During the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war, the risks of nuclear weapon use or a nuclear accident at nuclear plants in Zaporizhzhia, occupied by Russia, and Kursk have been repeatedly highlighted. Russia has frequently threatened to use nuclear weapons, the latest instance being on February 24, 2026, when it accused the UK and France of helping Ukraine acquire nuclear capability and warned that such actions could trigger a confrontation between nuclear powers. Later, between 18 and 20 May 2026, Russia and Belarus conducted joint nuclear exercises involving missile units and strategic forces practicing nuclear weapon delivery and deployment. Such threats have emanated since the start of the conflict from various levels of the Russian government and military, including President Putin. Immediately after the invasion of Ukraine, Putin ordered Russia’s military on 27 February 2022 to put its deterrence forces, which include nuclear weapons, on “special alert.” On September 21 of the same year, he reiterated his threat to use all types of weapons, asserting that it was not a bluff. This clearly shows that his threats so far had not been taken seriously or lacked credibility, as they were driven by battlefield reversals and a shortage of military personnel in the invasion’s initial stages.

Russia’s nuclear threats reduced in 2023 when its military operations were achieving favourable results, another reason for their low credibility. However, nuclear rhetoric picked up again in 2024, including exercises simulating “theatre” or regional nuclear attacks, in contrast to “strategic” nuclear exercises simulating war with the US. Russian threats have been so frequent and unceasing that they no longer make headlines in Western media. Their recurrence has eroded credibility, rendering them ineffectual. These provocative articulations are assessed to be inconceivable, exaggerated, routine, discordant, and implausible.

The intent of these threats appears to be imposing restraint and influencing Western decisions. Russia has essentially reinforced two red lines for the West: first, the unacceptability of direct involvement and deployment of NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine; second, deterring and constraining the West from providing military aid to Ukraine, specifically offensive weapons platforms that could threaten Russian territory. In the first case, the US and NATO leaders have been extremely cautious and avoided direct resistance to Russia’s invasion. While military assistance was slow initially, it picked up gradually. The West has disregarded Russia’s warnings and provided Ukraine with weapon systems explicitly opposed by the Kremlin, including tanks, drones, and long-range missiles. On August 1, 2024, the first batch of long-awaited F-16 jets arrived in Ukraine, significantly bolstering its air force. Ukraine has since carried out aerial strikes deep into Russian territory, even hitting oil refineries in Siberia. Earlier, it forced Russia to scale down its Victory Day Parade on 9 May 2026 in Moscow due to security concerns. Despite its red lines being violated, Russia has avoided striking NATO territory. This reflects the continued effectiveness of strategic mutual nuclear deterrence among parties to the conflict.

Historically, the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe by either side has not been taken seriously. During the Cold War, NATO planning envisaged immediate use of hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons in response to a conventional Soviet attack in Europe, to hedge against conventional asymmetry. Yet, nobody assigned a high probability to this option. Similarly, the Soviets remained largely hostile to the idea that nuclear war could be fought in a highly limited manner, such as small-scale battlefield exchanges for bargaining purposes.

India does not face a major nuclear threat from large nuclear powers—the US and Russia—or the medium-sized nuclear forces maintained by the UK and France. Its major adversaries are China and Pakistan. China is the first and only nuclear weapon state recognized under the NPT to have maintained an official NFU policy continuously since it first acquired nuclear weapons in 1964. Since then, it has shown no proclivity for nuclear blackmail or coercive diplomacy based on nuclear threats. While a full-blown war initiated by China to resolve the boundary issue is unlikely in the short term, limited conflict due to escalation of local issues on the LAC could occur, as seen in Eastern Ladakh in 2020. As long as nuclear capabilities remain, China’s intentions can change at any time.

Pakistan’s case is entirely different. It considers the threat from India existential and inimical to its very idea of nationhood. Its strategic thought process is based on proactive and pre-emptive actions. Nuclear weapons give Pakistan the confidence to face a larger neighbour with asymmetry in military, economic, and industrial capacity. It professes that nuclear weapons reduce the probability of conventional conflict. Accordingly, it has a declaratory doctrine of “first use,” and lately has been advocating “early use” as part of strategic signalling to India. It has also alluded to ambiguous territorial, infrastructure, and economic red lines. Ambiguity and irrationality reinforce the deterrence value of nuclear threats. Pakistan seeks to deter India at all levels of war—nuclear, conventional, and sub-conventional—while denying India the same equation. It has regularly resorted to nuclear sabre-rattling in past conflicts to influence Indian decision-makers, as demonstrated during the Kargil War, Operation Parakram, surgical strikes across the LC, the Balakot air strikes, and recently Operation Sindoor.

In contrast, India’s nuclear doctrine is based on the twin pillars of NFU and minimum credible deterrence, resulting in massive retaliation in response to a nuclear attack. India believes that nuclear weapons deter only nuclear war and are of strategic relevance, not for warfighting. Suggestions have been made in recent years to revise the doctrine, abandon NFU, and incorporate “first use.” The main arguments advanced include the complex regional security environment and technological advances that may degrade the potency of a second strike.

Deterrence is widely accepted as a psychological construct rather than an end in itself. It should inspire fear, where the perceived cost of deterrence breakdown outweighs the benefits of war as a dispute resolution instrument. Even if a nation declares NFU, no one will trust that it will remain committed to NFU if its vital interests are at stake. A degree of calculated ambiguity in a nuclear doctrine is essential for credibility. Restraints on nuclear war are mainly intellectual, ethical, and doctrinal. During the Cold War, the USSR could not have invaded Western Europe even if the US had a declaratory NFU policy. Importantly, it is against the national interest of responsible and status quo powers like India to weaken the nuclear threshold. Conventional attacks are largely considered within the rules of international behaviour in a jus ad bellum situation, such as punitive conventional retaliation by India in response to high-profile terrorist incidents. The possibility of escalation or total eruption makes it unlikely that either side could achieve decisive victory in a limited war by using nuclear weapons.

Nevertheless, the existence of nuclear weapons cannot be downplayed, and they may be used in extreme cases by a nuclear-capable state. Threats to use nuclear weapons will continue to be made repeatedly to deter and influence adversary decision-making by playing mind games. Under the nuclear overhang, space for conventional operations exists, though its extent remains undefined and can be expanded by the side exercising escalation dominance. Moreover, deterrence is not static; it requires active escalation management throughout a crisis. Therefore, lessons from recent conflicts, particularly the Russia–Ukraine war, reinforce the enduring relevance, resilience, and credibility of India’s nuclear doctrine in maintaining strategic stability.

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Autonomy as the Next Evolution of Air Power

Air power has always evolved alongside the dominant technologies of its era.
The early twentieth century belonged to mechanics: the mastery of engines, wings, and altitude. The Cold War was defined by electronics: radar, stealth, and precision-guided munitions. The twenty-first century belongs to autonomy: perception, reasoning, and coordinated action.

Our (India’s) strategic environment is shifting under the combined pressures of regional tension, rapid technological diffusion, and the imperative of sovereignty in critical capabilities. Flanked by nuclear‑armed neighbours and operating across contested air and maritime domains, we must present credible deterrence while preserving freedom of action on multiple fronts. Reliance on imported technologies and legacy platforms is ceding to a new requirement: build indigenous, intelligent, and resilient systems that adapt faster than the threats they face. Against this backdrop, autonomy is not a luxury; it is a strategic necessity that will shape our ability to defend our skies, protect our seas, and project power across the Indo‑Pacific.

Understanding Autonomy

At its core, autonomy is the ability of a system to perceive its environment, interpret complex data, decide on a course of action, and execute. Differentiating automation from mission autonomy – whereas automation follows rules, mission autonomy understands context and adapts to uncertainties. In military air power, this means aircraft, drones, and sensors that respond dynamically to threats, collaborate fluidly, and adjust missions in real time without step‑by‑step direction. Such systems can replan routes under electronic attack, prioritize sensor feeds, or coordinate surveillance coverage across regions. Even when GPS and communications are denied, autonomy continues its mission, relying on uploaded data and making informed decisions. Without it, a mission is merely a plan. In contested environments where links break, manual control falters, and operators are overwhelmed, autonomy turns fragility into endurance.

For us in India, autonomy represents both a necessity and an opportunity. The nation’s airspace, stretching from high-altitude Himalayan borders to vast oceanic approaches, demands persistent surveillance, rapid response, and minimal attrition. Distributed intelligence – systems that think and act collaboratively at the edge – offers a path to surveillance without overstretch.

Simultaneously, autonomy eases manpower and logistics constraints. Intelligent mission management reduces cognitive load on pilots, while extending operational reach and endurance. Where pilots are scarce, autonomy can supplement and step in to fly. By integrating onto systems not bound to long runways, autonomy expands basing options and complicates an adversary’s targeting calculus. Most importantly, it restores freedom of action: the ability to adapt faster than potential adversaries in the shifting tempo of modern conflict.

Teaming as Force Multiplication

The potential of autonomy multiplies when thought of not as isolated machines, but as teams – networks of autonomous systems that can learn from, coordinate with, and support one another in complex missions.

Teaming allows multiple autonomous assets, whether airborne, maritime, or ground-based, to distribute tasks dynamically. Each autonomous asset becomes part of an extended neural network: observing, orienting, deciding, and acting in concert with its peers. One sensor platform may detect and classify targets; another may relay data through a resilient mesh network; a third may execute a strike or provide support in the event of interference/jamming. The network continually re-weaves itself; if one node is jammed or destroyed, others reroute around the gap or cover/bridge the gap by reassigning responsibilities among the able team members.

This model transforms air power from platform-centric to ecosystem-centric. Rather than concentrating risk in a few expensive manned aircraft, forces can employ many, relatively inexpensive, intelligent systems working together, offering agility, redundancy, and resilience. This is autonomy not as an isolated function, but as a living, adaptive web. Each operates semi-independently, but all share a common intent shaped by human command.

For India, such teaming has profound implications. Along the northern and north-western borders, autonomous airborne systems could coordinate patrol patterns, identify intrusions, and hand off tracking without saturating command networks. Over the Indian Ocean, autonomous reconnaissance aircraft can team with other maritime surveillance assets and even satellites to create and sustain a continuous intelligence picture or maritime domain awareness, thereby creating an ability to instantly react to suspicious movement or emerging crises.

Team’s adaptive behaviour contributes to its deterrent quality. When one system is lost or degraded, others reassign tasks automatically, preserving mission continuity. This capacity to self-heal under pressure amplifies deterrence through resilience; adversaries cannot easily capitate a force that reorganizes faster than they can target it.

Partnerships for Autonomy Integration and Sovereign Development

Developing and sustaining autonomy at scale demands an industrial and institutional shift. The speed of AI innovation far exceeds the tempo of traditional defence procurement. To remain competitive, India needs ecosystems that combine military discipline with private‑sector agility, academia’s research depth, and a clear pathway from lab to the frontline.

Crucially, to adapt to the autonomy revolution, India does not have to wait for new airframes. Instead, autonomy can be integrated incrementally onto existing platforms, extending their relevance and capability without wholesale replacement. Across the global defence industry, autonomy is already maturing in the field. Private innovators and research institutions have developed and flight-tested adaptable autonomy architectures that can be integrated onto diverse aircraft and mission profiles. Modern mission computers, open avionics standards, and secure datalink architectures allow legacy fighters, transports, and surveillance aircraft to host autonomous functions from adaptive sensor management to semi-autonomous flight operations and cooperative targeting.

By layering autonomy onto proven airframes, air forces can bridge the gap between current capability and future independence, gaining the benefits of intelligent air power while developing the sovereign expertise to field fully autonomous systems in the decade ahead.

For India, this represents a unique opportunity to accelerate modernization without waiting for generational replacement programs. By partnering with experienced autonomy developers, both domestic and international, India can adopt, adapt, and sovereignly certify proven systems as part of its own modernization cycle……leverage what exists now while investing in indigenous development for tomorrow.

Nevertheless, partnership recommended above must be co‑developmental, not solely transactional. Governments, defence organizations, research centres, and private firms must work within shared simulation environments, data ecosystems, and validation frameworks to accelerate progress in developing sovereign autonomy. Integrating proven architectures can help India operationalize autonomy as a near-term force multiplier while building pathways for indigenous evolution. Instead of rigid, multiyear development cycles, autonomy should advance through iterative, test-driven updates that refine performance in real time. Years of development become weeks. Months of development become days. Such collaboration compresses timelines, strengthens accountability, and embeds transparency as a core feature of capability generation, not a bureaucratic afterthought.

The end-goal of these partnerships is sovereign autonomy: the ability to design, test, and certify mission behaviours under a national authority. Sovereign autonomy ensures that governments, not vendors, control the evolution of their own systems. In practical terms, this means separating flight-critical safety software from mission logic so that domestic teams can adapt operational behaviours without compromising safety or revealing proprietary architectures. Partners that enable integration of existing autonomy while also providing a platform for indigenous development set the conditions for enduring success in a fast‑moving defence landscape. It allows us to integrate and develop, test, and deploy intelligent machines faster than ever.

India’s defence modernization programs have begun to reflect this trajectory. Initiatives like iDEX have opened pathways for small and medium enterprises to contribute advanced software, simulation, and sensor solutions.

International partnerships will matter as well. Trusted collaboration on data standards, testing protocols, and secure interfaces can enhance interoperability without surrendering control. The key is open architecture with disciplined governance – a system that allows India to innovate locally while operating globally.

Through the aforementioned partnerships, autonomy becomes not just a capability but an industry – one that strengthens national resilience, creates enduring expertise, and ensures that the authority to adapt and improve remains sovereign.

Deterrence in the Age of Autonomy

Autonomy and teaming are not only operational enablers, but they are also strategic multipliers. They redefine deterrence for an era in which information moves faster than formations and decision speed decides survival.

Where traditional deterrence emphasized visible mass, like fleets, bases, and inventories, modern deterrence emphasizes invisible agility – the capacity to reconfigure faster than an adversary can target, to absorb disruption, and to project power from unexpected directions. Autonomous air power, even more so if it is runway independent, makes this possible. Systems that can operate from dispersed sites, update tactics overnight, and maintain networked awareness across vast distances present an adversary with an unsolvable dilemma: where to strike, and against what? Deterrence arises from uncertainty in the face of a force that learns and adapts in contact.

For us in India, this agility has profound strategic consequences. Autonomous air power allows the nation to extend presence without overstretch, maintain vigilance across multiple fronts and long borders, and recover from attacks more swiftly. When paired with trusted partnerships and sovereign control, it ensures that India can adapt faster than any external actor can constrain it. Moreover, autonomy enhances coalition credibility. When systems are designed with interoperability embedded from the start, our forces can operate seamlessly alongside allies while preserving control of national assets and data. Predictable collaboration reinforces deterrence by signaling both independence and reliability.

The essence of deterrence in the autonomy era lies in its speed, resilience, and trust. Nations that can integrate these elements will command the initiative not by threatening destruction, but by denying instability. Autonomy, intelligently governed, becomes not an escalatory force but a stabilizing one.

The Future Ahead

Autonomy, teaming, and partnership are not separate trends; they are the intertwined pillars of future air power. They shift the balance from hardware to intelligence, from centralization to adaptability, and from ownership to collaboration. India mastering this triad offers operational advantage and simultaneously strategic independence. By integrating mission autonomy into current forces, creating coordinate networks of platforms for missions, and developing sovereign autonomy through public-private partnership, India can shape an air power model rooted in both freedom and responsibility. In the coming decades, the nations that succeed will not be those that build the most machines, but those that build the most coherent systems where humans, algorithms, industries, and allies act in partnership.

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With population of India touching 140 billion and having undergone a rapid and sustained economic expansion in the last 10 years, demand for energy in India is about to see a quantum 40 percent growth in the next ten years. Like many other developing countries of the world, India is also a net importer of energy. More than a quarter of primary energy needs of the country are being met through imports, mainly in the form of crude oil and natural gas. Biofuels, being a domestic and renewable source of energy, can significantly cut down India’s dependence on imported oil, can lessen the environmental degradation caused by the use of fossil fuels and is the best alternative option in securing the energy needs of the country.

India embarked upon the journey of production of bio-fuels nearly a decade ago in order to reduce its dependence on foreign oil and thus, improving her energy security situation. India is now amongst top producers of Jatropha oil and achieved 10% ethanol blending in 2022, quite ahead of the schedule, in its pursuit of a 20% blending target by 2025. 

Launch of the Global Bio-Fuel Alliance (GBA)

Headwinds in the area of sustainable development exist, still, Global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions continue to surge with biodiversity loss, climate change, drought, pollution, land degradation and desertification, threatening lives and livelihoods. In order to deal with this current phenomenon, Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi along with the leaders of Singapore, Bangladesh, Italy, USA, Brazil, Argentina, Mauritius and UAE, launched the Global Biofuel Alliance on 9 September 2023, on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in New Delhi. The alliance is going to act as a central repository of knowledge and databank as well as an expert hub. GBA aims to be a catalyst platform, promoting global collaboration for the widespread adoption and advancement of biofuels.

What are Bio – Fuels?

 Any kind of a hydrocarbon fuel that is produced from an organic matter (living or dead) in a short duration (days, weeks, or months), can be called a biofuel. Biofuels can be solid, liquid or gaseous in nature. Solids like Wood, dried plant material, manure, liquid like Bioethanol and Biodiesel and gaseous like Biogas can be used to replace or be used in addition to diesel, petrol or other fossil fuels for transport. They can also be used to produce heat and electricity and have widespread application.

First Generation Biofuels. These are produced from food sources such as starch, sugar, vegetable oil or animal fats using conventional technology. Some of the common first-generation biofuels include Biodiesel, Bioalcohols, Bioethers, Vegetable oil, Biogas etc. Though the process of conversion is easy but use of food sources in the production of biofuels creates an imbalance in food economy, which may lead to increased food prices and hunger.

Second Generation Biofuels. These are made from non-food crops or some portions of food crops that are not edible and are considered as wastes, like stems, husks, wood chips, fruit skins, peelings etc. Thermochemical reactions or biochemical conversion process is used for producing such fuels. Some of the examples include cellulose ethanol, biodiesel etc. These fuels may not have any effect on the food economy, however, their production is quite complicated.

Third Generation Biofuels. These are produced from some micro-organisms like algae, example Butanol. Micro-organisms like algae can be grown using water and land thought unsuitable for food production. One disadvantage is environmental pollution caused due to the use of fertilizers for production of such crops.

Fourth Generation Biofuels. In the production of such fuels, crops that are genetically engineered to consume high amounts of carbon are grown and harvested as biomass. The crops are thereafter converted into fuel using second generation techniques. The advantage is that it reduces carbon from the environment.

Felt Need

Indian Energy Scenario and Significance of Biofuels. India ranks sixth in energy demand accounting for 3.6% of total global energy demand in the world. While the energy demand is estimated to grow at 4.8% a year, a large part of India’s population, majority in the villages / rural areas, doesn’t have access to it. Most rural kitchens still use biomass fuels in their smoky kitchens.

In 2003-04, India, which is 70% dependent on imports for meeting her crude oil requirement, spent 18.36 billion dollars (Rs 84,236 cores) on the import of more than 90 million tons of crude oil. It is predicted that if the country continues at this rate, 5.6 million barrels of oil /day will be consumed by 2030 out of which, more than 94% will be met through oil imports.

Securing of long-term supply of energy not only requires current fuel resources to be used as economically as possible but also diversification of energy sources used in this fuel system. In the years to come, we have to reach a stage in our development, where our dependence on fossil fuels should reach the minimum level for energy generation. This is the reason why Biofuels are recognized major players for ensuring energy security in the future of our country.

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Suitability of India for Bio Fuels Production

Fortunately, there is large proportion of degraded forestland and unused public land and fallow lands of farmers where non-edible oil seeds can be grown. There are many of the non-edible species which are rich in oil and at the same time, can be easily grown in the country. Further, India has large arable land and good climatic conditions with adequate rainfall in the large part of the area to account for large biomass production each year.

Some promising tree species were evaluated and it was found that there were a number of them such as Jatropha Curcas and Pongamia Pinnatta which can be very suitable for our conditions. Jatropha Curcas, in specific, has been found most suitable for the purpose.

One hectare land under Jatropha plantation with about 4400 plants per hectare under rain fed conditions can produce about 1500 litres of oil. It is estimated that about three million hectares plantation is required in order to produce oil for 10% replacement of petrodiesel which is quite substantial.

Biofuel Policy of India

History of Biofuel. India initiated its biofuel programme more than a decade back and launched many policy measures to promote biofuels ever since. India launched its “Ethanol Blending Programme” in 2002, which mandated 5% blending of ethanol (E5) with petrol in four Union Territories and nine States with effect from January 2003. The Planning Commission of India constituted a Committee on Development of Biofuels in July 2002. The report released in 2003 of the Committee recommended India to progressively move towards higher targets in blending of biofuels which include strengthening of the ethanol blending programme.

The 5% blending mandate in the case of ethanol could not be achieved due to shortage of bioethanol supply. In October 2004, the mandate was amended “requiring E5 blends only when adequate ethanol supplies were available”. In 2006, the 5% blending mandate was extended to cover 20 States and 8 Union Territories.

Again, this target could not be achieved due to shortage of bioethanol supply. In September 2008, the Union Cabinet set a target of 5% blending all across the country. The Planning Commission report of year 2003 recommended launching a National Mission on Biodiesel to be based on non-edible oil and identified Jatropha Curcas as the most suitable tree-borne oilseed for this biodiesel production. One aim of the Mission was to gradually raise the blending target to 20% by the year 2012. The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, in October 2005, announced a biodiesel purchase policy, which required Oil Marketing Companies (OMC) to procure biodiesel for blending with diesel with effect from January 2006. In order to ailing ethanol and biodiesel blending programs, India’s National Biofuel Policy was approved by the Government of India in December 2009.

National Biofuel Policy. The goal of the Policy is to ensure availability of biofuels in the market, thereby, increasing their blending percentage. It aims at ensuring the ready availability of biofuels in the market to meet demand and brought out an indicative target of 20% blending of biofuels, for bio-diesel and bio-ethanol both, by 2017. While the target for bio-ethanol was supposed to be mandatory, the blending target for biodiesel was intended to be recommendatory. Salient features of the biofuel policy include:

1. Biofuels to be based solely on non-food crops to be raised on degraded or wastelands that were found to be unsuitable for agriculture, thereby, avoiding a possible fuel vs. food security conflict.

2. Cultivation of non-edible oil seeds for production of bio-diesel to be promoted through a Minimum Support Price.

3. Plantations that provide the feedstock for biodiesel and bio-ethanol also to be supported through a Minimum Support Price.

4. Research, development and demonstration be supported to cover varied aspects of feedstock production and processing of biofuels which also include development of second-generation biofuels. The Policy document also includes interventions and enabling mechanisms with respect to plantations, processing, distribution and marketing, financing, financial and fiscal incentives and research and development.

G20 Bio-fuel Alliance

Progress in Other G20 Countries. The United States Inflation Reduction Act makes USD 9.4 billion available for biofuels which is quite substantial. Some other G20 countries and regions making notable progress to boost biofuels include:

•             Brazil is planning to increase biodiesel blending to 15% by 2026 which is up from 10% in 2022. 

•             Canada is implementing its Clean Fuel Regulations in 2023, which require a 13% cut in GHG emissions intensity for transport fuels by 2030. 

•             The European Union is closing on to its agreement on updated Renewable Energy Directive (RED III) which would double the requirements for renewables content in transportation fuels, including biofuels, compared to existing targets.

•             Singapore has supplied about 70,000 tonnes of bio-fuels to ocean-going vessels in 2022. Singapore Airlines is also using sustainable blended aviation fuel.

•             The Argentina biodiesel industry is based mainly on the use of soybean as feedstock. There are 31 companies in the country currently producing biodiesel with an estimated annual production capacity of over 745 million litres.

Gains for India

G20 initiative was launched to promote an alliance of governments, international organizations and industries to promote adoption of bio-fuels. Global bio-fuel alliance mirrors the International Solar Alliance which was launched in 2015 by India and 120 signatory countries in Paris.

The Bio-fuel alliance is a win-win situation for ‘Atamnirbhar Bharat’. It will help to create jobs, reduce pollution and to top it all, make India a leader in the production and use of Bio-fuels. The alliance is oriented towards India’s goal of becoming a carbon-neutral country by 2070. The alliance will fast-track India’s existing Bio-fuels programs like Sustainable Alternative towards Affordable Transportation (SATAT) and ‘Gobardhan’ scheme, which will help farmers in enhancing their income, create jobs and boost overall growth of Indian ecosystem.

Way Forward

Despite laying a lot of emphasis on Bio-fuels, substantial ground still needs to be covered by India. In order to achieve its laid down aim, India needs to rev up its model of Bio-fuels which requires making policy changes, adopting technological advancements and collaboration with other countries.

Quality Check. National Policy on Biofuels (NPB) does not permit private biofuel manufacturers to market directly. The responsibility for storage, distribution and marketing of Biofuels is vested in OMCs. Biodiesel manufacturers must send their biodiesel to OMC approved collection centers where the standard of quality is verified. Price and minimum quality standards are already laid out in the NPB.

Government Support. Biofuels need to be backed by the government in many different ways, including subsidies, blending mandates or targets, reduced import duties, tax exemptions and credits, support for R&D and direct involvement in biofuel production, as well as other incentives to encourage local biofuel production and use. Biofuel blend mandates require specific quantity of biodiesel, ethanol and advanced biofuels to be mixed with petroleum-based transportation fuels and needs to be vigorously executed.

Innovation. An innovation gap exists in converting woody and grassy biomass (e.g. agricultural and forestry residues) to liquid biofuels. For example, via thermochemical routes such as biomass gasification followed by FT synthesis (bio-FT), hydrothermal liquefaction and fast pyrolysis with upgrading. While bio-FT is presently at the demonstration phase, many commercial-scale projects are currently in the pipeline, mostly in the United States and also in Europe and Japan. G20 alliance will prove beneficial here, wherein, such exchange of ideas and innovations can now take place.

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Technology Deployment. The vast quantity of biofuel production currently uses so-called conventional feedstocks such as corn, sugar cane and soybeans. However, extending biofuel production to advanced feedstocks is critical to ensuring minimal impact on food prices, land-use and other environmental factors while tripling biofuels production.

Used cooking oil and waste animal fats provide most of the non-food crop feedstocks for biofuel production currently. Given that these feedstocks are limited, new technologies are required to be commercialised to expand non-food crop biofuel production. Toxicological study should also be initiated in India through concerned R & D centers, as it is a pre-requisite for the introduction of any fuel. 

Supporting Infra. Capturing CO2 from biofuels is cheaper as compared to other bioenergy and carbon capture processes. Many of the biofuel production pathways emit CO2 as an inherent part of their process. Such routes include ethanol fermentation (both cellulosic and crop-based) and bio-FT. The high concentration of CO2 essentially means that the cost of capturing the CO2 is low, since no additional purification will be required apart from dehydration. Once the CO2 is captured, it requires to be compressed and transported via a pipeline, truck or ship to a storage site or be used in some way, for which suitable infrastructure needs to be created.

Policy. Biofuels are facing challenges of their own, prompting differing policy responses. Overall, close to 80 countries have policies that support biofuel demand. Nearly 60% of biofuel demand is observed in advanced economies and only 40% in emerging economies. Biofuel demand though, is expected to increase by 11% to 2024, with two-thirds of growth taking place in emerging economies. 

However, while biofuels offer energy security advantages, their prices climbed quicker than those of gasoline and diesel in many of the countries. In order to mitigate increase in transport fuel costs, Brazil, Sweden and Finland delayed their planned increase to biofuel blending obligations in 2022.

Only Brazil and Indonesia are accelerating deployment by 2024. India also needs to act on identical lines and bring in changes in its NBP. It may lead to hike in transport prices in the near future but will be immensely beneficial in the long run.

Investment. Investment in liquid biofuels saw a marked hike in 2022, notably in renewable diesel Global transport biofuel, wherein, capacity was enhanced by 7% in 2022, its largest annual increase in over a decade. Biorefineries focused on renewable diesel and contributed towards the bulk of the growth, thanks to attractive policies in the United States and Europe, while ethanol capacity saw notable increases in Brazil, Indonesia, India and China.

Several large companies, world over, are also making forays into sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs). In the European Union alone there are more than 30 advanced biorefinery projects in operation and  further 10 are slated for operations before 2025. The United States is seen as a leader in this sector, attributed to generous fiscal incentives, an estimated USD 9.4 billion in tax credits and financial support for new production capacity and biofuel infrastructure.

International Collaboration. International collaboration is inescapable in order to realise the potential of biofuels. International collaboration can accelerate biofuel deployment by developing and sharing best practices, policy and deployment, co-ordinating research and promoting common sustainability standards. Current efforts include: 

•             The Biofuture Platform Initiative. A 22-country initiative to promote an advanced low-carbon bioeconomy that is innovative and scalable, sustainable, established under the Clean Energy Ministerial in 2021. It aims at promoting consensus on biomass sustainability, enabling financing, promoting best practices and promoting international co-operation. 

•             IEA Bioenergy. A Technology Collaboration Program (TCP) which was established in 1978 in order to facilitate co-operation and exchange of information between countries that have national programs in bioenergy R&D and deployment. It provides leading analysis on market deployment, bioenergy technology development, demonstration, sustainability and policy frameworks.

•             Clean Skies for Tomorrow Coalition. An industry-led coalition working to promote the commercial sale of viable, low-emission SAF, of which biojet kerosene is one type, for broad adoption by industry by 2030.

•             Global Bioenergy Partnership. An initiative that focuses on developing countries to support a wide range of activities including national and regional policy making and supporting sustainable practices. This also includes the development and implementation of 24 sustainability indicators. 

An inter-play between G20 alliance and these international collaborations which have already provided a headstart to the Bio fuel sector, needs to evolve so that concerted results can be achieved.

Private Sector Participation. Refiners are now increasing their footprints into the biofuels supply chain. Refiners traditionally focused on oil and gas refining and were involved in half of planned capacity additions, including co‐processing facilities, facility conversion or building new facilities. Refiners, such as Total Energies, Eni, Neste and Valero, currently own maximum of operating capacity for renewable diesel and they also have a sizeable share of planned capacity. These refiners need to be dovetailed into own overall design and given incentives, so as to provide much needed fillip to the Bio- Gas sector.

Conclusion        

Development of a self-reliant community to manage the natural system is an important element of sustainable development. Here lays the importance of biofuels as a renewable and domestic energy supply. While bioethanol and biodiesel can be seen as future fuels in the transport sector, biogas and biomass technologies can prove their utility in rural India. However, commercialisation of these fuels on a large scale needs technological innovation of the highest order supported by proper policy orientation.

Government of India seems keen to give a head start to all the biofuels programs. A concerted effort from both, the government and private parties, towards a coherent technological and policy initiative has the potential to lead India to meet its energy requirements substantially through biofuels materializing the ‘Swadeshi’ vision of Mahatma Gandhi, thereby, creating revolutionary changes in our nation’s development. New Delhi G20 summit has laid the foundation for this mammoth endeavor, however, it needs to be pursued vigorously in upcoming G20 summits in Brazil in 2024, in South Africa in 2025 and the United States in 2026 at the beginning of the next cycle.

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In the visionary words of the Indian Prime Minister spoken from the ramparts of Red Fort on 15 Aug 2021, ‘Not only will Green Hydrogen be the basis of green growth through green jobs but it will also set an example for the world towards green energy transition.’ This resounding statement from the highest echelons of Indian leadership underscores the nation’s commitment to embrace green hydrogen as a transformative energy source. In a world grappling with environmental challenges and seeking sustainable energy solutions, green hydrogen emerges as a beacon of hope and innovation. The Indian National Green Hydrogen Mission, launched in Jan 2023 aims to make India energy independent, decarbonise major economic sectors and turn nation into a global hub to produce, utilize export Green Hydrogen and its derivatives. In a world grappling with environmental challenges and seeking sustainable energy solutions, green hydrogen emerges as a beacon of hope and innovation.

What is Green Hydrogen and why is it important?

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. However, it does not exist in the earth’s atmosphere and is required to be produced through artificial means. Green Hydrogen specifically relates to hydrogen production methods using only renewable energy.  Operating at scale, Green Hydrogen and hydrogen-based fuels could play a central role in decarbonization of the global energy system and energy transition.

One of its key advantages of Hydrogen is that it is the perfect complement to renewable sources like wind, solar and hydel owing to its capability to generate on-demand power when output from renewable sources cannot match demand. Hydrogen is the only non-carbon fuel which can potentially decarbonize sectors like industries, mobility and power generation. Hydrogen could help decarbonize hard-to-electrify heavy mobility sectors like shipping, railways, heavy trucks and buses. The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Global Hydrogen Review 2022 notes positive signs of progress in this field recently, as the first fleet of trains powered by hydrogen fuel cells began operating in Germany. India has already launched Hydrogen Fuel Cell buses in Delhi and will be rolling out its first domestically designed and built hydrogen-powered train by December 2023. Today, most of the hydrogen is used by refining and chemical industry. Demand for industrial use has tripled since 1975 and its potential as an energy transition fuel could see demand grow exponentially.

ALSO READ: Event Preview: Energy Strategy for the Armed Forces 2022

Advancements in Green Hydrogen Technologies- Global Scan

The global quest for clean energy is disrupting the fossil fuel-based world order. Hydrogen could account for up to 12% of global energy use by 2050, leading to the rise of new energy superpowers. But who are the frontrunners in the race to adopt and scale up green hydrogen and other low-carbon fuels affecting political and economic changes in the energy landscape. A report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), called ‘Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation: The Hydrogen Factor’ lists leaders in developing policy initiatives, technology and export facilities to promote green hydrogen value chains – all of which are needed if the world is to decarbonize sectors like steel making, shipping and transportation.

(a)          China. China consumes and produces more hydrogen than any other country – its current annual usage is more than 24 million tons. Most of the country’s production is ‘grey’ hydrogen, generated using fossil fuels like coal, however, more than 30 green hydrogen projects have been setup since 2019. China announced first hydrogen roadmap in 2016. It has the world’s third-largest fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) fleet and is a pioneer in developing fuel cell trucks and buses. China’s five-year economic plan recognizes hydrogen as one of the six industries of the future.

(b)          The European Union. Having issued its National Hydrogen Strategy in 2020, the EU has recognized hydrogen as a key technology for achieving policy goals such as the ‘European Green Deal’. The bloc’s strategy is heavily focused on emissions-free green hydrogen, with a target to install 40 gigawatts of renewable hydrogen electrolyzer capacity by 2030. However, with Europe’s green hydrogen capacity set to reach just 2.7 gigawatts by 2025, achieving such an ambitious goal will be a challenge. The ‘European Clean Hydrogen Alliance’ was launched to support investment and large-scale deployment of Green hydrogen projects as the EU aims to become the industrial leader in Green Hydrogen. Within the bloc, different member states look set to become large-scale hydrogen importers, exporters or transit hubs.

(c)           Japan. In 2017, Japan became the first country to formulate a National Hydrogen Strategy in order to become the world’s first ‘hydrogen society’ by adopting the fuel across all sectors. The country lacks the natural resources needed to deploy sufficient levels of wind or solar to generate green hydrogen at scale, therefore developing long term supply agreements to import Green Hydrogen from overseas. Alongside government investment in hydrogen and fuel cell technologies totaling $670 million in 2020, policymakers have set mobility targets of 800,000 FCEVs and 900 hydrogen refueling stations by 2030.

(d)          South Korea. South Korea’s 2019 Hydrogen roadmap hailed Green hydrogen as a key driver of economic growth and job creation. The nation has its sights set on becoming a global leader in producing and deploying FCEVs and large-scale stationary fuel cells for hydrogen power generation. Its ‘Green New Deal’ contains an ambitious target of deploying 200,000 FCEVs by 2025.  Last year, South Korea passed the Economic Promotion and Safety Control of Hydrogen Act- the world’s first law aimed at promoting hydrogen vehicles, charging stations and fuel cells. Plans are in place for hydrogen to provide 10% of the energy needs of its cities, counties and towns by 2030, with its share rising to 30% by 2040 before it becomes the country’s largest single energy carrier by mid-century.

(e)          The United States.  The US is the world’s second largest producer and consumer of hydrogen after China, accounting for 13% of global demand. States such as California supported the country’s FCEV market growth for more than a decade with initiatives like the ‘Clean Vehicle Rebate Program’. The US led the world in this field until 2020. When the government passed law- ‘Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021’. It contained a $9.5 billion budget to boost Green hydrogen development. This was followed by the launch of the government’s Hydrogen Earthshot program aimed at bringing down the cost of Green Hydrogen to $1 per 1 kilogram in 1 decade.

ALSO READ: Iran ready to meet India’s energy needs

Why Green Hydrogen in India’s Energy Porfolio?

Green hydrogen’s emergence as the fuel of the future for India is rooted in a multitude of reasons and compelling arguments that make it an indispensable component of the nation’s energy landscape as discussed hereinunder:-

(a)          Abundant Renewable Resources. India is blessed with abundant solar and wind resources, making it well-suited for green hydrogen production. Harnessing these renewable energy sources through electrolysis allows India to produce hydrogen with minimal environmental impact, positioning the nation as a global leader in sustainable energy production.

(b)          Decarbonisation Imperative. India, like the rest of the world, faces the pressing need to reduce carbon emissions to combat climate change. Green hydrogen provides a pathway to decarbonize various sectors.

(c)           Energy Storage and Grid Balancing. Green hydrogen offers a unique solution to the intermittent nature of renewable energy sources. Excess electricity generated during peak periods can be used for electrolysis to produce hydrogen, which can then be stored and used during periods of high demand or low renewable energy generation. This enhances grid stability and energy security.

(d)      Versatility and End-Use Flexibility. Green hydrogen is remarkably versatile. It can be used as a fuel for vehicles, as a feedstock in industrial processes, or to generate electricity through fuel cells. This versatility allows India to address multiple energy needs simultaneously, reducing reliance on imported fossil fuels in various sectors.

(e)     Technological Advancements. Advancements in green hydrogen production technologies, including electrolysers and hydrogen storage solutions, have made the process more efficient and cost-effective. As technology continues to improve, the economic viability of green hydrogen becomes increasingly attractive.

(f)      Economic Growth and Job Creation. Investing in the green hydrogen sector can stimulate economic growth and job creation. The development of a robust hydrogen ecosystem, from production to infrastructure deployment, will create a multitude of employment opportunities fostering economic prosperity.

(g)    International Collaboration and Trade. Green hydrogen presents opportunities for international collaboration and trade. India can export green hydrogen and related technologies to other nations, enhancing its standing in the global energy market and fostering diplomatic ties.

Green Hydrogen’s Role in Achieving India’s Energy Goals

Green hydrogen, produced through the process of electrolysis using renewable energy sources like wind and solar power is hailed as the fuel of the future for several compelling reasons. Firstly, it is a clean and sustainable energy carrier, emitting only water vapours when burned or used in fuel cells, thus combating greenhouse gas emissions and addressing climate change. Secondly, it can be efficiently stored and transported, offering flexibility in energy distribution. Thirdly, it is incredibly versatile and can be used across various sectors, including transportation, industry and power generation. For India, it’s a strategic tool to achieve energy security, energy independence by 2047 and net-zero emissions by 2070.

(a)          Energy Security. As India’s growth story unfolds, energy requirement is likely to grow by at least 25% by 2030. India is currently importing over 40% of its primary energy requirement, worth over USD 90 billion every year. This necessitates diversification of National energy portfolio towards green hydrogen technologies to progressively reduce share of imported fossil fuels. India, by harnessing abundant renewable energy resources can produce green hydrogen domestically, ensuring a stable and secure energy supply.

(b)          Energy Independence by 2047. India’s aspiration to attain energy independence by its centenary in 2047, the 100th year of independence, is an ambitious yet achievable goal. Green hydrogen holds the key to this aspiration by offering a clean, indigenous energy source that can replace fossil fuels in various sectors. By investing in green hydrogen infrastructure and technology, India can reduce its reliance on imported fossil fuels and move closer to energy independence.

(c)           Net Zero by 2070. India’s commitment to achieving net-zero emissions by 2070 is a testament to its dedication to combating climate change. Green hydrogen is a crucial enabler in this journey. When used as a clean fuel or feedstock, green hydrogen can significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions across sectors, such as transportation, industry and power generation. Its carbon-neutral nature aligns perfectly with the goal of eliminating net emissions. Carbon-free steel, ammonia, fuel cell based power generation and hydrogen based transportation systems will assist in reduction of fossil fuel based carbon emissions.

Micro Grid Power Plants for Offgrid Forward Locations of Indian Army

MoU between Indian Army and National Thermal Power Corporation Renewable Energy Limited (NTPC REL). In consonance with the National Green hydrogen Mission, on 21 Mar 2023, Indian Army became first Government entity to ink an MoU with NTPC REL for installation of Green Hydrogen based Micro Grid Power Plants at off grid forward locations along Northern Borders. The plants will provide round the clock clean power supply to the troops deployed in inhospitable terrain, extreme climatic conditions higher Himalayas. The progressive step will reduce Indian Army’s dependence on power being generated by fossil fuel fired Generators.

Pilot Project at Chushul. The 200 KW pilot project at Chushul will be the first operational green hydrogen-based power plant in India. NTPC REL will develop the project on Build, Own and Operate (BOO) model, wherein investment, construction, operation and maintenance post commissioning will be the responsibility of NTPC REL and Indian Army will provide land on 25 on lease for 25 years and pay the tariff as per Power Purchase Agreement. NTPC REL has conceptualized and designed the pilot project and has completed the tendering formalities. Work on site is likely to commence by December 2023.

Design & Configuration. The plant has been designed on the basic concept of producing power by installing Solar Photovoltaic panels to capture solar energy and directly supply the same to consumer through a micro grid during solar hours. Also, a part of solar energy will be used to run electrolysers which will break water into hydrogen and oxygen and hydrogen will be compressed and stored in cylinders. The stored hydrogen will be used to run fuel cells which will provide power during non-solar hours. Besides, a four-hour battery backup will be provided though a Battery Energy storage system, which will also cater to intermittency and fluctuations in solar energy required to power electrlysers.  The layout of the pilot project is given as under:-                       

(a)          Solar Plant. The solar plant will comprise of a Solar PV modules for a DC capacity of 3200 kW. The power will be evacuated from Solar plant directly into local AC grid at 415 V during solar hours. The electrolysers and BESS would be fed by DC power from the solar plant through a unique system of DC-DC conversion to save on energy losses. Metering, protection and Energy Management System (EMS) will be installed for safe and smooth operations

(b)          Hydrogen Plant. Hydrogen generation of 160 kg/day with 1000 kW of Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) type electrolyser will be installed. Electrolysers are envisaged to interface directly with DC grid through DC/DC converter. Hydrogen compression system will be installed to the required pressure of 250 bar for storage. Hydrogen storage facility will have at least 200 kg of usable hydrogen required for fuel cell in a Type-IV hydrogen gas cylinders. Heat exchangers will be installed in closed loop system.

(c)           Battery Energy Storage System (BESS). BESS for the capacity of 300KW/1200KWHr will be installed for storing of un-utilised/surplus power from solar plant by charging the battery system. Power to be extracted or discharged from the battery to existing load (200KW) at any time. BESS will support Hydrogen Plant and load during the fluctuation in solar plant due to weather conditions. BESS will cater to the power requirement of emergency load (max 80 kW) for one hour and lighting load for three hours of operation. It shall have battery and thermal management system for its effective operation. BESS is envisaged to interface directly with DC grid through DC/DC converter and also operate in standalone mode as well as in tandem operation with local grid comprising Solar PV & Fuel Cell. BESS discharging energy capacity at the end of 10 Years shall be 90% of rated energy capacity with 90% annual utilization factor.

(d)          Fuel Cell System. Electrical power to be generated for Net capacity of 200 KW using a PEM type Fuel Cell. Fuel Cell will interface directly with DC grid through DC/DC converter. Fuel Cell shall operate in standalone mode as well as in tandem operation with local grid comprising Solar PV & BESS. Fuel Cell has been designed to operate based on the load condition and maintain the power quality in the system.

Challenges in Making India a Global Green Hydrogen Hub

While the future of green hydrogen is promising, India faces several challenges on its path to becoming a global green hydrogen hub. These challenges include the following:-

(a)          High production costs.

(b)          The need for significant infrastructure development for creation of hydrogen Eco-system.

(c)           Intermittency issues with renewable energy sources.

(d)          Need for indigenization and mass production of hydrogen technologies.

(e)          Collaboration between public and private sectors along with incentive based supportive policies will be crucial in overcoming these challenges.

Conclusion

Green Hydrogen represents an extraordinary opportunity for India and the world to transition towards a sustainable, low-carbon future. With its clean and versatile nature, it has the potential to address climate change, enhance energy security and drive economic growth. Despite the existing challenges, the future of green hydrogen is filled with optimism, driven by innovation and a shared commitment to a greener and more sustainable world.

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Chief of Army Staff Gen MM Naravane, on January 12, replying to a question submitted in advance, said, “We are not averse to the demilitarization of the glacier but the pre-condition for that is to accept the AGPL. Pakistan has to accept what are their positions and what are ours, and both of us have to sign on the dotted line before any kind of disengagement takes place.”

Stalemate in Talks

There have been 13 rounds of talks on the demilitarisation of Siachen, the last one at Rawalpindi in June 2012. After almost a ten-year hiatus, Gen Naravane’s statement shows that there is no progress.

India has been insisting on the marking of the current positions that the Army holds on maps that are to be ratified by both sides. This will establish Indian territorial control along the Saltoro range. On the other hand, Pakistan has been reluctant to authenticate Indian positions as it will legitimise India’s ‘illegal act’ of violating the Simla Agreement by occupying an area that was under Pakistan’s administrative control. The crux of the matter is that neither side is willing to make any territorial compromise.

After the fifth round of talks in June 1989, the joint statement stated: “There was agreement by both sides to work towards a comprehensive settlement, based on redeployment of forces to reduce the chance of conflict.” This was a direct result of Rajiv Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto’s political intervention in attempting to find a solution on Siachen.

The sixth round in 1992 carried forward the discussions of 1989, and this was the second time that an agreement was almost reached. However, there was no political acceptance by then-Prime Minister Narsimha Rao to ratify the agreement. In 2006, a draft agreement was drawn up for a phased, mutual withdrawal and joint monitoring of a demilitarised zone at Siachen.

Importance of Siachen

Lt Gen V R Raghavan, who served as the Director-General of Military Operations, wrote in his book Siachen: Conflict without End: “It is apparent that neither India nor Pakistan secures a strategic advantage by contesting the possession of the Saltoro range. Neither also faces a military threat to the territory it occupies in Jammu and Kashmir from over the Saltoro range…A strategic veneer is given to what is actually a political necessity for continuing the conflict.”

On the other hand, the area is bound by Pakistan to the west, the Chinese Shaksgam valley to the North, and the Sub Sector North (SSN) of Ladakh to the east, where the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is confronting the Indian Army in the Depsang plains. If military collusion between Pakistan and China is to occur, this is the area where it is most likely to happen.

Shaksgam Valley

While Gen Naravane spelt out the Indian Army’s position on the issue, the matter has become far more complicated for national security planners with Pakistan and China proposing a road connecting Yarkand in Sinkiang to Muzaffarabad in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir through Shaksgam Valley, a 5193-square-kilometres territory that Pakistan illegally ceded to China in 1963. The Shaksgam Valley lies in the trans-Karakoram range watershed.

Area maps clearly show that Rimo Glacier, Teram Shehr Glacier and the Siachen Glacier are located within the Indian union territory of Ladakh. The adjoining areas of these glaciers are PLA dominated territories like Shaksgam Valley and Yarkand Valley in the north and PoK in the west in addition to the warlike deployments by the PLA in Aksai Chin opposite Daulat Beg Oldi sector in the east. The PLA has a history of aggressive transgressions into what the Army calls sub-sector north and it is adamant in blocking the Indian Army patrols in Depsang Bulge south of DBO.

The proposed Muzaffarabad-Shaksgam-Yarkand Valley road will not only boost the military interoperability between two iron brothers but also pose a two-front threat to Indian forces in the sub-sector north.

The Indian Army controls the Saltoro Ridge that provides ingress into Siachen Glacier since 1984 post-Operation Meghdoot. Siachen Glacier is located in the eastern Karakoram range, just northeast of NJ 9842, where the Line of Control between India and Pakistan ends.

The military situation in the area is quite precarious with China building all-weather access to Pakistan via Karakoram Pass, just 18 km from DBO plateau, and trying to militarily impose India rejected 1959 line on the LAC in Ladakh.

Historical Background

Siachen is a part of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir (now divided into two Union territories — Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh), which legally acceded to India on October 26-27, 1947 and has since then been its integral part. This was endorsed by every political party in the land, and both Houses of the Indian Parliament passed an unanimous resolution on February 22, 1994 that the State of Jammu and Kashmir has been, is and shall be an integral part of India!

It was in the later years of the 1970s that the India side picked up activities by Pakistan in the Siachen area, such as sponsoring international mountaineering expeditions. This would have implied that Pakistan had jurisdiction over this territory. This was also the time when official US maps began to show the LoC as extending right up to the Karakoram Pass on the India-China boundary, which would, in effect, imply that the Siachen glacier fell under the actual jurisdiction of Pakistan. The Chinese followed suit. As a result, roughly 2,300 sq km of territory in this glacier zone came to be shown as under Pakistani control. In response to this encroachment, the Indian Army launched what came to be known as Operation Meghdoot, in 1984, to occupy the Siachen-Saltoro ridge. Pakistani attempts to dislodge the Indian troops from the heights did not succeed though they did occupy and fortify the lower reaches on their side.

Comments

Brookings scholar Stephen Cohen said: “Siachen is a conflict between two bald men over a comb.” The cost of Siachen expedition over the years has been around 2,150 soldiers killed and 5,000 persons wounded on both sides with an estimated cost of roughly $1 million a day.

Any move to withdraw from our territory will also be a violation of the Constitution by India’s rulers. The reality is, Siachen can’t be a discussion point except for its acceptance and recognition as an integral/inviolable part of India.

In the best of times, India and Pakistan were engaged in what was known as a Composite Dialogue, the agenda for which contained eight items. Siachen and Sir Creek were two issues on which early agreement was possible.

It is true that the AGPL delineation had been a major sticking point in reaching an agreement on Siachen. However, this matter had been resolved between the two sides, first during bilateral defence secretary-level talks in 1992 and then subsequently in foreign secretary-level talks in 2006. These agreements could not be formalised and implemented due to political reasons.

Can Pakistan or China be relied upon for their diplomatic assurances?

It would be militarily prudent for Indian Army to put the demilitarization of Siachen on the back-burner till such time the Chinese PLA agrees to respect the Ladakh LAC and restores April 2020 status quo ante as well as allow India unhindered rights to patrol Depsang Bulge and Charding Nullah Junction (CNJ) in Demchok sector.

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China’s Three Warfares Need to to be Countered

The changing character of war and its emerging dimensions which are often referred to as grey zone, non-contact, cyber, and information warfare, are fueling some serious debates/actions across the world and these aspects are now a part of every country’s war preparedness roadmaps.

War is essentially an offensive operation, waged upon the physical, political or psychological sovereignty of the enemy, through kinetic or non-kinetic means. The idea of warfare, as an art and science both is a constantly evolving domain but the pace of change that we are witnessing now is unprecedented in many ways.

While discussing information warfare, it is a sort of a formal practice to start with China and its popular ‘Three Warfares’ doctrine (an official political and information pre-kinetic warfare strategy of the PLA) published in 2003. But at the same time, we cannot afford to ignore what the former US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis indicated in 2009 when he said: “We need a new Strategic Concept that reconciles war’s grim realities with the human aspirations of our people and the global audience” and “capturing perceptions is the new high ground in today’s conflicts, as the moral is to the material as three is to one.” In 2018, it was under his command, the United States included ‘Information’ as the seventh joint function in its Joint Operations Doctrine (JP 3-0).

India’s National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval often talks about these global trends and shifts when he says that: “Civil society is the new frontier of warfare,” and it is “the common people, their thinking, their perceptions, their sense of well being and their perception of their own governments,” and everything that can impact the “will of the nation,” is under attack, in this new age of information revolution.

In the last few months, what India has witnessed what seems like a climax of information and psychological warfare! For the first time, we saw how a decision (Agriculture Reforms) passed through the democratic process, through elected representatives, was forced to roll back, after a massive misinformation/disinformation campaign against the ‘intent’ of the lawmakers. From money to ‘tool kit’ to support from foreign sources, everything was open done, yet the democratic mechanisms seemed ineffective to tackle that.

For the first time, we are watching Chinese propaganda video/pictures streaming through the social media handle of the leaders of the biggest Opposition party of the county and for the first time, an animated conspiracy to target the prime minister (operated from foreign lands) has flashed openly before our eyes, too. This is, by far, the most alarming phase of ongoing information warfare! And this encourages us to see where the root of the problem lies.

Information as a Weapon

Improvisations to shape, influence, control and manipulate information, in wartime are not new! From the invention of the World Wide Web, several parallel types of research were initiated, in the same bloc, to leverage the potential of information as a weapon, capable of targeting human minds, which once launched, no jammer can ever intercept.

The idea that information itself is not only a ‘potent weapon’ but a ‘lucrative target’ as well, dominated the US military literature/ discussions for decades. Several ideas/ research reports/ doctrines published during that time validate this fact, where the use of models ranging from historical case studies to futuristic scenarios on how information warfare has impacted or will impact the future of conflicts was elaborately explained. One such thesis “Information as a Weapon – Reality versus Promises,” published in 1999, mentioned that: “One characteristic of the US military and its way of war is its fascination with technology and the associated search for the high-tech silver bullet that will allow quick victories with minimal collateral damage.”

Since then the process of the search for ‘high tech silver bullet,’ went through several phases of evolution/ interaction and information exchange, an overview of which is therefore crucial!

Information, Communication, Feedback and Control

The concepts of ‘information’, ‘message’, ‘feedback’ and ‘control’, the foundational block of modern communication innovations, are the products of an in-depth research on the human and his biological, psychological, social, and behavioral aspects. But that research itself was not done under normal circumstances of human discovery, they were all initiated during the phase of Great Wars, either in pre-, middle-, or post-World War I & II period.

In his book ‘Cybernetics,’ Norbert Wiener classified communication and control together and the reason for this he gave was that “when I communicate with another person, I impart a message to him and when he communicates back with me he returns a related message, which contains information primarily accessible to him and not to me,” and “When I control the actions of another person, I communicate a message to him,” and “furthermore, if my control is to be effective I must take cognizance of any messages from him which may indicate that the order is understood and has been obeyed.” Thus, his thesis was that a “society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it.”

By looking at the history and background of present-day information technologies, one can say that the idea of ‘warfare’ is in-built, since its origin, in the very core of these systems, and the possibilities to exploit these capabilities for strategic objectives, were always there!

When an idea is capable of reaching the masses, influencing their perceptions and, in some cases, regulating their consciousness too, confining it to the battlefield, is an impossible task and most certainly a fake claim too!

In a 1997 interview, Dr. Daniel Kuehl, professor of military strategy, School of Information Warfare and Strategy, US National Defense University said, “The computer, telecoms systems, etc, are hardware; the instructions that guide the computer, i.e., Windows 95, is the software; the human brain is the wetware, and it’s the most important element in Information Warfare (IW). Until and unless we get truly intelligence agents and AI, all the hard/ software won’t matter, because the final decision point is the brain – the wetware.”

Here the word ‘wetware’ refers to the new battlefield’s focus area, which is also called the “grey matter” of the brain in which opinions/ perceptions are formed and decisions are made.

9/11- A Turning Point

In many ways, September 2001 attacks gave a major push to US IW efforts. This realization that the time gap between the two aircrafts crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center was wide enough (18 minutes) to allow for live TV coverage of the second crash, cannot be a mere coincidence. It fueled a new debate about asymmetrical warfare, where the speed and reach of information technology can be exploited to attain the core objectives of IW.

It is important here to note that IW, as a concept, is technology independent and its operations can be conducted via any form of media, not just cyberspace. After all, it all started with leaflets dropping campaigns (Airborne leaflet propaganda or letter-bombs), radio broadcast, and printed propaganda in World War I and II.

But what has changed now is that the hallmarks of the information revolution, i.e., transparency, immediacy, reach, scale and element of exactitude that internet technologies provide, have accelerated the impact of Information operations to a different level! As Dr. Daniel Kuehl explained, “The new medium of cyberspace offers a particularly rich environment through which we can reach those elusive targets, the enemy’s will and capability, via the various entryways and connecting points in the information environment, whether they be hardware, software or wetware.”

Post 2010 – Shift From ‘Platforms’ to ‘Cyber’

With a shift from “computer as a platform” (systems and networks) to present day “cyberspace,” technology’s role in measuring, monitoring, predicting and deciding the trends and perceptions, a critical aspect of information warfare, is moving toward a different level.

‘Cyberspace’ made the nations awaken to the reality that information, as an element of power, is the most cost-effective and useful force at all levels. Some believe that the explosion in computers, telecoms and media technology changed the traditional notion of Power itself.

For over a decade, a different kind of proliferation of Information assets is going on and it is not the USA alone, defence experts from China and Russia, studying this new warfare area at a feverish pace as they were also on a similar search for the “perfect weapon” in information warfare, are also participating in it.

Russia

In Russian military doctrine, IW is considered as an integrated whole-of-systems working together that includes, intelligence and counter-intelligence gathering, Maskirovka and disinformation, Electronic Warfare (EW) systems, psychological pressure, etc. Their contemporary research and published works on this subject highlight exploring the Information-psychological component of IW. Information-psychological impact (IPI) is “the informational influence on people’s minds, which alters their perception of the reality, behavioral functions and, in some cases, even the functioning of their inner organs and body systems,” as mentioned in “Modeling the Information-Psychological Impact in Social Networks” research paper, published by some Russian scholars, in 2019. The paper highlights the diffusion process of IPI in social media platforms.

Russia started well, gained some momentum on some points as well but a lack of an overall edge, in the world of the Wide Web, is quite apparent!

Technology suits the psyche of another big player, who traditionally prefers ‘stratagem’ over real war and valor and whose strategists are often quoted as the founding fathers of IW.

China – From ‘Three Warfares’ to ‘Intelligentized Warfare’

In 2003, China revised its “Political Work Guidelines of the People’s Liberation Army,” to include its ‘Three Warfares’ strategy, in which public opinion or use of media, psychological means and legal warfare, kind of ideas were highlighted. There are views that all three dimensions come under China’s larger ‘political warfare’ strategy, which has been in play for quite a long time.

In an opinion article “Why is Congress hiding its MoU with China’s Communists?” published in New Indian Express in August 2020, A. Surya Prakash, former chairperson Prasar Bharati wrote, “The news about the MoU entered into by the Congress party with the Communist Party of China (CCP) in 2008 has now become a matter of concern because of two pertinent reasons. Firstly, the Congress is just not willing to disclose the contents of this MoU with the CCP, which not only controls the Chinese government but runs that country in every sense of the word. Secondly, there is the news about donations received by the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation (RGF) from the Chinese Government.”

From 2008 to 2018, the entire approach to political warfare has undergone a major shift and in this change, technology is a leading factor! Similar kind of psychological blows that mainstream activities and media headlines used to create before is now possible through a mere tweet, post or video circulated live on the Big Tech platforms, and whose response/ reactions data/ analytics are available in a real-time manner. One can say that these self-learning algorithms and their ‘general intelligence’ are the most lethal weapon in this new age of IW!

In recently released US Department of Defense’s annual report on Chinese Military Power, China’s growing focus on developing the next generation warfare capabilities that include the use of more “mechanized, informatized, and intelligentized” systems with the help of specific emerging tech including AI and the use of AI for social media analysis and propaganda are highlighted too.

Post 2017 – Alpha GO’s win

Dr. Kai Fu Lee, the author of the book “AI Superpower”, writes that the AlphaGo’s victory over Chinese Go champion “lit a fire under the Chinese technology community that has been burning ever since.” AlphaGO is a Google DeepMind lab product, that plays the board game Go. In May 2017, in a well-orchestrated and widely covered event, AlphaGo won against Chinese Go champion Ke Jie, in all three rounds.

From 2017, China has accelerated the pace of AI investment and R&D activities on a historic scale. It is interesting to note that in less than two months of Ke Jie’s defeat by AlphaGo, the State Council of China launched the vision “A Next-Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan.” It describes AI as a “strategic technology” that has become a “focus of international competition” and projected that “by 2030 China would become the center of global innovation in artificial intelligence, leading in theory, technology and application.”

With this, a new kind of information warfare race started between the USA and China, in which China appears to be leading. In October 2021, a senior Pentagon official resigned with a warning to his fraternity that “the US could not compete with China on AI.”

Both sides have not just Big Tech and Big Data but Big Ambitions as well and, backed by intelligent systems, their maneouvres can accelerate this new age warfare to a different level.

The Case of Bharat

Now the question is where does Bharat stand on this? And do we have the emerging patterns and changing character of warfare in sight?

In a recently delivered “33rd IB Centenary Endowment Lecture on Redefining Security,” External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, perfectly summarized the need to reimagine the security scenario and approach to protect national interests, due to the reasons he tweeted as:

1. Possibility of unrestricted political warfare involving more capabilities and their greater exercise. Also linkaging of autonomous sectors for political messaging.

2. Growing challenge of borderless politics, played for the benefit of few, in the name of many. Is shaping narratives and perceptions impacting security.

3. Securitizing of the routine through a web of technologies, activities, and instruments, often without user awareness.

4. Factor in surveillance capitalism and enterprises with mega-interests.

And he said: “It is important to be clear-eyed about the world we live in and confident about what we want. Must bear in mind we are an open society. Our values must always come out stronger.”

Clarity about the present and future trends of warfare is very much there in our current system. But we will be able to better analyze the issues when we will see them with a multi-dimensional, open-minded perspective.

Power is a reality and information becoming a new dimension of power is a reality too! At this moment, our focus is more on the Chinese side but we must be cautious about the fact that somewhere our incapability to not see the full picture can itself be a part of the strategic calculations of others.

We live in a complex world, where the nature of alliance/ partnership is becoming more and more ad-hoc, open-minded and issue-based. When analyzing the information warfare scenarios, we must have to adopt an eyesight that views all players, be it the USA, Russia, China, France, Germany, UK or any other active participant of global politics, on the same level.

In Arthashastra, Kautilya says: “of the three acquirements – enthusiasm, power and skill for intrigue, he who possesses more of the quality mentioned later than the one mentioned first (in the order of enumeration) will be successful in over-reaching others.”

To craft the strategy in this new warfare, the more we will look inward, the better we will perform.

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“The Science of Military Strategy” released in 2013 by the Academy of Military Sciences was the third edition of the text, following previous versions in 1987 and 2001. A full-English translation of the 276-page Chinese document, which was first released a year into Xi Jinping’s tenure in October 2013, was published, on 8 February 2021, by the United States-based China Aerospace Studies Institute at Air University, based at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.

Here are the extracts related to India’s Military Strategy.

“India is a regional power in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, and is also an emerging major country that is in the midst of arising, and so its international status is improving every day. Understanding and analyzing trends in its military strategy have an important significance for understanding and grasping the world and regional strategic setup, and even its security situation.

“From India’s independence in 1947 to the end of the Cold War, India’s military strategy largely underwent three stages of development.

“The first stage was a period of limited offensive strategy (from India’s independence to the beginning of the 1960s). At the start of Indian independence, its domestic economy was backward and its military power was weak; externally, it formed a confrontation with Pakistan, and it also faced an intense competition between the United States and the Soviet Union as they struggled to dominate the South Asian region. Under these circumstances, the [Jawaharlal] Nehru government adopted a policy of “non-alliance” with the outside, it dealt with both the U.S. and the Soviet blocs, while internally, it adopted a policy of “first the economy and then national defense;” it struggled for time, it developed the economy, it deepened and accumulated national power, and it strove to achieve the strategic goals of preserving India, developing India, and strengthening India. Militarily, it promoted a strategy of “limited offense,” viewed Pakistan as its most direct threat, put its strategic focus on the west, and continually improved its deployment for operations against Pakistan. At the same time, India intensified its military penetration into areas that it had yet to occupy south of the McMahon Line, in order to achieve the goals of territorial expansion and long-term control over contested areas along the Sino- Indian border; by 1958 it had seized a large area of Chinese territory north of the traditional and customary lines south of the McMahon Line, and had established the socalled “Himalayan security system” in India’s north, aimed at China.

The second stage was the period of a strategy of “expansion on two fronts” (the 1960s to the early 1970s). [India’s] defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian border conflict had a major impact on India’s military strategy. India reevaluated its security environment, rethought its military policies, and summarized its experiences and lessons.

“First, it gave priority to military buildup; starting in 1964, it implemented its first five-year plan for national defense, spending 50 billion rupees, and expanding its armaments on a large scale.

“Second, given the situation that it was difficult for [India’s] national power to contend with China, it adopted an in-depth defense program against the PRC for a given period of time.

“Third, it actively prepared for operations against Pakistan in the west and against the PRC in the north. In the late 1960s, India received a great deal of aid from the United States, and it formed a de facto alliance with the Soviet Union; in addition to this, its domestic economic situation improved somewhat, there was some strengthening of its overall national power, its military expansionist thinking accordingly looked up, and it adopted a strategy of “expansion on two fronts” where it had China and Pakistan as simultaneous targets of major operations and prepared for simultaneous operations along both the western and northern battle lines. It adopted a program of “attack to the west and defend to the north,” where the western front would be primarily for offense and the northern front would be primarily for defense, and it directly aimed the spearhead of its expansion toward the western border, in an effort to weaken Pakistan strategically. In November 1971, India launched a large-scale assault against Pakistan, in order to dismember Pakistan at one blow.

“The third stage was the period of a strategy of “maintain the land and control the sea” (1970s to the late 1980s). After the third India-Pakistan War, the setup where India dominated South Asia basically took shape. US-Indian relations and Sino-Indian relations, which had been tense for a time, tended to ameliorate; the United Kingdom withdrew its troops from the Indian Ocean because of a lack of financial and military strength; the Soviet Union gradually reduced its interference in the South Asian region after the mid-1980s; and this resulted in a major change in the South Asian strategic situation that benefited India and provided strategic opportunity and conditions for it to expand into the Indian Ocean region. Under these conditions, based on [the fact that] India’s strategic intentions on land had fundamentally been achieved, it gradually shifted the focus of its strategy from the South Asian subcontinent to the Indian Ocean, it proposed the military strategic idea of “maintain the land and control the sea,” and it comprehensively sought superiority at sea over the northern Indian Ocean.

“After the end of the Cold War, there was a major adjustment to India’s military strategy, where it shifted from a strategy of “regional offense” to a strategy of “regional deterrence.” India believed that the traditional concept of war in the Cold War period, where you annihilated the enemy country’s military strengths, plundered its territory, and conquered its will through warfare, was no longer suitable to the international strategic setup and the South Asian subcontinent situation, which had developed and changed, and that it should “put its stress on emphasizing the role of deterrence and not emphasize conquest and occupation of territory.” Based on this idea, India began in the early 1990s to execute the military strategy of “regional deterrence.” What was called the “region” included a broad scope that started with the Himalayan range in the north and went south to the Indian Ocean, and started in the west with Iran and went east to Burma. What was called “deterrence” was based on making worst-case preparations for major fighting, using powerful military strengths as a backup, and carrying out shock and awe that had effective military force against various targets of operations, including deterrence at sea and nuclear deterrence. Throughout the entire 1990s, the core of India’s strategy of “regional deterrence” was “denial” {juzhi}, and it emphasized maintaining absolute military superiority over the countries within the South Asian subcontinent, deterring these from engaging in military adventures that would threaten India, and achieving such goals as ensuring the security of the nation’s seacoasts and territorial waters and preventing major countries from infiltrating [the subcontinent].

“Upon entering the 21st century, as India’s economy quickly developed and its overall national power continually strengthened, its economic and military power exceeded the sum total of the various other countries in South Asia, and the other South Asian countries in actuality had no power to pose a major threat against India. India believed that the possibility of a large-scale total war breaking out between Pakistan and India in the future because of border disputes was small; it was more likely that there would be small- and medium-scale limited and conventional wars on the border. At the same time, the threats of terrorism, splittism, and transnational organized crime were increasing daily, and non-traditional security threats and traditional security threats were similarly serious and interwoven. Therefore, the Indian military gave the strategy of “regional deterrence” new details, and transformed the passive defense-type thinking of “denial deterrence” into a preemptive strike-type idea of “disciplinary deterrence;” it emphasized taking the initiative to attack, acting before the enemy does, and doing its best to win a high-tech “limited conventional war” under conditions of nuclear deterrence. The main details included [the following]. As regards strategic targets, it stressed having military matters subordinate to political ones; not seeking to threaten the existence of an enemy country; and influencing or impelling an enemy country to modify its anti-Indian policies through the flexible use of military means in a restrained way, while at the same time, it itself was prepared to make necessary compromises in exchange for the enemy’s concessions. As regards preparations for war, it shifted from being prepared to fight a total war, as in the past, to being based on fighting a high-tech limited conventional war under conditions of nuclear deterrence. As regards strategic guidance, it discarded the passive defensive concept of “waiting for the enemy to arrive within [India’s] borders and then getting rid of him” and adopted a guiding program of actively taking the initiative and of preemptive strikes, blocking the enemy in advance from large-scale attacks, so that the war would be waged on the enemy’s territory, forcing the opponent to be trapped on the defensive and in an opportune situation. As regards guidance of operations, there was a stress on joint operations by the three services, and an emphasis on “seamlessly mobilizing all resources in attacking, routing, and defeating the enemy,” and “concentrating all operational strengths for use at a single decisive point, and thus producing maximum effect.” As regards guidance of deterrence, it emphasized the use of both nuclear and conventional deterrence, using nuclear deterrence to ensure that India basically avoided invasions in war, that it was effective in keeping opponents from using nuclear weapons against India, that it limited warfare to the scope of a limited conventional war, that it developed reliable and powerful conventional means of deterrence, that it formed deterrent strengths at multiple levels, and that it used conventional military forces as the “spearhead” of the attack, that it used nuclear strengths as the “shield” of defense, and that it strengthened the flexibility and selectivity of military deterrence.

“Taking an overall look at developments in India’s military strategy since independence, it is possible to see four interrelated basic characteristics.

“First is a strong geopolitical nature. Since the day of its independence, India has determined its national interests through geopolitical thought, to plan its national security and draft military strategy. It has stressed that India is the heart of Asia and that the Indian Ocean is India’s ocean, it has treated the South Asian subcontinent as its sphere of influence, and it has regarded some neighboring countries as the main obstacles blocking it from achieving its geopolitical interests. India’s military strategy has treated protecting its geopolitical interests and eliminating geopolitical obstacles as its starting point and end point. After the end of the Cold War, the international security environment underwent major changes, but India still treated geopolitics as a basic factor that was the source for considering and designing military strategy, and it still determined the direction of its strategy, the means of its strategy, and the targets of its operations from the angle of a geostrategic competition, as it attempted to build the South Asian subcontinent into a strategic foundation with itself as the center, and to thus manage and control the Indian Ocean.

“Second is that it has comprehensively carried on with what it has inherited. After India’s independence, at the same time that [India] received intact the United Kingdom’s colonial political borders, it fully carried on with the United Kingdom’s imperial expansionist military strategic thought; the most important part of this was the idea of socalled “Indocentrism.” The core of this was to treat Kashmir, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and Assam as “the internal lines of India’s defense;” to incorporate Tibet into its sphere of influence as a “buffer state;” and to treat the illegally concocted McMahon Line and the Johnson-Ardagh Line as its “security inner ring.” Nehru viewed the South Asian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean as a “security ring,” and pursued a regional security policy that had India as its main body. In addition, India also absorbed local traditional ideas of strategy. For example, it treated peripheral countries as its main opponents to be guarded against and as the targets of its operations; it was deeply affected by the traditional ideas of its historically famous strategist Chanakya, “that treated neighbors as enemies and that dealt with those who were far away and attacked those who were near,” and the “law of fish.”

“Third is limited offensives. India has proposed the national strategic objectives of “dominating South Asia, controlling the Indian Ocean, and striving to be a first-rate power in the world;” this inevitably has determined that its military strategy will have a fairly strong offensive tint. Although India insists that it pursues a “defensive” strategy, a series of military actions that it took after its independence , including three India- Pakistan wars and its armed annexation of the kingdom of Sikkim, its instigation of the Sino-Indian border conflict, and its sending troops to Sri Lanka have all fully proven that its strategy has a distinctly offensive nature. In recent years, with the rapid rise of India’s national power and military power, this offensive nature has been increasing. At the same time, because its national power and military power are limited by not being strong enough yet, the offensive nature of this strategy is restricted to the South Asian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean situation, and it temporarily has no way to fully prevent major countries outside this region from infiltrating and controlling the South Asian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean. As regards its strategy against the PRC, India has adopted a defensive posture overall, but at the same time has also used offense as a defense to actively seek local superiority, and has also used its unremitting nibbling away in peacetime to create conditions for switching from defense to offense in wartime.

“Fourth is deterrence in all directions. In order to resolve the contradiction between its ambition for dominance and its limited national power and military strength, India has proposed carrying out deterrence in all directions in various spheres. After the end of the Cold War, India strengthened its relations with such great powers as the United States and Japan, adjusted its previous emphasis on actual war to an emphasis on deterrence, and has emphasized carrying out deterrence that differed in nature against differing targets and along differing strategic directions. In regard to China, it has carried out “dissuasive” deterrence, to deter China from using troops against India, and has restrained China from entering its sphere of influence. In regard to the small countries along the South Asian periphery, it has carried out “punitive” deterrence, to ensure that they do not dare go against India’s interests and to force them to humbly heed India’s control. In regards to the United States, China, and India, it carries out “nuclear symmetry” deterrence; its nuclear strategic concept is to “discourage” the United States, “deter” China, and “deal with” Pakistan. Of these, “deterring” China is its focus, because it thinks that only by “deterring” China will it be able to “deal with” Pakistan and have the possibility of “discouraging” the United States.

“As India’s consciousness [of itself] as a great power grows stronger and as its overall national power and military strength continually grow, clues to the future developmental trends of its military strategy will gradually be revealed. The orientation of India’s strategic objectives may advance from regional dominance toward global participation, its strategic guidance will put more emphasis on active offense, its strategic deployments will be reflected more in its intentions to control the South Asian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean, and it will give more stress to paying attention to both the land and the sea, and to stabilizing the western front, strengthening the northern front, advancing to the east and expanding to the south, and to developing toward the sea; its forms of operations will pay more attention to joint air-land operations, mobile operations, and information warfare by the various services and service arms; the building of its military strengths will change from being inward toward being outward “trans-border operational strengths;” and it will vigorously develop a new type of system of operations that will have as their backbone aircraft carriers, fourth-generation fighters, nuclear submarines, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles as well as anti-missile systems and outer space military systems.”

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In 2018, the then Pakistan prime minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi had said that his country had developed short-range nuclear weapons to counter the ‘Cold Start’ doctrine of the Indian Army. Nuclear War in South Asia is a real possibility, warned the Pakistan’s national security adviser (NSA), Lt Gen (retired) Nasser Khan Janjua in 2018. India has been stockpiling a range of dangerous weapons and threatens Pakistan continuously with conventional warfare, he added. The then Indian Air Force (IAF) Chief, Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa said “the IAF has the capability of locating and striking nuclear and other targets in Pakistan. We have a draft nuclear doctrine. It is answered in that – what happens when the enemy decides to use nuclear weapons on us. As far as IAF is concerned, it has the ability to locate, fix and strike and that is not only for tactical nuclear weapons but for other targets across the border (as well).”

Global Realities

Today there are eight overt nuclear powers, USA, Russia, UK, France, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea; one covert (Israel), one nuclear aspirant (Iran). Saudi Arabia has stated that they will go nuclear if Iran acquires. There is a  risk that middleweight militaries and non-state actors may muster nuclear devices. Mary Robinson, wrote in The Elders, on December 2019, “The risk of a nuclear war is higher than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Nuclear weapons  and the climate emergency are the two existential threats facing humanity today”.

The multi-polar world is watching efforts to deter N Korea and Iran, and that will decide the future of Nuclear Non-Proliferation. World is ill prepared for rise of nuclear aspirants and opaque or non-existent nuclear doctrines of those countries. 

Indian Nuclear Scenario

India has declared a policy of ‘No First Use’ (NFU) of nuclear weapons but India will react with a massive retaliation in case attacked. China also has a NFU policy. Sitakanta Mishra wrote in “Pakistan’s Nuclear Threshold: Not as Low as Perceived”, that though the exact contours of Pakistan’s nuclear threshold were unclear, Khalid Kidwai, the former head of Strategic Planning Division (SPD), in 2001 delineated four generic ‘redlines’: spatial threshold (loss of large parts of territory), military threshold (destruction of large parts of land or air forces), economic threshold (economic strangulation), and political threshold (political destabilization or large scale internal subversion).

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In 2002 then president Pervez Musharraf stated that “nuclear weapons are aimed solely at India,” and would only be used if “the very existence of Pakistan as a state is threatened”. With this background, India does not envisage a nuclear war with China. In any case China does have conventional military superiority and there is unlikely to be a situation when it threatens India with nuclear weapons, and invite a massive retaliation. The threat of a nuclear attack, therefore, is only from Pakistan.

The first scenario is that Pakistan launches a full-fledged nuclear attack, and India is forced to respond with massive retaliatory nuclear strike. The second scenario is that Pakistan attacks India with Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNW). As per India’s declared policy, it is expected to respond with a massive retaliatory nuclear strike. Both these scenarios will mean assured mutual destruction. The third scenario is that Pakistan attacks with TNWs but Indian political leadership dithers in decision making or inordinately delays response under international pressures. In such a case Indian Armed Forces will have to continue conventional offensive under NBC environment.

Indo-Pak Nuclear Dynamics

Both India and Pakistan are overt nuclear weapon powers since 1998, with each having around 100-150 nuclear warheads. Pakistani establishment routinely makes loose statements telling the world of high risk of nuclear war in the South Asian region, and indirectly indicating to India that it will respond with a nuclear attack if it was threatened beyond a point. India has to, therefore, remain prepared for a possible nuclear strike. Since Pakistan’s implied threat of nuclear response and its threshold is somewhat vague, there is a significant space for conventional offensive operations. Uri surgical strike and Balakot air strikes prove the point. A scenario of “repeated alerts and false alarms” is likely to prevail in the Indo-Pak context, particularly till confidence building and risk reduction measures are firmly in place.

Pakistani Nuclear Capability

Pakistan started its nuclear programme in 1972 just after the 1971 Indo-Pak war dismembered it and Bangladesh was liberated. The first nuclear weapon test was carried out in May 1998. Pakistan is estimated to have a stockpile of 130 warheads. The maximum missile range currently (Shaheen-III) is 2750 km. That will cover most of India. People’s Republic of China   (PRC) has allegedly transferred missile and related materials to Pakistan. North Korea had been secretly supplying Pakistan with ballistic missile technology in exchange for nuclear weapons technology. Pakistan’s low-yield weapons can be carried on fighter-bombers and on short-range ballistic missiles Shaheen and Gauri. They have built Soviet-style road-mobile missiles and air defences around strategic sites, with other concealment measures. Pakistan also possesses nuclear tipped Babur cruise missiles with range up to 700 km, extendable to 1,000 km. The Hatf-IX (Nasr) is a battlefield TNW with range up to 70 km. PAF has two dedicated squadrons of the JF-17 Thunder, now believed to be the preferred vehicle for delivery of nuclear weapons. One squadron of F-16s is capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The French Mirage-III are also upgraded to carry a new air launch cruise missile. Pakistan is developing a sea-based variant of the Hatf-VIII Babur nuclear cruise missile. Pakistan has pushed a proposal to build its own nuclear submarines.

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Pakistan refuses to adopt NFU indicating that it would strike India with nuclear weapons even if India did not use such weapons first. Pakistan’s asymmetric nuclear posture has significant influence on India’s decision and ability to retaliate, as seen in 2001 (Indian Parliament) and 2008 (Mumbai) deadly attacks on Indian soil. Pakistan’s motive for pursuing a nuclear weapons development programme is to prevent another invasion of Pakistan. Pakistan is not a signatory to the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). While the world has been worried about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons passing on to rouge states or even terrorists, Pakistan has repeatedly claimed that their weapons are most secure. Unlike rest of the world where the nukes are controlled by civilian heads of government, in Pakistan the nuclear button is reportedly with the Army.

Indian Nuclear Capability and Response

India launched its nuclear programme in 1967 just after China exploded a nuclear device in 1964. India carried out the first nuclear explosion in 1974 and its first nuclear weapons test in May 1998. India is reportedly having a stockpile of around 110 nuclear warheads. The maximum operational ballistic missile range (of Agni V) is 5,800 km. This covers all of China. India was estimated to have 800 kg of separated reactor-grade plutonium with a total amount of 8,300 kg of civilian plutonium, enough for approximately 1,000 nuclear weapons. Supersonic BrahMos cruise missile with nuclear warhead 300kg and range 450 km, and Nirbhay long range cruise missile with 1500 kg warhead and 1000 km range are also part of the arsenal. India is a member of the Missile Technology Control Regime, Wassenaar Arrangement and Australia Group. India has signed neither the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty nor the NPT. India maintains NFU nuclear policy and has a nuclear triad capability as a part of its ‘Minimum Credible Deterrence’. India’s Strategic Forces Command (SFC) was established in 2003 and is the joint Services custodian of all of India’s nuclear weapons, missiles and assets. However, the political leadership, in the form of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) is the only body authorized to order a nuclear strike.

Agni-VI and Surya missiles, under development, will have range going up to 16,000 km. Dhanush (350 km) Sagarika (700 km) and K-4 (3500 km) are the three naval missiles. Nuclear-armed fighter-bombers, land-based nuclear weapons, coupled with nuclear powered submarines, including indigenous submarines, make a formidable capability.

Indian Air Defence Strategy

To the defender, for identifying a nuclear vis-a-vis conventional missile or aircraft strike there is little difference. In case of such high level vagueness, India will have no choice but to presume every incoming raid as a nuclear attack. The threat to intercept includes subsonic low-flying tactical cruise missiles and aircraft and fast moving long-trajectory ballistic missiles. The air defence aircraft with IAF have air-to-air missiles (AAM) and the surface-to-air missiles (SAM) with IAF and Army will be used to intercept as many incoming projectiles as possible. Credible SAM capability with SPYDER and Akash, among others, exists. Later, S-400 Triumf will join the fleet.

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The Indian Ballistic Missile Defence Programme (IBMDP)  is an initiative to develop and deploy a multi-layered ballistic missile defence system against a ballistic missile attack. The two-tiered system is planned to intercept any incoming missile launched from 5,000 kilometers away. Prithvi Air Defence (PAD) missile is for high altitude interception, and the Advanced Air Defence (AAD) Missile for lower altitude interception. It includes the Long Range Tracking Radar, and 3D Multi Function Control Radar.

On 27 March 2019, India tested an anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon during an operation code named Mission Shakti. The target of the test was a satellite present in a low Earth orbit (LEO), which was hit with a kinetic kill vehicle. The ASAT test utilized a modified anti-ballistic missile interceptor, Prithvi Defence Vehicle Mark-II, which was developed under Project XSV-1. The test made India the fourth country after the US, Russia and China  to have tested an ASAT weapon. This capability further reinforces the Air Defence capability against a nuclear ballistic missile. Strong passive air defence measures, including against NBC threat need to be regularly rehearsed.

Pakistan’s Nuclear Approach

Pakistan hopes that a limited nuclear strike offers a quick tactical victory through speed and penetration against critical targets. It may use Hatf IX (Nasr) which is a solid fuel, low-yield, sub-sonic surface-to-surface, tactical missile with 100 km range, 500 Kg warhead. It is normally used like an artillery system, with 5-6 missiles fired simultaneously at the target area. Pakistan hopes/intends that quick strike could induce delays in Indian decision-making cycle.

Military Operational Considerations in NBC Environment

If the Indian armed forces are forced into continued conventional operations because the political executive dithers or delays decision for a nuclear response then it must ensure to keep critical elements intact to carry on an offensive under NBC environment. Mass for mass, nuclear detonation is a  millions times more powerful and results in blast, fire, and radiation. Free electrons emitted affect radio waves, especially at lower frequencies of Radar, VHF and UHF. Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) generates high voltages that can destroy unshielded electronics. Military needs to war-game actions under EMP effects. Forces need to repeatedly revisit nuclear operational doctrine and need to educate nuclear operators and decision makers.

Indian Nuclear Response Preparation

Peacetime capability building and demonstration contributes to deterrence. Early warning and attack assessment needs network of radars, other sensors and processing stations. A fail-safe communication system must link the surveillance, early warning, command and control systems with the nuclear forces (C4SR). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already helping strategic decision making. Ability of Indian military elements to absorb enemy first strike through dispersion and redundancy and remain operationally efficient is critical. Survival of decision makers and other support services through active and passive means is important. There is a need to provide air defence to all these elements, critically the national capital.

All resources for nuclear mission must be earmarked, disbursed and secured. Integrated satellite, aerial and ground-based surveillance system to gather data for ‘targeting’ must be in place. Adequate processing facilities for rapid retargeting based on event templates, current intelligence & higher inputs. All nuclear warheads must be pre-positioned and ready to be armed. There should be a clear plan to kill enemy second strike ability by targeting higher direction centres, and simultaneous deep operations to disrupt enemy’s preparation and movement.

Ground Offensive Under Nuclear Overhang

A tactical nuclear weapon can threaten employment of mass formations and forward fixed operating bases. Field Commanders may be forced to ensure dispersal, survivability, and force protection. Isolation of units, mass casualties, and loss of C2 capabilities will necessitate semi-independent operations and decentralized control. This may add functional stress. A tactical nuclear weapon can alter terrain and create obstacles such as fallen trees, fires, craters, rubble, and radiation. Creation of obstacles will deny terrain and slow the counterattacks. The striking force may have to cross areas contaminated by fallout and initial radiation. Army may have to replace units in case of tactical nuclear attack in TBA. In a nuclear environment decisive battles must be greatly compressed and campaigns accelerated.

IAF would support Indian Army’s offensive and defensive operations by creating air superiority in TBA and providing an air umbrella to surface strike forces. It would undertake interdiction missions. Fixed wing and rotary wing will provide logistic/ replenishment support and also mass casualty/ medical evacuation in case of nuclear attack. IAF will also support nuclear disaster relief operations at national and tactical level by moving disaster management teams, NBC equipments and medical supplies. It will also set up ‘Rapid Air Mobile’ hospitals.

Calling the Pakistani Nuclear Bluff

Deterrence is a product of a nation’s military capabilities and willingness to use them. Indian policy is to terminate conflict at the lowest possible level of violence. Nuclear deterrence also requires air superiority, space superiority, cyberspace superiority, global precision attack, rapid global mobility, global integrated intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and command & control.

Escalation control is essential. It involves conveying to the enemy that, although we are capable of escalating to a higher level, we have deliberately held back. Escalation can be controlled by tight limits on the area of employment and timing and duration of employment be kept short. A channel of communication with the adversary must remain available to permit negotiations for escalation control and conflict termination. Critical thing is the turnaround time for the decision to launch a nuclear counter-strike. The final decision on use of nuclear weapons has to be made by the leader (prime minister), based on political and military advice, especially when you are going to act only in retaliation.

Pakistan has been routinely reminding the world about the escalated risk of a military show-down in South Asia. It is often geo-political brinkmanship to extract American  sympathy and military aid. Pakistani Generals would never dare to risk their own and their future generations through a nuclear attack. Pakistani reaction to shooting down of Atlantique aircraft, its response to heavy casualties in Kargil and its response to Uri and Balakot strikes were all very mute. India must, therefore, remain aggressive in its conventional operations and intelligently manage escalation. It is time to call Pakistan’s nuclear bluff.

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Operational Matters

Gen Naravane need not spend too much time on integration with the Air Force and Navy, seeking increase in budgetary allocations, joint doctrines, employment of strategic forces, space, cyber, information warfare and so on, except insofar as it concerns the Army alone. Luckily, Gen Bipin Rawat, having just side-stepped from the Army chief’s office into the CDS’s, is well aware of the Army’s requirements. The new Army chief will, of course, have to take forward the changes initiated by Gen Rawat, when it comes to Integrated Battle Groups, restructuring of the Army HQ, manpower, and so on.

Army Restructuring

The restructuring of the Army HQ in New Delhi, initiated by Gen Biopin Rawat, is in progress. It is the beginning of the first full-cadre review of the Army in over 30 years. Keeping in sight the emerging security matrix and the abiding challenge of sprucing up the force and equipping it with cutting-edge armoury and equipment on a budget, this is a part of changes that must be executed to achieve the objectives of a competitive force.

The restructuring of Army HQ to gear it up towards capability-based modernisation needs, would synergise and coalesce all revenue and capital spending under one organisation and effectively prioritise competing requirements with an operational focus to get better value for funds allocated by the government.

Under the restructuring approved now called Reorganisation of the Army Headquarters, two weapons and systems procurement branches will be merged and a new post of Deputy Chief of Army Staff created to coordinate with military intelligence, operations and logistics wings.

At present, there are an estimated 950 to 1,000 officers posted at the Army HQ. The officers who will be weaned off the HQ will be available to the formations and units. As many as 229 officers from the headquarters will be “optimised and relocated to units and formations of the filed armies”. Ninety per cent of these officers are from the ranks of Colonel and below.

Strategy & Operations. The new Deputy Chief of Army Staff (Strategy) will oversee strategy and operations, intelligence collation, conduct of operations and the movement of logistics. At present, the DG (Military Operations) and the DG (Military Intelligence) report to the Army Chief or Vice-Chief. The new DG (IW) will have the erstwhile ADGs (Public Information) and Information Warfare (IW) wings under him to counter social media propaganda and hybrid warfare.

Information Warfare. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has also okayed the creation of a consolidated information warfare wing that will subsume two existing wings under the DGMI and the DGMO. The Information Warfare branch will be headed by the Lieutenant General rank officer and will come under another newly created appointment- Deputy Chief of Army Staff (Strategy).The new DG IW (Director General Information Warfare) will have under him the erstwhile ADGs PI (Public Information) and IW (Information Warfare) to meet needs of the future battlefield, hybrid warfare and social media reality.

The ADGPI branch deals with media projection and has a social media wing, which is likely to remain untouched. The existing Information Warfare branch operates under the Military Operations directorate. Separately, a cyber unit will also be placed under the DG IW.

Military Training. The third major reform is that the Army’s Training Command based in Shimla will now be sole adviser to the Army Chief on all training matters. The Military Training Directorate in Delhi is being merged into the Army Training Command (ARTRAC) in Shimla.

Capability & Sustenance. Also, the restructuring will merge the Master General Ordnance (MGO), who is currently under the Vice-Chief, and the DG (Weapons and Equipment) under a single vertical with the Deputy Chief of Army Staff (Planning and Strategy), which will be renamed Capability and Sustenance. Now all acquisitions of the Army will be handled by a new office under the Director-General (Capability Development). The revenue budget will be handled by DG (Sustenance).

Vigilance & Human Rights. New wings for vigilance and human rights issues will be set up under major-generals. The ADG (vigilance) wing will have officers drawn from the three services for an objective and impartial approach and will report directly to the army chief. The ADG (human rights) branch will have a police officer on deputation, he said. The ADG (human rights) will report to the director general of military operations.

Countering Pak-sponsored Terrorism

Gen Naravane inherits the threat posed by Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and its asymmetric warfare offensive against India, which began some 30 years ago in the Punjab in the 1980s. Since then Pakistan has shifted its proxy war to Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), although we have seen some sparks again in Punjab through its support to Khalistanis and the use of drones to drop arms, ammunition and equipment to the separatists there. Yet, it is an existential threat in Punjab.

In Jammu & Kashmir (J&K), the Abrogation of Article 370 on 5 August 2019, and the subsequent steps taken to prevent large scale disturbances have brought down violence in the state, but the reorganization has brought in its own internal and external challenges, which are yet to show up in full. The political initiative, which was long overdue and which the Army had always been asking for, has yet to run its full course – until the elections are held in the state, as promised by the central government.

Pakistan’s deep state – the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the military – is somewhat subdued at present, partly due to the pressure being asserted by the Unites States and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to force Pakistan to take action against declared terrorists, money laundering and to conform to international financial transaction standards. It has not helped Pakistan that its all-weather ally, China, has not done sufficiently enough to come to its help despite trying to raise the J&K issue in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and its chairmanship of the FATF. In fact, China has tried but Indian diplomacy has successfully thwarted all attempts by China to rake up the issue.

Troops levels are being reduced in J&K, casualty figures show a downward trend but cease fire violations on the Line of Control show an upward trend. The upper hand and the moral ascendency over Pakistan in the proxy war must be maintained. That would be Gen Naravane’s principal operational task.

One way which has been tried and tested in the last two years is to retaliate every time there is a serious breach by Pakistan and raise costs and consequences for it in all manner possible without crossing the threshold. That threshold is now being pushed further and further as the deep aerial strike of 26 February 2019 at Balakot, in response to the Pulwama attack that killed 45 CRPF soldiers, showed. It is no one’s guess that the surgical strike 1.0 carried out on 29 September  2016 after the Uri attack was not the last one that the country has seen. The time to remain defensive, confined to consequence management in our own territory, which was the norm for 30 years, has now passed. As a corollary, one must say that creating the military capacity for punitive action is a sine qua non if Pakistani terror is not to continue unabated.

Maoist Menace

The police and home ministry have been claiming great success in containing the Maoists and reducing their influence. The unfortunate fact, however, is that each year in Apr-May they launch an annual tactical counter-offensive and inflict heavy losses on the police and Central Police Organisations (CPOs) and loot weapons. Their strike power is intact and we have not been able to penetrate the dense jungles of Dantewada to destroy the armed Maoist groups in that sanctuary. The number of armed Maoist battalions has gone up from 3 to 21 in this forest redoubt. This is most dangerous and we cannot lull ourselves into complacency.

Conventional Capacity Building

Balakot was a great morale booster but it also pointed out glaring shortcomings in our national security architecture. We need to get our act together for urgently needed arms acquisition. The process is dangerously dysfunctional and mired in so much red tape that it is becoming impossible to execute major arms acquisition programmes in any reasonable time frame.

With the CDS in place with the express mandate to coordinate and prioritise acquisitions, there should be some improvement, but one cannot shy away from the fact that within the Army, too, refining and deciding upon requirements is a time-consuming process. There are external factors, which are beyond the COAS’ control, like the planning and budgeting process itself, complicated defence procurement procedure (DPP), multi-layered sanctions and approvals, repeated cancellation of tenders, long trial periods and so on. But even government-to-government deals and procurement under fast-track procedures have always overshot the laid down timelines.

The Indian Army is the 2nd largest armed force at 1.3 million behind the Chinese Army. In the Global Fire Power Index, which is arrived at by considering 55 indices, Indian Armed Forces rank 4th. India ranks a poor 25th in terms of Armoured Fighting Vehicles (AFV), which include Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFV); and 26th in terms of Self-Propelled (SP) Artillery.

It would have been a different matter if India were an arms exporter but it ranks nowhere in the first ten. In fact, India was the world’s second-largest arms importer during 2014-18, accounting for 9.5% of the global total, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) which released its report released on 11 March 2019.

In terms of defence expenditure, China spends five times more than India, with its Defence Budget pegged at $250 bn (1,9% of GDP) for 2018, while India’s Defence Budget for 2018-19 was $51 bn (1.63% of GDP).

A large quantity of the Indian Army’s equipment is of foreign origin, notably Russian and much of it requires replacement or upgrade. Among them are T-72 tanks, T-90 tanks, BMP-2, Zsu-23-2, Zsu-23-4, Kvadrat air defence system, OSA-AK air defence system, Dragunov sniper rifles and so on.

Weapon Systems and Platforms

Mechanised Forces. The mechanised forces are equipped with Russian T-72 tanks, assembled in India, many of which have undergone upgrades but are nevertheless in need of replacement with a ‘Future Ready Combat Vehicle’ (FRCV) or future main battle tank (MBT) – ultimately 2400 to be precise. The Army will in time add 464 T-90MS standard tanks in due course after negotiating a licence to make them in India. That will bring the T-90 tanks to a fleet strength of 1000. The target is 1600.

All 1770 BMP-2 IFVs require to be replaced by modern IFVs. The search for a Future Infantry Combat Vehicle (FICV) started in 2010. The Expression of Interest (EoI) was issued for the third time in November 2017 after two failed attempts. When it does come, it might be a world-class tank but whether the Army will embrace it, cannot be certain.

Anti-Tank Guided Missiles. The Russian Konkurs and French Milan anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) are widely used and the Army has been waiting for many years for DRDO to finalise the development of the Nag ATGM. While the project is delayed, the government appears ready to approve the procurement of limited numbers of Israel Rafael’s Spike ATGM.

Ammunition. The CAG had pointed out in 2017 that “Out of a total of 152 types of ammunition, the stock of 121 types of ammunition (80%) was below the authorization level of 10 days intense fighting. And availability of 55 per cent types of ammunition was below the minimum inescapable requirement to be maintained for operational preparedness and 40 per cent types of ammunitions were critical level having stock of less than 10 days,” The situation has since improved after fast-track purchases, but it is still alarming. What has emerged is that the Ordnance Factories are unable to meet the requirements of the armed forces as indented from time to time.

Artillery. 10 K-9 Vajra 155mm tracked self-propelled (SP) guns, made under licence by L&T Defence in India, were inducted on 9 November 2018.The entire process of inducting 100 K9 Vajra at a cost of Rs 4,366 crore will be completed by November 2020.

The Ordnance Factory Board’s (OFB) 155mm/45 calibre Dhanush gun, developed from the designs transferred by Bofors in 1980 to OFB, as part of transfer of technology (ToT) of the FH-77 155mm Bofors howitzer has been successfully inducted into the Army on 8 April 2019. The OFB will make 114 guns.

The Advanced Towed Artillery Gun System (ATAGS), developed both by Bharat Forge and Tata Defence& Aerospace, separately, based on DRDO designs has also passed muster and is undergoing final user trials. The MoD had sanctioned the ATAGS project in September 2012. A prototype was part of the Republic Day parade in 2017.

The BAE System’s M777 155mm ultra-light howitzer (ULH) was also inducted into service in November 2018. 145 pieces will be supplied.

An improved longer range Pinaka rocket for the multi-barrel rocket launcher (MBRL) has been developed by DRDO. The Artillery also wants an indigenous Smerch-type long-range MBRL to be produced in India.

Air Defence. The Russian Igla-S has been selected as the very short-range air defence (VSHORAD) system weapon of choice through a contest between but the contract is yet to be finalised.

Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL), Bharat Dynamics Ltd (BDL) and DRDO have completed trials of the quick reaction Surface-to-air missile (QRSAM).

Akash Weapon System (AWS) has been developed as a short-range surface-to-air missile (SRSAM) and two regiments have been inducted into service, while two more have been approved for purchase.

For the ground-based air defence weapons systems for area and point defence – the L70 gun and the ZSU-23-2 – the RFI was issued in January 2019 and the upgrade efforts also continue.

Infantry. The Future Infantry Soldier as a System (F-INSAS) has been abandoned as an integrated approach. Instead, various components of the system are being pursued separately for procurement.

A Rs 639 crore contract was signed on 10 April 2018 with SMPP Ltd, an Indian vendor for the procurement of 186,138 bullet proof jackets (BPJs). The first lot of BPJs was delivered in April 2019.

A limited quantity (72,000) of Sig Sauer 716 assault rifles and 93,000 Caracal 816 carbines are being procured through Fast Track Procedure (FTP). Meanwhile, an Ordnance Factory is being established at Rae Bareilly to produce the AK-203 assault rifle in large numbers to cater for the remainder required of the armed forces and the paramilitary as well as for export.

The Infantry also requires a lighter, more lethal shoulder fired anti-tank weapon, notably the Carl Gustav Mk IV, a Battlefield Surveillance Radar (BFSR) and an improved 81mm mortar.

Network-centric Operations. The Rs 50,000 crore Battlefield Management System (BMS) was envisaged by the Army to enable a faster decision process by commanders at all echelons, enable better decision due to reliable operational information provided in real time and have the ability to quickly close the sensor to shooter loop by integrating all surveillance means to facilitate engagement through an automated decision support and command and control system, exploiting technology for mission accomplishment in the Tactical Battle Area (TBA).

The project has been abandoned indefinitely due to costs involved. The Army chief reviewed the project in 2018 and decided to put it on the back-burner in favour of other projects.

Army Aviation. While the Army had asked for 39 AH-64E multi-role attack helicopters, the government has accepted to procure six for it for the time being in addition to the 22 Apaches on order for the IAF.

The Rudra ALH-WSI armed helicopter based on the Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) is making steady progress, though the selection of anti-tank missiles it will carry is yet to be finalised. The production of the Light Combat Helicopter (LCH) has started. The Army wants 114 LCH.

Army Aviation is expected to replace its ageing Chetak and Cheetah helicopters with the Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) Light Utility Helicopter (LUH).

The Army continues to use Israeli IAI Searcher II unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and is looking to add to its fleet. Sadly, the Army is poorly equipped with such vital force-multipliers.

Combat Engineering. The Engineers are looking for lighter, redeployable, foldable and air-portable bridges. Similarly, they would like to have lighter, higher capacity assault trackway, quick repair materials for damaged runways and fuel-air explosive (FAE) solutions for destroying mines.

Infrastructure

Alongside modernisation of equipment, it si important for infrastructure – strategic roads, railway and bases – to be improved. The Chinese have built all-weather class-9 or 24 roads right up to all their posts in all sectors. They have excellent lateral roads. Their railway system and pipelines are being extended to major logistics bases. Deployment time of their formations has been cut down to enable them to launch an offensive for short duration wars while stocking is done for follow up echelons.

Overview

The fact remains that in the case of major systems, like artillery guns, main battle tanks, infantry combat vehicles, anti-tank weapons, air defence weapon systems, etc, we are far short of the ideal mix of obsolete-legacy-modern systems that should be in service at any time. Blaming the Defence Reasearch& Development Organisation (DRDO), public sector undertakings (PSUs) or Ordnance Factory Board (OFB) alone is not enough. The Army should push for change. The Army Design Bureau, now in a fledgling state, the almost defunct Army Technology Board, and other initiatives must evolve into effective organisations capable of driving research and innovation. The enhanced powers of the Army Commanders, vice chief of army staff and other down the chain must be utilised to support procurement from private industry so as to force DRDO, PSUs and OFB to compete. The Army must also resolutely fight for user involvement in development, favourable terms and conditions like penalties for cost and time overruns, shortcomings in quality and guaranteed serviceability and availability of equipment.

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