A 1996 National Defense College of India document expands on this point: “National security is an appropriate and aggressive blend of political resilience and maturity, human resources, economic structure and capacity, technological competence, industrial base, availability of natural resources and military power. »

Seen from this broader perspective, India’s aspiration to become an upper-middle-income country by 2047 requires a lot of work on national security. This column, the fifth in my series on the transformation from “quantity to quality,” addresses the requirements of national defense.

As with our armed forces, the needs here differ from the requirements in other areas. Indeed, in terms of defense, we must also follow the evolution of the capabilities of our adversaries. In this sense, it is not only something we must do to move forward, but also to avoid falling behind.

Due to this requirement for “reflexivity”, quantity and quality cannot be completely separated. In some sense, quantity as a minimum requirement might be necessary simply to maintain parity with an opponent.

An excerpt from a document released by the US director of national intelligence says: “Over the next two decades, military conflicts will most likely be driven by the same factors that historically sparked wars, ranging from resource protection to disparities There are economic and ideological differences in the quest for power and influence, but the way war is fought will change as new technologies, applications and doctrines emerge and new actors gain access to these capabilities. Combining improved sensors, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) with hypersonics and other advanced technologies will produce more precise, better-connected, faster, longer-range, and more destructive weapons, primarily available to the most advanced armies, but some within everyone’s reach. small state and non-state actors. The proliferation and diffusion of these systems over time will make more assets vulnerable, increase the risk of escalation, and make combat potentially deadlier, but not necessarily more decisive. »

He talks about connectivity, lethality and hardware autonomy, combined with new concepts of rapid attack, area defense and “non-kinetic” warfare (use of proxies providing plausible deniability) in the software elements of the future field of battle.

Arguably, the technological capability of the Indian armed forces lags at least a generation behind that of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the United States, Russia, China, the United Kingdom. United and France. India seeks to keep pace with changes in China’s armed forces, even as China itself seeks to close its military gap with the United States.

One way to reduce this gap would be to devote more resources to defense as a proportion of gross domestic product. Nitin Pai, my colleague at Takshashila, defended such an increase in military spending in Mint.

The other way to achieve this is to move to a future state where India focuses on agility, lighter unmanned weapons, adaptable multi-terrain applications, swarm weapons, all-round missile defense. test and spatial surveillance.

The ongoing evolution of military technology from a mechanical engineering and hardware base to computing, software, telecommunications, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) highlights value India’s strengths. This is the platform from which India has the opportunity to take the leap – and it must do so.

Peel the onion a little further and one realizes that the army in India is huge, while the air force and navy are relatively small. This difference in size has allowed the Air Force and Navy to be a little more agile and innovative than the Army, which has the difficult task of managing its personnel and inventories.

For example, the Indian Naval Academy in Ezhimalai, Kerala, has gradually tightened entry barriers and now offers an ‘IIT’ type engineering pathway to become a naval officer. Wherever projects or missions have been completed and operated with some flexibility, progress has been made.

India’s missile program and its nuclear-powered submarines can be considered successes; its inability to build a fighter jet engine is even less so (the biggest challenge is precision metallurgy capable of withstanding extraordinary thrust and high temperatures).

Other structural ideas such as theater commands and “across-service collaboration” have been proposed and partially adopted since the publication of the Kargil committee report in 2000.

The Indian armed forces are organized around qualified personnel, but will have to transform into “talent” organizations. This is a significant transformation on the scale required and countries around the world are grappling with the same project. The additional challenge for India is that it will have to make this transition while reducing conventional parity gaps.

PS: “When I let go of what I am, I become what I could be,” said Lao Tzu, founder of Taoism.