Comprehensive National Power

- Mano J Joshi

IT is no secret that there’s a delay in India’s current cycle of military modernisation. Ask the services and they will vaguely claim that the cycle will be completed by 2022 or maybe 2027. The effort is to induct the contemporary range of armoured vehi­cles, artillery, fighter jets, submarines, frigates and so on. Given the decades taken to achieve this, these systems will almost immediately become obsolete and another delayed cycle will begin.

As long as an indigent Pakistan was the principal adversary, this caused no big worry. But we now inc­reasingly confront a risen China, whose plans work on schedule, and whose modernisation is relentlessly moving from copying western design and concepts towards leapfrogging to become technology leaders.

In recent years, China has systematically built up its military, and also undertaken a deep reorganisation of its structure. This is aimed at creating a force that, as Xi Jinping is never tired of repeating, is loyal to the Communist Party of China and capable of fighting and winning wars. The reorganisation has led to an integrated military divided into geographical theatre commands mimicking in many ways the organisation of its principal adversary: the United States.

The modernisation is top to bottom—it begins with the nuclear forces, the bedrock of Beijing’s status as a world power, and goes right down to the maritime militias that are used to swamp fishing grounds in the South China Sea. The Chinese are simultaneously aiming to deny the US access to its mainland through the so­called A2/AD (anti­access area denial) syst­ ems, and at the same time organising their own forces for greater regional and even extra­regional reach.