DANGER OF PLAYING CATCH-UP WITH DEFENCE TECH

Bureaucratic limbo and anaemic funding hamper the upgrades India’s armed services desperately require. Defence spend must be raised as share of GDP and research efforts integrated across institutions

- MANISH TEWARI

THE American-Israeli attack on Iran nudged and winked, if not instigated, by Iran's other regional adversaries has once again underscored that multiple obituaries of the post-1945 US-anchored, soi-disant 'rules-based' international order are repeatedly being foregrounded.

The world has regressed to the early 20th century where outcomes are once again being measured in hulls, squadrons and technological edges.

In this churn, the US has delineated a new baseline: its defence budget has almost crossed the trillion-dollar threshold, a sum larger than the next nine nations' combined. A significant portion of this is being channelled into a new generation of capabilities, from the yetunproven 'Golden Dome' architecture to the software-defined platforms of Silicon Valley's defence tech startups.

Opposite this is the People's Liberation Army of China. Since the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995-96, Beijing maintained a sustained, double-digit increase in defence spending for two decades, a trajectory that moderated in 2016 to a still-steady 7.6 percent annual rise in the decade since.

From a defence expenditure roughly a sixth of the US's in 2012, China compressed the gap to roughly a third by 2024. In the Indo-Pacific, China's defence spending is hegemonic: more than thrice that of India, five times that of Japan and nearly seven times South Korea's. The Chinese spend more on defence than the next 22 Indo-Pacific militaries combined, including India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Taiwan. It translates into the world's largest navy, a modernised air force operating stealth aircraft, and an integrated missile force predicated on power projection far from its shores.

For a nation of India's geostrategic heft, a peninsula jutting into the Indian Ocean with a contested 15,000-km land frontier, this is the unforgiving context.