The Power India is Building
It’s hard not to marvel (or shudder, more likely) at the complexity of India’s security environment: from edgy nuclear neighbors and determined jihadists to indigenous Maoist insurgents, the country faces an unenviable array of threats. It’s not surprising, then, that Delhi has seen fit to expand its defense budget for 2011 by 4 percent — following on the heels of last year’s massive increase, which raised Indian defense spending by more than a quarter.
A significant portion of the additional funds will be dedicated to personnel costs, of course, but India is also investing aggressively in capabilities to address threats from across the spectrum — expanding the country’s paramilitary and police forces, procuring UAVs and other updated C4ISR systems for each of its armed services, and modernizing the country’s air force and undersea capabilities.
India, as I’ve noted previously, is also refining its warfighting doctrine and defense posture in an effort to adapt to what it perceives, rightly, as the new strategic reality in Asia. That reality, as my colleague Dan Blumenthal points out in today’s Wall Street Journal, is dominated by an increasingly ambitious and militarily capable China and a strategically ambivalent United States: “President Obama’s accommodating stance toward China and his apparent lack of interest in cementing partnership with Delhi have focused Indian minds, as have his failure to invest in resources his Pacific commanders need,” Dan argues.
No less important, however, is India’s ongoing rivalry with Pakistan. Relations between the two hit yet another rough patch in the wake of last month’s bombing in Pune, and the subsequent bilateral talks in New Delhi between the countries’ foreign secretaries — the first since the 2008 Mumbai attacks — were predictably unfruitful. According to Pakistani officials, the new Indian defense budget the proposed “two-front war” doctrine only stand to further compromise stability in the region.
Sunday’s military exercises in Pokhran, India, not far from the Pakistani border, were a small but telling manifestation of India’s increasingly forward-leaning stance toward both of its regional competitors. The exercises featured airstrikes from a range of Indian fighters against simulated terrorist training facilities, and were reportedly attended by military officials from 30 countries. Attachés from Pakistan and China, however, were conspicuously absent.
Tim Sullivan is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
