Our racial memory has, with good reason, always been obsessed by the perpetual threat of invasion from the Himalayan passes; the Pakistani marauders who came across Uri in 1947 and the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) hordes who swarmed down the slopes of Tawang in 1962 only served to reinforce this historical and cultural fixation.

India’s emergence as an economic power of global significance and its essential reliance on the sea for energy, trade and projecting influence, is rapidly changing perceptions, and arousing the maritime consciousness of the intelligentsia.

When India gained Independence, those charged with planning for the country’s embryonic maritime force were fortuitously, men of vision; and within six months had prepared a ten-year expansion plan for the consideration of the Government of India. The plan was drawn up around the concept of two fleets; one for the Arabian Sea and the other for the Bay of Bengal, each to be built around a light-fleet carrier to be later replaced by larger fleet carriers. This somewhat grandiose plan, which received the approval of both the Governor General Lord Mountbatten and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, unfortunately failed to materialize. Hostilities with Pakistan in the state of Jammu and Kashmir barely two months after Independence focused the young nation’s attention as well as scarce defence resources towards the Himalayas rather than the oceans, and the naval plans were put on the back burner.

Subsequently, during the first few decades post-independence, the Indian Navy (IN) existed in an environment of uncertainty. There was a time when we needed to justify, year after year, our plans, our acquisitions and often our very raison d’ etre to a skeptical Government. It was only in the 1980s that the Navy’s potential as an instrument of state power began to dawn on decision-makers and found a permanent niche in their consciousness.

As the smallest of the three armed forces of a nation beset with a continental mindset, the IN has faced numerous challenges from time to time. This article attempts to provide a ringside view from the higher reaches of Naval Headquarters (NHQ), circa 2003-2006, as well as some personal views and observations relating to force planning issues and processes.

Remoulding Minds

India’s emergence as an economic power of global significance and its essential reliance on the sea for energy, trade and projecting influence, is rapidly changing perceptions, and arousing the maritime consciousness of the intelligentsia. While India possesses all the attributes of a potential major power, an inherent cultural diffidence holds her back from assuming the mantle and responsibilities of a regional maritime power. The challenge thus clearly lies in our minds; and re-moulding of perception has been a consistent endeavour of the naval leadership.

While India possesses all the attributes of a potential major power, an inherent cultural diffidence holds her back from assuming the mantle and responsibilities of a regional maritime power.

Conventional deterrence and war fighting are indeed the bread and butter of navies, but these remain essentially linked to threats, which inevitably tend to wax and wane cyclically with diplomatic activity. Such has been our naiveté and myopia in matters of national security that periodically there emerges a view amongst decision-makers that with ‘peace breaking out’ all round, the possibility of conflict is diminishing and that defence spending needs to be cut back. On occasions in the past, just as this view was about to prevail, a security crisis has arisen to bring us back from the brink; and so regrettably, we have seen this farcical cycle enacted many times in our brief history.

Of all the armed forces, navies take the longest to build and consolidate; and a growing force like the IN cannot afford to remain hostage to fluctuating security perceptions. The challenge for us, therefore, lies in reducing emphasis on threat perceptions as the sole arbiter in the force planning process, and bringing opinion (within and outside the navy) around to focus firmly a la Palmerston, on India’s long-term permanent interests in this context.

A beginning was made in 2004 with the promulgation of the Indian Maritime Doctrine, but the strategic thought process, in order to attain continuity and critical mass, required a degree of institutional reinforcement. The establishment of the National Maritime Foundation (a navy supported non-governmental think tank) in 2005 was the first step in this direction. Subsequently, the creation of the Directorate of Strategy, Concepts and Transformation, the Naval History Division both in NHQ, and the Flag Officer Doctrines & Concepts in Mumbai, have helped to craft an institutional continuum which will hopefully foster doctrinal debate and discussion on maritime issues.

...INS Beas, is stated to be 85 per cent indigenous in content and this is indeed heartening news. But we must face the stark reality that the remaining 15 per cent consists of weapons, sensors and combat management systems, which define the fighting potential of the ship.

With our maritime interests as the focal point, an exercise was undertaken in 2005 to prepare a Maritime Capabilities Perspective Plan to prioritize the capabilities (as distinct from number of platforms) required to safeguard them in the context of predicted fund availability. It was followed in 2006, by the release of a document entitled, Freedom of the Seas: India’s Maritime Strategy. This has completed a trilogy of documents, which provides the intellectual underpinning for the Navy’s plans and should help to crystallize informed opinion.

The Challenge of Obsolescence

We were fortunate that the seeds of a self-reliant blue water Navy were sown by our farsighted predecessors when they embarked on the brave venture of undertaking warship construction in India four decades ago. Since then, our shipyards have done very well to have delivered more than 85 ships and submarines, many of Indian design, to the IN.

While the hull and even the propulsion machinery of a warship is meant to last for two or three decades, what naval planners dread most is the onset of obsolescence of weapon systems as soon as the ship is launched. This is a very real challenge because a ship may take anything between 6-8 years to construct (in Indian conditions), and since the imported weapons/sensors when nominated for fitment were already in service, they would be 10-15 years (or more) old by the time the ship becomes operational. Thus when the ship completes just half her life, the on-board systems are already over 25 years old and rapidly losing efficacy against contemporary threats.

The latest warship delivered to the navy, INS Beas, is stated to be 85 per cent indigenous in content and this is indeed heartening news. But we must face the stark reality that the remaining 15 per cent consists of weapons, sensors and combat management systems, which define the fighting potential of the ship. These systems not only constitute the most expensive component of a warship but, are also most susceptible to obsolescence and have so far remained beyond the capability of the Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) as well as the Defence Public Sector Undertakings (DPSU) to design or produce.

Alleviation of this problem has been engaging the attention of the navy for a considerable period, and certain measures have been evolved to reduce its impact.

It is in a desperate effort to beat obsolescence that the Staff Qualitative Requirements (SQRs) are often pitched at levels considered ‘unrealistic’, and then not frozen till as late as possible. This has been termed as the classic struggle between what is termed the ‘good enough’ and the ‘best’.

Dependent as we have been, to a very large extent, on various constituents of the former USSR, our shipbuilding endeavours have remained hostage to their opaque, unresponsive and sluggish system of negotiations, contract and supply. This reliance introduces an element of grave uncertainty into the construction schedules and is the single most common cause for cascading time and cost overruns that we have faced in our recent shipbuilding programmes. While the Ministry of Finance may well heap scorn on NHQ and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) for what it considers ‘poor programme management’, they completely overlook the courageous leap of faith that the Navy has taken by shunning the easier import option and going down the thorny road of indigenous warship design and construction.

Alleviation of this problem has been engaging the attention of the navy for a considerable period, and certain measures have been evolved to reduce its impact. For one, a hard decision had to be taken that the SQRs should be made more realistic, so as to accept current systems, which are ‘good enough’ to counter extant threats. As a corollary, on the day a unit (ship, submarine or aircraft) enters service, it would be assigned a date for a mid-life update (MLU) a decade or more down the road. This period would permit adequate time for the ‘best’ contemporary systems to be developed and made available for the MLU.

The ultimate and the only acceptable solution is of course, to become self-reliant and design our own systems, and that constitutes the next challenge.

The Hurdles to Self-Reliance

If there is one lesson that the Indian Armed Forces should have learnt during the past few decades, it is about the hazards and pitfalls of depending on foreign sources for defence hardware (which invariably comes with embedded software). The days of ‘friendship prices’ are now well behind us, and no matter what the source, we are paying top dollar for everything that we buy in the ruthless international arms bazaar. We must remain acutely conscious of the fact that every time we contract a weapon system or platform of foreign origin, we compromise a little bit of our security because:

• We become dependant on a foreign power for yet one more combat system/ platform for its complete life cycle.
• The equipment manufacturer will progressively keep hiking the price of spare parts and overhauls without any rationale or explanation.
• The availability of product support (including spares) will keep declining, till it begins to affect our combat readiness.
• Unless adroitly negotiated in advance, the software source codes will be kept out of our reach to hamper in-house repairs.