The British mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russel famously said that there were two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it, and the other, that you can boast about having read it. To this postulate, another motive can be added unhesitatingly to recommend In Hard Times: Security in a Time of Insecurity (Bloomsbury, 2022); it provides an insightful overview of the issues concerning India’s defence and security.
This erudite anthology of 10 essays edited by security analysts Manoj Joshi, Praveen Swami and Nishtha Gautam is posited against the backdrop of contemporary geopolitics, which is increasingly becoming ‘bi-multipolar’, with the US and China representing the first half of this hyphenated equation and ‘middle powers’ like France, Germany and India, the other half.
In Hard Times: Security in a Time of Insecurity
Bloomsbury, 2022
The contemporary geopolitical complexity, argues Sanjay Baru in his context-setting essay India’s World, offers an opportunity for India to consolidate its position as a middle power, provided it accelerates and sustains economic development. However, this is a big IF, considering that there has been a virtual ‘race to the bottom between Asian powers’, triggered by an economic slowdown since 2016 and exacerbated further by two years of the COVID-19 pandemic that erupted in 2020.
Arguably, India’s economy has not done too badly in this downward race, but there is no denying that its revenues continue to be woefully inadequate to fulfil the ever-growing needs of diverse sectors like health, education, infrastructure, rural development, poverty alleviation and other developmental projects, while at the same time liberally financing military modernisation and internal security reforms.
Pranay Kotasthane acknowledges this grim fiscal reality in his essay Nor Guns Nor Butter: The Inconvenient Truth of India’s Defence Financing. He cautions India’s strategic establishment to be mindful that days of steady economic growth are “behind us and getting back on the growth path will take time”. Acknowledging that resources for defence modernisation would remain “severely constrained”, he recommends a “whole-of-government” approach towards this goal.
He also recommends the creation of a “non-lapsable fund” for unhindered capital acquisitions – which, ironically, the government has virtually given up on – reducing expenditure on defence pensions that are depleting procurement funds, and a more practical shift in operational doctrines. These ideas need fleshing out to determine their workability and whether they can ultimately create sufficient fiscal space for military capacity building.
Four of the next five chapters by military veterans largely elaborate on doctrinal aspects of military reforms, while the fifth, How can the Indian Army Address the Resource Crunch Logjam?. by Colonel Vivek Chadha (Retd) from the Manohar Parrikar Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), focuses on the possible ways of containing the Indian Army’s (IA’s) expenditure on manpower, currently accounting for about 65% of its overall revenue budget.
Handing over IA’s counter-insurgency responsibilities to central armed police forces, re-evaluating the need for three strike corps to handle the threat from Pakistan on its western front, lateral entry of soldiers into the paramilitaries, and enhanced harnessing of technology are some of the recommendations he makes to reduce manpower costs, including the burden of pension payouts. Some of these ideas have been around for long but, as Col Chadha admits, the cost of developing and adapting new technologies as the key to savings in manpower costs will necessitate increased investment, wherein lies the intrinsic rub.
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Echoing Kotasthane’s assessment, Lieutenant General D.S. Hooda (Retd) too acknowledges that military capability building will continue to be incremental as the country’s parlous financial state will not permit any “significant increase” in future annual defence budgets. Hence, in his cogently argued analysis Army Capability Building, the three-star officer cautions that the IA “will have to look at its basic manning structure, review its operational responsibility, integrate common roles in the three services, undertake a doctrinal study of future warfighting, and develop high-end capability”.
Gen Hooda is spot on in pointing out that reduction in the army’s numerical strength does not necessarily mean a decrease in military capability. On the contrary, he reasons that a “leaner, technologically advanced force supported by a coherent doctrine, high standard of training and good human capital will be more effective”. Considering that previous attempts at reducing manpower haven’t had much success, it’ll take a lot of doing to bring about this doctrinal change.
Two essays – Trajectory of Indian Air Power by Air Vice Marshal Manmohan Bahadur (Retd) and Vectored Thrust: The Future of Indian Air Power by Group Captain Kishore Kumar Khera (Retd) – drive home the message underlying the US military maxim that the Army cannot control the ground under the sky if the Air Force does not control the sky over the ground. “Rather than an all-domain parity with China,” argues Group Captain Khera, “Indian aerospace power would do well to focus on specific areas and generate capability dominance or parity in specific subdomains.”
The maritime perspective has been effectively presented by former Indian Navy Chief of Staff Admiral Arun Prakash. In India’s Neglected Maritime Domain, he expatiates on his core contention that India’s maritime sector could have, but had not, “provided an impetus to heavy industry, spawned a complex of ancillaries, helped in skilling our youth and created job opportunities by the thousands”. All it had managed to achieve was to establish “an indigenous supporting industrial base for the Indian Navy, which is currently forced to rely largely on imported weapons and systems”.
With an eye on China’s burgeoning maritime might – that remains a recurring refrain in Admiral Prakash’s and other accompanying essays – the former naval chief recommends instituting an inter-departmental “oceanic administration” alongside an overarching ministry of “maritime affairs” to promote fishing, shipbuilding, seabed exploration and other related activities. This recommendation, however, seems to be at odds with his recurring lament over the enduring indifference of the “politico-bureaucratic system” to prioritising India’s maritime capacity building.
Moving away from defence, two essays – Reforming Indian Intelligence, anonymously authored by a former senior intelligence officer, and India’s Counter-insurgency Crises by Praveen Swami – provide insights primarily into domestic dimensions of India’s security predicament arising from relentless cross-border terrorism, extremist violence and sporadic emergence of assorted fissiparous movements.
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The author of the first of these two informative pieces argues for reformation of India’s intelligence agencies based on four ‘pillars’ of development – legal status, accountability and parliamentary oversight, focus on recruitment and training of professionals, and a better system of coordination and information gathering.
Swami makes a similar case for police reforms on the premise that “India might be better off using a policing-led model (for counter-insurgency operations) that involves less force, effectively coupling lower numbers with better intelligence and training, freeing troops and resources in the process, for more compelling strategic purposes.” The need for reforms in intelligence gathering is unquestionable but considering the trajectory of governmental disinterest in this project, it is anybody’s guess how and when such a process is likely to materialise.
With Beyond Equal Opportunities: Women in the Armed Forces, Nishtha Gautam has broken into the male-dominated discourse on defence and security, She presents a heartfelt perspective on why women’s participation in the forces “ought not be looked at through the prism of “sentimentality” (spouses of martyred personnel joining as officers) or gender equality (though important)”. Instead, it needed to be viewed from a “purely utilitarian” standpoint of how increased participation of women can augment security outcome. It is a passionately advocated refreshing perspective that merits serious attention.
While all the essays in the book are instructive and intellectually stimulating, collectively they do not conflate into a ‘whole-of-defence-and-security’, or even ‘whole-of-military’ perspective, as some other vital Ministry of Defence organs like the Defence Research and Development Organisation, Indian Coast Guard, Border Roads Organisation and the 16 Defence Public Sector Enterprises, which play a significant complementary role in boosting India’s defence capabilities, are left out of the discourse.
Considering the centrality of monetary resources in implementing several recommendations made by the authors, problems besetting comprehensive and finally viable defence planning, encompassing all these organs, too merited more attention.
In his Afterword, Manoj Joshi has contemporised all the essays which were obviously written before COVID-19 unfolded in its full fury. “At this crossroads of our history,” he argues, “the need of the hour is a “whole-of-the-nation” approach to problems”, rightly adding that in dealing with these critical security and military issues, “India must retain a sense of humility and modesty” in the face of challenges it confronts.
Joshi is also right in stating that India can draw a lesson from Deng Xiaoping’s 24-character strategy: Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership. Even a simple reworking of President Theodore Roosevelt’s policy of speaking softly and carrying a big stick could go far.
Both are sensible approaches, but the question is whether a rambunctious democracy, with its myriad contradictions, can doggedly pursue them or not. Therein lies the abiding challenge of reforming defence and security set up of the country.
Amit Cowshish is a former financial advisor (acquisitions), Ministry of Defence.
