India needs a strategic effort to understand that it is no longer
competing with China, but seeking to cope with an increasing asymmetry
of power
It is no secret that there’s a delay in India’s current cycle of
military modernisation. Ask the services and they will vaguely claim
that the cycle will be completed by 2022 or maybe 2027. The effort is to
induct the contemporary range of armoured vehicles, artillery, fighter
jets, submarines, frigates and so on. Given the decades taken to achieve
this, these systems will almost immediately become obsolete and another
delayed cycle will begin.
As long as an indigent Pakistan was the principal adversary, this
caused no big worry. But we now increasingly confront a risen China,
whose plans work on schedule, and whose modernisation is relentlessly
moving from copying western design and concepts towards leapfrogging to
become technology leaders.
In recent years, China has systematically built up its military, and
also undertaken a deep reorganisation of its structure. This is aimed at
creating a force that, as Xi Jinping is never tired of repeating, is
loyal to the Communist Party of China and capable of fighting and
winning wars. The reorganisation has led to an integrated military
divided into geographical theatre commands mimicking in many ways the
organisation of its principal adversary: the United States.
The modernisation is top to bottom—it begins with the nuclear forces,
the bedrock of Beijing’s status as a world power, and goes right down
to the maritime militias that are used to swamp fishing grounds in the
South China Sea. The Chinese are simultaneously aiming to deny the US
access to its mainland through the so-called A2/AD (anti-access area
denial) systems, and at the same time organising their own forces for
greater regional and even extra-regional reach.
So, while China’s navy moves from offshore defence to regional
capability, its air force is creating an integrated aerospace system for
offensive and defensive operations beyond its borders. All this means a
virtual assembly line of new generations of aircraft carriers,
destroyers, submarines, fighter aircraft, ballistic and cruise missiles
and associated systems. In all this, space is a key element for
C4ISR—command, control, communications, computers, intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance. We are talking here not of individual
satellites, but constellations. So by 2020, the existing 30 Beidou
navigation satellites will be replaced by 35 advanced versions. Already
40 Yaogan satellites move in a triplet formation providing imagery and
electronic intelligence. By 2020, China will be able to obtain 30-minute
updates from any part of the globe from 60 satellites including the
Gaofen and Jilin series. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is also
working on counter-space systems aimed at knocking out adversary
satellites.
For years, the PLA used to talk about “informationised warfare” which
was about digital systems and networks. Now, they are on the threshold
of what analyst Elsa Kania says is the era of “intelligentised warfare”
featuring artificial intelligence (AI), big data and cloud computing to
enhance their C4ISR capabilities. The depth of the Chinese effort is
obvious: many of the technologies now emerging are part of an effort
undertaken under Project 863, begun in March 1986. Among these are boost
glide vehicles, laser and high-power microwave (HPM) weapons. Earlier
this year, young scientist Huang Wenhua received a national technology
award for developing an HPM system for defending warships from anti-ship
missiles.
Beyond the horizon is an array of even more dramatic AI-based
technologies, where China has emerged as a global leader—in quantum
computing and communications and electromagnetic and pulsar propulsion
in space. These have great military consequences, and in all of them,
China has demonstrated a capacity, such as the launch last August of the
world’s first quantum communications satellite Micius.
But in the past few years, the challenge we have faced from China has
been somewhat strange. There has been Pakistan, the “iron brother” that
can always be counted on to keep India off balance, but we have also
seen a handful of Chinese soldiers pitching a tent in the middle of
nowhere in Aksai Chin in 2013, a disembodied voice warning INS Airavat
in 2011 that it was in Chinese waters, when, in fact, it was in
Vietnam’s EEZ, or, more recently, the invocation of a non-binding UN
Resolution 1172 of 1998 demanding that India end the development of
ballistic missiles, and the decision to rename six places in Arunachal
Pradesh. This is a new kind of warfare involving psychological, legal
and media elements. With both countries possessing nuclear weapons, it
is unlikely that they will openly fight each other. But, warfare has
many dimensions and the best victory is one that is obtained without
fighting at all.
Indeed, as Wu Chunqiu of the Academy of Military Sciences argued in
2000, “Victory without war does not mean that there is no war at all.
The wars one must fight are political wars, economic wars, science and
technology wars, diplomatic wars, etc. To sum up in a word, it is a war
of Comprehensive National Power (CNP). Although military power is an
important factor, in peacetime it usually acts as a backup force, and
plays the role of invisible might.” What India must understand is that
war is no longer about tanks and guns, but CNP. China has long had a
fascination with the concept pioneered by Ray Cline of the CIA, who came
up with an index based on the formula Pp = (C+E+M) x (S+W) in the
1960s. In the nuclear age, defeat and victory were about CNP, as the
erstwhile Soviet Union realised, not its military arsenal.
In Cline’s schema, Pp was perceived power, C was critical mass
(population plus territory), E was economic capability, M stood for
military strength, S was strategic purpose and W the will to pursue
national strategy. Subsequently other indices came up, using even more
refined variables.
The Chinese have never hidden their will to power. Where India has
always wanted to be seen as a ‘Great Nation’, the Chinese are clear that
they are once again destined to be a, if not the, ‘Great Power’. To
that end, they are deploying a range of elements relating to hard and
soft power, and the $1 trillion One Belt One Road scheme is its economic
manifestation.
One of the key areas being pursued is STI—science, technology and
innovation. In the next five years, the Chinese government alone will
spend $250 billion in S&T and innovation. Its tech giants, Baidu,
Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei and others will spend several times this sum.
The priority areas are quantum communications and computation, an arcane
field that is difficult to even conceptualise, but whose implications
are earth-shaking. In addition, focus remains on cyber security,
deep-space exploration, robotics, materials, genetics, big data and
brain research.
Hard power is used to control or coerce the behaviour of others, but
equally vital are soft power, persuasion, leading by example and a sense
of legitimacy. Here authoritarian China does not have it easy, but it
isn’t conceding anything. It is spending billions in winning friends and
influencing people. Through institutions and schemes like the AIIB, NDB
and the OBOR, it is expanding its remit to include Asia, parts of
Europe and the Indian Ocean Region. Its media and culture outreach aims
to present China in the best possible way to the international
community.
The Chinese challenge is not about guns and submarines, though the
disputed border and the Sino-Pak nexus signify the need to up our guard.
It is about CNP, of which the military is an important element, but not
the only one. We need a compound national strategic effort to enhance
all the CNP elements. In the first stage, India needs to understand
that it is no longer competing with China, but seeking to cope with an
increasing asymmetry of power. It should turn the Chinese strategy
inside out by ringing itself with A2/AD defences and make up our
military power deficit through effective coalitions and alliances.
It means a society working at a much higher level of efficiency than the
one we have now. It means a different kind of a military, not the World
War II kind of force we have today. But more important, we need a
socially cohesive India, led by people with a constructive and
forward-looking agenda. Most important, we need to understand that there
are no shortcuts. What you see in China is what began 30 years ago.
Outlook May 15, 2017
Friday, June 02, 2017
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