By Iskander Rehman
One of the more enduring aspects of Indian
strategic culture is a strong sense of maritime embattlement. Shortly after
independence, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru famously attributed
India’s past woes at the hands of predatory colonial powers to its maritime
weaknesses. During the Cold War, Indian strategists would fret over the
potential mushrooming of American submarine pens in Diego Garcia, or over the
possible reiteration of the 1971
USS Enterprise
incident, when the United States
dispatched a carrier task group to the Bay of Bengal
in a singularly blunt exercise of naval suasion. More than forty years later,
the U.S. presence in the Indian Ocean is no longer viewed by most Indians as a
threat. Another, more menacing extra-regional power has stepped in to fill the
void, and, in so doing, has ensured the continued survival of the maritime
embattlement narrative.
Indeed, 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.
Sensationalistic press reports on China's
so-called “string of pearls” abound, and wild stories on secret PLAN submarine bases in the Maldives, or large bases
on Burmese islands, are commonplace. In reality, most of China’s ventures
in places such as Chittagong, in Bangladesh, or Hambantota, in Sri Lanka,
appear to be, for the time being at least, primarily economic in nature.
Moreover, Indian observers tend to neglect the profoundly nationalistic pride
these projects tend to foster within the host countries themselves.
Last year, after having
meandered through the organized chaos of Hambantota, I interviewed the Sri
Lankan Ports Authority Manager on site. After enquiring whether Chinese
military vessels might, in the future, obtain preferential berthing rights, I
was subjected to a withering tirade on the inappropriate nature of my query.
While the funding may be in large part Chinese, the port itself is
strictly Sri Lankan, I was sternly informed, and acted as a powerful symbol of
a reunified country’s future economic potential. (The port is, in fact, named
the Mahinda Rajapaksa
Port, in honor of Sri Lanka’s president,
whose grinning, mustachioed face is a ubiquitous presence
throughout the country, from billboard to bank note.)
While one can’t discount the possibility in the
future that these nodes may acquire a more overtly military dimension, the
relentless onslaught of Indian media attention on the “String of Pearls” has
created an unfortunate, and rather paradoxical, effect. First of all, it
renders the debate over the nature of China’s
future naval presence in the Indian Ocean
somewhat less intelligible and more inchoate. Second, it makes it seem as
though the Indian government’s attitude towards China’s alleged creeping
expansionism is purely reactive and bereft of any clear strategic direction.
Let us imagine, thereby succumbing to the worst
kind of strategic pessimism, that in the course of the next two decades China does
move towards establishing some kind of a genuinely threatening naval presence
in the Indian Ocean Region.
This could take several distinct forms:
-- A gradual upsurge in Chinese submarine
incursions into the Indian Ocean, with the
option of secretly forward deploying wolf packs of Chinese submarines in
friendly deep-water ports such as Gwadar.
-- An extension of China's Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) complex from East
to West in order to provide some form of a shore-based protective shield to its
surface vessels or to target India’s ships and coastal infrastructure.
-- Simply by increasing the rotation and
stationing of its naval assets-surface or subsurface – in the friendly pearls
aforementioned.
If one, or all of these evolutions were to occur,
would India
be prepared for such a contingency? And more importantly, does the Indian Navy
have some kind of a concrete, actionable China Strategy in place for the Indian Ocean?
It may.
But if it does, you will be hard pressed to find
it outlined in detail in any of the official documents released by the Indian
Navy over the past decade or so, whether it be the two iterations of its Maritime
Doctrines (released in 2004 and 2009) or in its Maritime Strategy (published in 2007). All three documents
are highly didactic in tone and somewhat aspirational in nature. Their goal,
first and foremost, is to convince a traditionally
continentalist and inward-looking Indian leadership of the virtues of
Indian Seapower, not to lay out the battle plans for a potential future naval
clash with the next great “Dragon Fleet.” Therefore, when China is mentioned, it is only in passing, with
fleeting-albeit foreboding- references to “some nations’ attempts to gain a
strategic toehold in the Indian Ocean Rim” or to “attempts by China to strategically encircle India.”
If one really wishes to get a better appreciation
of how the Indian Navy plans for an upsurge in naval rivalry with Beijing, the best thing to do is to carefully parse the
refreshingly sanguine words of India’s
naval chiefs on the matter. By so doing, one can begin to discern the hazy
silhouette of a nascent three-pronged strategy, or “strategic trident,” which
could roughly be summarized as the following:
-- Leveraging India’s Natural Geographical
Advantage
-- Developing an Asymmetrical Technological Edge
-- Moving towards greater Navy/Air Force
Jointness in the Indian Ocean Region
A few years ago, the former Chief of Naval Staff
Sureesh Mehta created quite a stir, when he gave a
seminal speech at an Indian maritime think tank, the National Maritime
Foundation, shortly before his departure from office. Admiral Mehta, in a very
eloquently framed presentation, articulated some compelling arguments:
First, India
shouldn’t seek to compete ship for ship with China – such an approach is futile
and doomed to fail, due to the growing disparity in funding in-between both
navies. Second, India
should leverage its geographical advantage. In short, India will always retain a sizeable advantage
over any incoming Chinese fleet in the Indian Ocean by virtue of its central
position as an interior line power in the heart of the Indian Ocean, as
well as its peninsular formation, which enables it to radiate airpower in an
arc ranging from the Arabian Sea to the
Malacca Straits. Any Chinese naval task force venturing into the Indian Ocean would therefore have to run a formidable
gauntlet of combined Indian naval and shore-based airpower. Finally, India needed to
focus on developing an asymmetric technological edge over its Chinese rival.
New Delhi possesses an immense advantage over Beijing – in that it can import (nearly) all the weaponry it desires, and, unlike
China, doesn’t have to contend with an EU arms embargo, U.S. rivalry or growing
Russian unease.
India’s current Chief of Naval Staff, Nirmal
Verma, has added grist to the strategy laid out by his predecessor by
stressing the need to establish more “turnaround bases and naval air enclaves”
within the region, and by accelerating the revamping of India's air bases in
the Andaman and Nicobar islands, which Chinese strategists have portrayed as a potential “metal
chain” that could lock them out of the Bay of Bengal in the event of a conflict
with India.
As Sino-Indian rivalry spills out into the Indian Ocean, the maps of former, similarly
conflict-ridden eras, are being pulled out of the attic of history, undusted,
and made to overlap. Japan’s clever use of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago
as an unsinkable aircraft carrier during World War II is now being replicated
by New Delhi, and World War II era airbases in places such as Kalaikunda,
in West Midnapore, have been refurbished in order to host Indian Sukhoi-30
MKI squadrons, which can provide long-range air cover to naval forces operating
in the Andaman Sea west of the Malacca Straits.
The same minute patches of paradise at the
epicenter of Soviet-U.S. rivalry in the Indian Ocean Region during the Cold
War, such as the Seychelles,
now find themselves at the heart of a struggle for supremacy once more. Only
this time it’s Beijing and New
Delhi, Asia’s two rising naval
powers, which are jostling for influence. Competition in the Indian
Ocean is hardly a new phenomenon – the players may change, but the
game remains uncannily similar. And indeed, while much attention has been
lavished on China’s diplomatic forays into the Indian subcontinent’s maritime
backyard, scant focus has been given to India’s own parallel efforts to
establish strategically placed nodes of influence – such as the listening post
it erected in 2007 in Madagascar, or the ties it is discreetly shoring up with
other small island nations such as Mauritius.
As the Indian Navy’s attention gradually pivots
away from Pakistan in order
to focus increasingly on China,
it will be instructive to note whether this is accompanied by a corresponding
repositioning of its force structure. It may be premature to reliably ascertain
whether this is the case, but certain signs definitely seem to point to a
rebalancing. The Indian Navy's Eastern Command, for example, which has
traditionally been neglected in favor of its Western, Pakistan-facing alter
ego, is being considerably strengthened. The country’s small
flotilla of nuclear submarines will also operate from an undisclosed location along the eastern seaboard.
Jointness, at this juncture, appears to form the
missing link within the Indian Navy’s nascent China Strategy in the Indian Ocean. Indeed, if New Delhi wishes to truly leverage its
inherent geographical advantage, it needs to be able to draw on both its naval
aviation and shore-based airpower simultaneously rather than sequentially.
So far, unfortunately, the Indian Navy and Air
Force have yet to demonstrate any genuine capacity – or desire – for
operational synergy. In India’s
defense, Navy/Air Force synchronization in maritime strike warfare is
notoriously hard to achieve. Indeed, one could argue that the United States
only really mastered such a level of operational jointness through the catalyzing experience of the first Gulf War.
The Indian Navy and Air Force, however, appear to have demonstrated a singular
degree of reluctance to pursue any kind of meaningful operational synergy.
While both services have initiated joint training under the aegis of the TROPEX exercises annually held in the Bay
of Bengal, they still prefer to coordinate – rather than to
genuinely fuse – their combat exercises. The Indian Air Force and Naval aviation
assets are thus provided with distinct, pre-designated “air corridors” in which
to operate and respond to the instructions of their own service-specific
commanders. This is indicative of a very rudimentary level of inter-service
cooperation, which still prefers to opt for the traditional Indian
“coordination” model over the exigencies born out of genuine bi-service
synchrony.
What India needs is a truly transformational war
fighting concept for the Indian Ocean, an “AirSea Battle concept with Indian characteristics,”
which welds the three “prongs” of its thinking into a clear, actionable, China
strategy for the Indian Ocean. Until then, expect more alarmist reports of
hidden bases and nefarious plots.
Iskander Rehman is a Stanton
Nuclear Security Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C.
Courtesy:
The Diplomat.com
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