That we are not spending enough on defense is established. The question therefore to be addressed is that given our security environment what proportion of the National income should we invest in our security. The aggregate allocation since the nineties has been around 2.5 percent of our GDP. Taking into account the size of our defense forces this amount has just been enough to keep our forces fed, clothed and paid. There was very little left for modernization or capability accretion. As a matter of fact the allocations have been so insufficient that the armed forces were unable to even replace wastages due to normal wear and tear or expiry of shelf life of sensitive items like propellants and mines Consequently voids in our establishment have been growing and what is worse is that occasionally we are losing quite a few precious lives due to handling explosives that have been rendered unsafe.
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China is currently spending six to seven times more than what we spend on defense. Pakistan has dropped its defense expenditure to about four percent of its GDP in the last couple of years only because the country was on the verge of going broke. Otherwise it has been allotting seven to eight percent of its GDP towards defense. World wide the normative allotment to defense ranges from two to ten percent of the GDP. A large economy enables a country to reduce its expenditure on defense as a percentage of the Country’s GDP. It follows that if as and when our economy maintains a sustained growth of what we are aiming at –eight percent annually- we too would be in a position to drop our defense budget to percentages that our economists are comfortable with. There has to be a rider to this formulation. Either our adversaries’ economy grows at a relatively slower rate or there is a change for the better in our security climate.
“¦if the Government could commit to an allocation of about 3.5 percent of the GDP annually for the next fifteen years they could acquire some semblance of health and balance. Is this too much for the Nation to afford?
A more pragmatic way to assess the capabilities that the defense forces must possess would be to take stock of the threats to national security and the strategic vision that we have drawn up for the next fifteen to twenty years. Such an appraisal may suggest requirements that cannot be afforded or impose an undesirable burden on the Country’s economy. A conscious decision may then have to be taken to moderate and modify our political and diplomatic postures. Or alternatively the political leadership on the advise of the security establishment may resolve to find the resources that the defense forces need. For a variety of complex reasons we have rarely undertaken such an exercise. On the occasions that the odd individual has pushed for such an approach the effort never succeeded in that no decisions have ever been recorded by the Government and without recorded decisions there can be no follow-up. In the eighties the Army formulated a strategy paper and drew up a plan that attempted to define the capabilities that the Army needed to acquire by the year 2000. It was based on the assumption that the GDP would grow at about four percent annually and that the defense budget would be maintained at four percent of the GDP each year. This plan was never ratified nor formally abridged. Since then though plans are made every year they never go beyond the paper that they are written on.
Jingoistic rhetoric tends to raise the expectations from the armed forces. Without giving them the appropriate wherewithal the Nation unfairly imposes stresses and strains on our very fine sailors soldiers and airmen. The defense forces have endured such pressures for long. But the possibility of cracks surfacing cannot be ruled out. The price of repairing such cracks would inevitably be disproportionately high. There is an urgent need to bridge the gap between what the defense forces believe they need and what the Government has been giving. This has to be on the basis of an informed debate and not arbitrary.
The services headquarters it is believed have after due deliberation determined that if the Government could commit to an allocation of about 3.5 percent of the GDP annually for the next fifteen years they could acquire some semblance of health and balance. Is this too much for the Nation to afford?
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