IMR greets all Air Warriors on the occasion of Air Force Day. Historically, air power has become the crucial war-winning factor ever since the start of the Second World War. Germany’s initial victories and Blitzkriegs in Western Europe and then Russia were all paved by the formidable Panzer-Stuka dive bomber combination. Air power paved the way for stunning Japanese victories in Malaya, Singapore and Burma. The tide turned once the Allies gained air superiority. This trend continued in the post–war period. The stunning Israeli victory in the 1967 War was paved by the decimation of the air forces of Egypt, Syria and Iraq. In Gulf War I and II, air power almost unilaterally caused a collapse of Iraqi armed forces. In South Asia, per se, our magnificent victory in the 1971 War for the Liberation of Bangladesh was primarily brought about by air power. Air supremacy in the East enabled our Blitz to capture Dacca.
How then could India forget the most glaring lessons of military history and neglect air power for well over two decades. In 1990, the USSR collapsed and our cheap source of high-tech weapons dried up over-night. This delayed the replacement of crucial Russian fighters (Mig-21, -23, -27, etc) for almost three decades. The UPA government callously ignored India’s sharply declining squadron strength. The NDA government has made gallant efforts but these have not gone far enough to arrest the alarming decline of air power. When we did purchase Su-30 , MiG-29 and now Rafale aircrafts, we failed to buy them in numbers that would arrest the decline of our squadron strength. When we did buy fighter jets we failed to buy beyond-visual-range (BVR) missiles. Post Pulwama attack, even Pakistan Air Force (PAF) outranged the missiles on our MiG-21s. Staying glued to the romance of dog fights in the era of BVRs proved costly. There was a strange reluctance to provide the funding so drastically needed to plug glaring gaps in air power and even artillery fire power. We hope the combination of Su-30s, Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) and Rafales will plug the gaps. The simple fact is, the IAF urgently needs another 150 fighters of the Rafale-class. Plans to leisurely fill this void over the next 15 years could be a recipe for disaster. The panic buying spree in 2020 during the Ladakh crisis highlighted how we had failed to anticipate threats and carry out a methodical and time-bound build up.
Let me state this unequivocally – India’s national security has never been more seriously challenged than it is today. In addition to two-front war threat from China and Pakistan, today, we can add the Taliban and Turkey as external threats. The Maoists and jihadis continue to plague us from within because the Indian state has decided to let the Maoist insurgency linger on for decades by leaving it to our police and central police organisations (CPOs). At a time of rising threats we find our government inordinately focused upon down-sizing the armed forces and cutting costs. Given the rising threats, we need to rapidly expand and modernize our armed forces. Pinching pennies now could breed a civilizational disaster. We need to expand capabilities to deal with China’s altered threat levels and create out-of-area intervention capacities for Afghanistan and island states. We simply cannot afford to get back to the Congress era of defensive–defense and wholly reactive policies or let other countries dictate to us what our responses should be to Pakistan’s asymmetric jihad.
Having conquered Afghanistan, Pakistan is getting inordinately ambitious. Inexplicably we gave it a ceasefire on the Line of Control (LC) in February this year and enabled it to free all resources for overrunning Afghanistan. Emboldened by its Afghan success, Pakistan is upping the ante in Jammu & Kashmir by massively increasing infiltration and attempting renewed ethnic cleansing by targeted killing of minorities in Kashmir. This is hardly the time to continue with the cease fire, play cricket or go in for talks. National security organs and foreign policy establishments cannot work at cross-purposes at such a critical and dangerous juncture. The threat has never been higher. Turning the other cheek at a time like this cannot be a rational and realist response.
