while stemming Indian ability to escalate to a general war, where it had superiority. India is yet to emerge from this stability-instability paradox.

We do not know why Rajiv Gandhi agreed to the specific kind of military modernization that occurred in the mid-eighties, but then stepped back from using this capacity in 1987 during the Brasstacks crisis. Sundarji later wrote in a veiled work of fiction and told his many friends that Brasstacks was the last chance India had to dominate a non-nuclear Pakistan.

The puzzle of Brasstacks stands in a line of similar decisions. In 1971, India did not push the advantage of its victory in the eastern theatre to the West. Instead, New Delhi, under uberrealist Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, signed on to an equivocal agreement at Simla that committed both sides to peaceful resolution of future disputes without any enforcement measures. India’s decision to wait 24 years between its first nuclear test in 1974 and the second set of tests in 1998 is equally puzzling. Why did it not follow through after the 1974 test, and why did it test in 1998?

Underlying these puzzles is a remarkable preference for strategic restraint. Indian leaders simply have not seen the use of force as a useful instrument of politics. This foundation of ambivalence informs Indian defense policy, and consequently its military modernization and reform efforts.

To be sure, military restraint in a region as volatile as South Asia is wise and has helped persuade the great powers to accommodate India’s rise, but it does not help military planning. Together with the separation of the armed forces from the government, divisions among the services and between the services and other related agencies, and the inability of the military to seek formal support for policies it deems important, India’s strategic restraint has served to deny political guidance to the efforts of the armed forces to modernize. As wise as strategic restraint may be, Pakistan, India’s primary rival, hardly believes it to be true. Islamabad prepares as if India were an aggressive power and this has a real impact on India’s security.

Imbalance in Civil-Military Relations

What suffices for a military modernization plan is a wish list of weapon systems amounting to as much as $100 billion from the three services and hollow announcements of coming breakthroughs from the Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), the premier agency for military research in India.

The process is illustrative. The armed forces propose to acquire certain weapon systems. The political leadership and the civilian bureaucracy, especially the Ministry of Finance, react to these requests, agreeing on some and rejecting others. A number of dysfunctions ensue.

First, the services see things differently and their plans are essentially uncoordinated. Coming off the experience of the Kargil war and Operation Parakram, the Indian Army seems to have arrived at a Cold Start doctrine, seeking to find some fighting space between subconventional conflict and nuclear exchange in the standoff with Pakistan. The doctrine may not be official policy, but it informs the army’s wish list, where attack helicopters, tanks and long-range artillery stand out as marquee items. The Indian Air Force (IAF), meanwhile, is the primary instrument of the country’s nuclear deterrent. The IAF’s close second role is air superiority and air defense. Close air support, to which the IAF has belatedly agreed and which is essential to the army’s Cold Start doctrine, is a distant fourth.

The Indian Navy wants to secure the country’s sea-lanes of communications, protect its energy supplies and guard its trade routes. It wants further to be the vehicle of Indian naval diplomacy and sees a role in the anti-piracy efforts in the Malacca Straits and the Horn of Africa. What is less clear is how the Indian Navy might contribute in the event of a war with Pakistan. The navy would like simply to brush past the problem of Pakistan and reach for the grander projects. Accordingly, the Indian Navy’s biggest procurement order is a retrofitted aircraft carrier from Russia.

India’s three services have dramatically different views of what their role in India’s security should be, and there is no political effort to ensure this coordination. Cold Start remains an iffy proposition. India’s nuclear deterrent remains tethered to a single delivery system: fighter aircraft. Meanwhile, the Indian Army’s energies are dissipated with counterinsurgency duties, which might increase manifold if the army is told to fight the rising leftist insurgency, the Naxalites. And all this at a time when the primary security threat to the country has been terrorism. After the Mumbai attacks, the Indian government and the people of India are said to have resolved to tackle the problem headlong, but today the government’s minister in charge of internal security, Palaniappan Chidambaram, is more under siege himself than seizing the hidden enemy.

Second, despite repeated calls for and commissions into reforms in the higher defense structure, planning, intelligence, defense production and procurement, the Indian national security establishment remains fragmented and uncoordinated. The government and armed forces have succeeded in reforms primed by additions to the defense budget but failed to institute reforms that require changes in organization and priorities.

The Kargil Review Committee, and the Group of Ministers report that followed, for example, recommended a slew of reforms. The changes most readily implemented were those that created new commands, agencies and task forces, essentially linear expansion backed by new budgetary allocations. The changes least likely to occur were those required changes in the hierarchy.

The most common example of tough reform is the long-standing recommendation for a chief of defense staff. A military chief, as opposed to the service chiefs, could be a solution to the problem that causes the three services not to reconcile their priorities. However, political leaders have rejected the creation of the position of military commander-in-chief, mainly for fear of giving a military officer too much power. Instead of a chief of defense staff, the government has tried to install an integrated defense staff that is supposed to undertake reconciliation between the services, but which really is a toothless body with little influence.

Lastly, the Ministry of Defense has a finance section deputed by the Ministry of Finance. This section oversees all defense expenditures, even after they have been authorized. Once the cabinet has approved a spending item, what authority does the section have to turn down requests? However, the finance section raises questions of propriety, wisdom and policy that should under normal circumstances be under the purview of the defense minister.

No Legitimate Procurement Process

Corruption in weapons procurement has been a political issue since the mid-1980s, when allegations of a series of paybacks in the purchase of Bofors artillery, HDW submarines and other items mobilized an opposition that removed Rajiv Gandhi from power in 1989. Since then, Indian political leaders have tried hard not to appear to be corrupt, going out of their way to slow down new purchases.

However, corruption is still a problem, as shown in the 2001 Tehelka expose of political leaders accepting bribes in return for defense contracts. Recently, Uday Bhaskar, the Indian Navy officer and defense analyst, wrote bitingly that for a number of years now the armed forces, which desperately need modernization, have been returning unspent funds to the treasury.

There is widespread recognition that corruption is morally venal and detrimental to the cause of Indian security. We believe, however, that the second- and third-order problems of corruption have unacknowledged impact on military modernization and capacity. The Defense Procurement Manual and Procedures on the Ministry of Defense’s website are the first steps in the right direction, but the Indian government has generally failed to build a transparent and legitimate procurement process.

The deep roots of corruption extend to military research and development and to the heart of India’s foreign relations. Since the mid-1970s, however, the DRDO embarked on a number of ambitious and well-funded projects to build a fighter aircraft, a tank, and missiles. All three projects floundered.

While the aircraft and tank projects have largely failed, the missile program is considered successful. The reputation of the success carried the director of the missile program, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, to the presidency. Yet in 2010, no Indian missile in the arsenal of the armed forces has managed to alter the strategic equation with Pakistan or China. The Prithvi short-range missile is not useful because of its range and liquid fuel needs. The longer-range Agni models have gone through numerous tests without entering the army’s arsenal. Other variations, such as Nag and Akash, have limited strategic purpose.

The virtual monopoly over military research in state-owned labs has meant that the abundant energies of the Indian private sector have remained outside the defense industry. Where in the United States, small and medium-sized defense contractors form the backbone of the research complex, India is far from thinking along those lines. Despite recent efforts to include the private sector through various schemes, there continues to be distrust of private industry in the Indian defense establishment. We believe it is easier for a private foreign supplier to win a contract with the Ministry of Defense than it is for a small private Indian company to do so.

For decades, the Indian government has accepted dishonest promises made by DRDO as the basis for providing billions of dollars of support because of the persisting ideology of autarky. The greatest success of military research in India comes not from the DRDO, but from the Atomic Energy Commission, which built the nuclear devices. But the government has been unwilling to subject DRDO to public accountability. Instead, the head of DRDO serves as the defense minister’s scientific adviser. The two positions – of supplier and adviser – bring inherent conflict of interest, but this has not been an issue in India at all.

The second pattern of systemic corruption comes from the inability of the Indian defense system to wean itself from the supply of Soviet/Russian equipment. The reasons why India initially went to the Soviet Union for weapons are well-known. The United States chose Pakistan, India went to the Soviet Union. But that political decision was reinforced by ideas about the corruption-free nature of the state-owned Soviet defense industry and the profit-mindedness of western, and especially American, firms.

This characterization has always been untrue. Soviet/Russian suppliers have engaged in as much corruption as western firms, but because the Soviet Union was a closed system, the corruption – which was reported first in the press in the supplier countries – was never really reported in the Soviet Union. This tradition continues, though the Russian free press has been more critical of the country’s defense deals. Indeed, those who served as Indian ‘agents’ for the Soviet firms have highlighted the better business practice of Russians, a laughable matter in light of India’s recent travails with the retrofit and sale of the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov.

The tendency is reiterated in Indian preferences in dealing with the West as well. Western firms have always been seen as money-grubbing, an opinion that exists across the political spectrum and is prevalent in the civilian bureaucracy. New Delhi seems to prefer government-to-government foreign military sales, which are in turn causing some degree of protest from users who want longer-term maintenance arrangements with suppliers.

The political rapprochement between India and the United States has not yet filtered into the system for attitudes to change dramatically. India’s growing military supply relationship with Israel is instructive. The most successful Israeli firm in the Indian market is Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), a state-owned company. IAI was quick to adopt the Russian model of operation in India: offering the DRDO co-development opportunities to win contracts. In contrast, American firms are reluctant to work with, let alone transfer high-end technology to a state owned enterprise. They would prefer to set up a subsidiary in India, which could retain control of the technology.

India has been one of the biggest importers of advanced conventional weapons in the last thirty years, but this sustained rearmament has not altered India’s strategic position. The armed forces push for modernization, but do not have the authority to mount the national campaign necessary for transforming the security condition of the country. Budget increases delivered by a rapidly expanding economy and access to western technology previously denied to India have led to optimism about Indian military power, but the dysfunction in India’s civil-military relations reduces the impact of rearmament. Arming without aiming has some purpose in persuading other great powers of India’s benign rise, but it cannot be the basis of military planning.

This Policy Brief is based on an earlier paper published by Seminar, New Delhi. Stephen Cohen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Sunil Dasgupta is director of UMBC’s Political Science Program at the Universities at Shady Grove and a nonresident fellow at Brookings. They are the co-authors of Arming without Aiming: India’s Military Modernization, published in September 2010 by the Brookings Institution Press.

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Arming Without Aiming: India’s Military Modernization

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:30:00 -0400

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September 7, 2010
3:30 PM - 4:45 PM EDT

Falk Auditorium
The Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC

India’s explosive economic growth and rising international influence have led many experts to predict a possible major rearmament effort by the Indian military, in the face of ongoing tensions with Pakistan and a subcontinent that remains vulnerable to religious extremism. What steps has India taken to expand its military? What actions might India take in the future and what are the implications for the region?

On September 7, the Brookings Institution hosted the launch of Arming Without Aiming: India’s Military Modernization (Brookings Press, 2010), written by Senior Fellow Stephen Cohen, the author of numerous books on India and Pakistan, including The Idea of Pakistan (Brookings) and India: Emerging Power (Brookings), and Nonresident Fellow Sunil Dasgupta, director of Political Science at the University of Maryland's Universities at Shady Grove. Following the authors’ presentation, Edward Luce of the Financial Times and Ashley Tellis with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace joined a panel discussion on the future of India’s military.

Brookings President Strobe Talbott provided introductory remarks. After the program, panelists took audience questions.

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Arming Without Aiming: India’s Military Modernization

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Ed Luce

Washington Bureau Chief
Financial Times

Ashley Tellis

Senior Associate
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Arming without Aiming : India's Military Modernization

Stephen P. Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Brookings Institution Press 2010 223pp.

"Cohen's unmatched four decades' experience, studying and writing on Indian security issues, gives this book an exceptional degree of feel for the ground. The book has come at a time when a serious and more participative discussion on the issues flagged in it is badly needed."
—Economic & Political Weekly

India’s growing affluence has led experts to predict a major rearmament effort. The second-most populous nation in the world is beginning to wield the economic power expected of such a behemoth. Its border with Pakistan is a tinderbox, the subcontinent remains vulnerable to religious extremism, and a military rivalry between India and China could erupt in the future. India has long had the motivation for modernizing its military—it now has the resources as well. What should we expect to see in the future, and what will be the likely ramifications? In Arming without Aiming, Stephen Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta answer those crucial questions.

India’s armed forces want new weapons worth more than $100 billion. But most of these weapons must come from foreign suppliers due to the failures of India’s indigenous research and development. Weapons suppliers from other nations are queuing up in New Delhi. A long relationship between India and Russian manufacturers goes back to the cold war. More recently, India and Israel have developed strong military trade ties. Now, a new military relationship with the United States has generated the greatest hope for military transformation in India.

Against this backdrop of new affluence and newfound access to foreign military technology, Cohen and Dasgupta investigate India’s military modernization to find haphazard military change that lacks political direction, suffers from balkanization of military organization and doctrine, remains limited by narrow prospective planning, and is driven by the pursuit of technology free from military-strategic objectives. The character of military change in India, especially the dysfunction in the political-military establishment with regard to procurement, is ultimately the result of a historical doctrine of strategic restraint in place since Nehru. In that context, its approach of arming without strategic purpose remains viable as India seeks great-power accommodation of its rise and does not want to look threatening. The danger lies in its modernization efforts precipitating a period of strategic assertion or contributing to misperception of India’s intentions by Pakistan and China, its two most immediate rivals.

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The Arming without Aiming launch event was held on Tuesday, September 7, 2010 at the Brookings Institution. Click here for details on the event, including a Powerpoint presentation by Stephen Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta.

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Stephen P. Cohen

Sunil Dasgupta

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Paramilitary Groups: Local Alliances in Counterinsurgency Operations

Sunil Dasgupta — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:03:00 -0400

INTRODUCTION:

Local allies are central to counterinsurgency campaigns, but their role is not well understood beyond the provision of general political support and access to local knowledge. This paper examines the organization of local allies into paramilitary groups within the context of the three-step recruit-withdraw-renegotiate strategy adopted by counterinsurgents. After describing the model, I use four brief case studies of Iraq, Algeria, the Indian Punjab, and Colombia to illustrate the general process. I conclude with a section laying out general principles of paramilitary management.

Recruit, Withdraw, Renegotiate

Military invasions seldom produce lasting victory against insurgencies, but they create the opportunity for identifying potential local allies. It is not important who the ally is so long as the insurgents come to see them as the collaborators and an irreconcilable enemy; the government could distribute low-grade weapons generally to see who resisted and who passed the weapon to the other side. Since the thing the government lacks most is information, this is a way to discover who’s who. The organizing and arming of groups outside the government creates a direct challenge to the rebels who are trying to impose their own order. The better organized and better armed these groups are, that is, the more robust the paramilitary formation, the greater the challenge the rebels perceive. A civil war ensues during which the government withdraws from the conflict. The extent and duration of the withdrawal depends on the specific conditions of the cases, but the intent to let the local competition play itself out.

If the paramilitaries do a good job and the rebels are losing, the counterinsurgents offer the insurgents a peace deal. If the deal is taken, the government moves to disarm, demobilize, or disengage the paramilitaries from the conflict. The government can bribe them, absorb them into the regular police or the military, and if everything fails physically disarm the groups.

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Sunil Dasgupta