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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Category Archives: Security

Calling Pakistan’s Escalation Bluff

29 Thu Sep 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Pakistan, Security, South Asia

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

India, LoC, nuclear, Pakistan, terrorism

On Thursday morning, the Indian Army announced that it had conducted several strikes on terrorist camps across the Line of Control. According to the statement by the Director General for Military Operations, Lt Gen Ranbir Singh, operations took place in four sectors along the LoC – Bhimber, Hotspring, Kel, and Lipa – at 00 30 on September 28 and destroyed seven terrorist bases that were used to stage infiltrations into India. All facilities were between 500 and 3,000 metres from the LoC. Casualties are reported to include two Pakistani soldiers and 38 terrorists. Commandos were dropped at the LoC from where they crossed over into Pakistani-occupied Kashmir under the watchful eye of Indian drones. The action was undertaken after receiving “credible and specific information” about terrorists at the locations planning attacks on major Indian cities.

Pakistan’s initial reaction has been to deny these strikes, citing “usual” Indian cross-border shelling instead as the cause of death of two of its soldiers. This buys their leadership time to decide on how to respond, especially in light of the United States’ prompt statement expressing support for Indian counter-terrorism efforts. Though worded vaguely, its timing and general import leaves little doubt that Washington knew about and approved of India’s military actions Wednesday night.

The Indian strike is truly genius – while representing almost nothing tactically, it has truly set the cat among the pigeons diplomatically and strategically. At an empirical level, India’s action is a cross-border strike only by the grace of semantics – its special forces penetrated into Pakistani-held territory only just beyond a good sniper’s range and killed 38 terrorists, a number that could probably be replaced in hours. Normally, a cross-border strike evokes memories of Neptune Spear, Ajax, Moked, or Thunderbolt. Nonetheless, this is nothing to be scoffed at – I had written in a previous article that India cannot hope to dissuade Pakistan from terrorism with cross-border strikes and should instead attrit Pakistan and its terrorist allies. Wednesday’s strike fits the mould perfectly.

The ingenuity of India’s move comes in its diplomatic package. First, it sought to persuade the United States of the justness of its cause – Washington can be a moralising bully as much as India’s early prime ministers were. Second, it announced the strike publicly and reiterated that the operations were limited and had been halted – this dampened any escalatory opportunism by Pakistan. Furthermore, it was a booster shot for national morale, sagging after decades of receiving blows from across the border. Third, Delhi briefed the envoys of 22 nations, including the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council,  through its foreign secretary S Jaishankar on Wednesday’s mission. This would consolidate international opinion behind Indian actions, especially since Pakistan has a glowing reputation for supporting terrorism. The briefing was presumably to also reassure the global community that the military action was indeed limited, the conviction of which would lead to their diplomatic pressure on Islamabad to abjure from further provoking Delhi.

Strategically, India has called Pakistan’s bluff that it would respond with nuclear weapons if the former dared to conduct raids into the latter’s territory. Wednesday’s raid is so small and insignificant that a nuclear response would seem insane by any standards. As several analysts in favour of striking back at Pakistan, including myself, have argued earlier, India must utilise the conflict space below Pakistan’s nuclear threshold if it is to have any hope of curbing Pakistani shenanigans. This is exactly what Delhi has now done, challenging Islamabad to actually defend in public terrorists with nuclear weapons. And it seems, Islamabad has blinked.

There is no reason this bluff could not have been called earlier, but previous administrations imagined – and Pakistan allowed them to do so – that even the slightest response to the asymmetric war being waged from across the LoC would incur Pakistani nuclear retaliation. The Narendra Modi government has understood that the threshold had to be higher than that for it to have any meaning. Yet in all caution, Modi authorised only very shallow strikes at first – if Pakistan fails to live up to its rhetoric, future strikes may be even deeper and more significant as India improves its capability to conduct such strikes. Wednesday’s raid has disregarded Pakistan’s nuclear red lines and in all likelihood, pushed them back a bit.

Why did Modi not act earlier? Perhaps because he wanted to, on the world stage, give diplomacy a chance; perhaps the Indian military was not ready in the first two years of the Modi administration; or perhaps he wanted to dispel the stereotypes about him for domestic political reasons. This is all speculation and irrelevant to the national security debate. What matters is that the Indian government has finally acted boldly – and wisely – on the Pakistani-sponsored terrorism question and it is a much appreciated breath of fresh air.


This post appeared on FirstPost on September 30, 2016.

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The Fantasy of a Silver Bullet

26 Mon Sep 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Security, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on The Fantasy of a Silver Bullet

Tags

Asghar Sodai, IDF, India, Islam, Israel, Israeli Defence Forces, Mossad, Pakistan, terrorism, United States

What should be the goal of an Indian military cross-border excursion? Many observers, myself among them, do not believe that India presently has the requisite military capability to carry out any strike into Pakistan that would hurt the Pakistani military or degrade the infrastructure of its jihadist allies while simultaneously remain below Islamabad’s nuclear threshold. There are yet others who argue that such options simply do not exist because any conceivable strike would either be of limited strategic use or risk escalation of the crisis past the nuclear limit. Or both. However, it is important to be clear about the aims of a cross-border mission before we discuss utility or capability.

One kind of cross-border strike is a precise attack from the air. Presumably, stealth helicopters or fighter aircraft would slip into enemy airspace, unleash their deadly payload of precision guided munitions, and return before anyone is the wiser. Critics say that India lacks the material capability as well as training to carry out such missions. However, such high standards for these sorts of operations are achieved only in Hollywood or on the X-Box: as ample examples illustrate, real life is a lot messier. In perhaps the most famous and significant case of an airstrike gone awry, in May 1999, the United States air force mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. More recently, according to the United Nations, over 1,250 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan in just the past seven years.

The possibility of collateral damage or a failed strike – when the targets have already fled – is always there. Faulty intelligence, bad data, or a fast-evolving situation on the ground is usually to blame. Robert Farley, a professor at the University of Kentucky who studies the American military, explains, “One of the core aspects of air power theory is this idea that with enough reconnaissance, with enough data with enough data crunching, we can paint an extremely hyper-accurate picture of the battlefield that is going to not only eliminate accidental strikes, but it’s going to make it so we can strike directly and precisely.” The situational awareness in reality is never that good, admitted Scott F Murray, a retired US air force colonel who coordinated the US air campaign in the Middle East and Afghanistan. While India needs to hone its skills in surgical airstrikes, the benchmark can never be an ideal that has rarely been achieved.

A second option is the targeted assassination or abduction of key figures. Although Israeli operations such as the one bringing Adolf Eichmann to trial or the series of assassinations carried out in revenge for the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972 come to mind, there are also equally public and painful failures such as the botched job in Lillehammer in 1973 or the failed attempt on Khaled Meshaal in 1997. These operations require global assets and a long-term focus that the Indian political class has simply not been seen to possess.

Yet what is the long-term utility of being able to conduct such operations? As we have seen after every successful US or Israeli counter-terrorism mission, fallen leaders are quickly replaced. For a time, the organisation may lose steam; occasionally, a lack of agreement on a suitable successor may cause a group to splinter, but this makes it even more difficult to keep track of the various new factions. Rarely, if ever, have such operations succeeded in stopping terrorism and yet terror cell leaders constitute high value targets. The elimination of Hafiz Saeed, Dawood Ibrahim, or any other senior terrorist figure may be a national morale booster and morally satisfying but will scarcely dissuade Pakistan from conducting further acts of terrorism against India.

The value of a cross-border strike is not in its potential to resolve conflict – any such expectation is delusional. Rather, it is the assurance of a punitive response, even one that is held back to a time and place of Delhi’s choosing. From a rationalist, state-level perspective, this cycle of strike and counter-strike seems insane. Yet India is not fighting a state but an idea: as Husain Haqqani has argued in his recent book, India vs Pakistan: Why Can’t We Just Be Friends?, the root of the conflict between the two South Asian states is not nationalism but religion. Contrary to popular opinion, Islam did not enter the scene during the rule of Zia ul-Haq but as early as Ayub Khan, who used to pepper his anti-India speeches with Islamic references. Even before independence, the Urdu poet Asghar Sodai coined the famous phrase (1944) that would go on to become a rallying cry for all sorts of groups in Pakistan to this day – پاکستان کا مطلب کیا لاالہ الا اللہ‎. Unlike states, ideas are more amorphous and resilient to force.

A model that is popularly looked up to in India is Israel. The swift, daring, and decisive actions of not just its intelligence services but also its military are the stuff of legend. However, the real lessons for India come from the pattern of fighting the Israeli Defence Forces have adopted over last 20 years and not its early days. Lt. Col. Ron Tira (res.) of the Israeli Air Force describes the IDF’s strategy in its last six major engagements as one of attrition in which the aim was to “cause the opponent more damage (quantitatively and qualitatively) than the opponent caused Israel in the same timespan.” The fear of punitive retaliation would, it was hoped, delay the next conflict and restrain the enemy’s ambitions.

This is exactly the strategy Israel previously avoided – against larger, better equipped, and better trained forces of nation-states, the tiny IDF would be no match in the long haul. Against asymmetric forces, however, this strategy allows for resource and risk management. The limited aims and slow tempo of such campaigns allows both sides time for diplomatic signalling and stock-taking. The strategy works, Tira explains, because “Israel faced weak sub-state enemies whose main capabilities lie in inflicting damage, but who do not threaten to defeat the IDF or to capture Israeli territory. In each campaign, the interests defended by the IDF were of secondary importance. In this context, Israel could afford to sustain damage from the opponent, knowing that the opponent at the same time was suffering more substantial damage, without removing the threat or substantially degrading the opponent’s ability to make war.”

The South Asian situation is not identical – Pakistan actively cultivates terrorist networks in a far more direct manner than Arab support comes for the Palestinian disaffected. More importantly, Pakistan possesses nuclear weapons. Yet limited strikes by India, at times without even awaiting a provocation, will force Islamabad to distance itself from or publicly embrace its illegitimate children. It is feared that such action could well raise the heat on the border but the limited nature of these attacks would give Islamabad no credible reason to resort to nuclear blackmail. And why must nuclear anxiety be borne by one side alone and not shared?

Indian leaders must understand the nature of the threat they face and adopt a strategy that is more in tune with the demands of the situation. It may not be as satisfying as precise and decisive strikes or give closure but it is an old art of war. The fantasy of a silver bullet serves no one.


This post appeared on FirstPost on September 28, 2016.

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Rafale Finally Comes Home

21 Wed Sep 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Security, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Rafale Finally Comes Home

Tags

AAM, air to air missile, beyond visual range, Brahmos-NG, BVR, cruise missile, Dassault, France, IAF, India, Indian Air Force, MBDA, Meteor, MMRCA, Rafale, RBE2-AA, SCALP, Storm Shadow, Système de Croisière Autonome à Longue Portée – Emploi Général, Thales

As news broke late Wednesday evening that India and France had finally agreed upon the terms and conditions for the purchase of 36 Rafale jets by the former from the latter, it was probably greeted with relief rather than joy. Dassault, the French aviation company that manufactures the Rafale, had won the tender in January 2012 but had been locked in negotiations with the Indian government over the technical details ever since. When Narendra Modi came to office, he tried to break the impasse and India initiated talks directly with the French government for an inter-government agreement but even that, until just a month ago, seemed to be going nowhere. The conclusion of the deal, to be signed on September 23, will be a relief to the Indian Air Force as well as Dassault. The first planes will begin to arrive 36 months hence and the entire order will be completed a further 30 months from then.

In fact, India’s search for a medium multi-role combat aircraft had begun almost a decade ago in August 2007 when finances finally allowed the IAF to begin replacing its aging fleet of MiGs. Four companies participated in the competition – Saab, Mikoyan, Lockheed, and of course, Dassault. The Rafale’s similarities to the Mirage 2000 that the IAF already operated, its lower life-cycle costs, and its naval and nuclear strike variants clinched the deal for Dassault.

Although the deal was originally envisaged to be for 126 aircraft with an option of 74 more, the final agreement has settled around 36 jets. Projected to cost $12 billion in 2012, that figure has also come down to $7.88 billion. However, India has managed to negotiate for several bells and whistles in the smaller deal and it is reported that the agreed upon price is around $750 million less than what the previous government was willing to pay

Dassault has agreed to make India-specific modifications to the planes, allowing the integration of Israeli helmet-mounted displays. Additionally, MBDA, the European missile manufacturer, will provide Meteor, an air-to-air missile with a beyond-visual-range over 100 kms, and Storm Shadow (known as Système de Croisière Autonome à Longue Portée – Emploi Général or SCALP in the French military), an air-launched cruise missile with a range of over 560 kms, with the Rafales. Both these acquisitions will significantly improve the reach of the IAF, allowing them to shoot deep into enemy airspace or territory without crossing any international boundaries. Integration of the Brahmos-NG, a smaller version of the Brahmos supersonic missile, will make the Rafale a lethal platform by land or sea.

A complete transfer of technology, including for the Thales RBE2-AA radar and software source code, spare parts, maintenance, training, and a guarantee of 75 percent operational availability for the first five years takes the price of the package up from a base price of $3.8 billion for just the Rafales to the final number. A 50 percent offset agreement obligates Dassault to re-invest half the money from the deal in India again, creating hundreds of new jobs.

India’s decision to buy only 36 planes, barely two squadrons, seems puzzling at first. They will not fill the gap in the IAF’s numbers and nor will the Rafale’s nuclear capability add much to the Indian offensive toolkit. One can only assume that once the first set of jets are delivered, a further order will be placed to augment the existing numbers, including naval variants. This is even more likely if Dassault begins to manufacture in India – with the transfer of technology, it would be easy to domestically ramp up numbers as India has done with the Sukhoi. The Rafale’s primary role is to replace the IAF’s retiring fleet: while the Tejas Light Combat Aircraft is expected to step in at the low end, the Rafale will occupy the mid-level force structure with the expectation that an advanced indigenous descendant of the Tejas or the fifth generation fighter that India is jointly developing with Russia will form the top of the line component.

Immediately, the Rafale is expected to give India the dominant status in the air. Wedded to airborne control systems, the Rafale and its armaments can essentially hit enemy targets while staying out of range of their fighter jets. Though not the essential component of a future cross-border strike, the Rafale can provide the additional firepower if needed. As the IAF’s description of the tender suggests, the Rafale is a multi-role platform that can be deployed for air dominance, ground support, aerial reconnaissance, and nuclear delivery. The Rafale has already been used in all these capacities – except the last, of course – in Afghanistan, Libya, Mali, and Iraq and maintained a high operational rate throughout.

Neither the Rafale nor any other weapons system will give the side possessing it the ultimate advantage in battle and such expectations are foolish. Nonetheless, the Rafale, when it arrives, will substantially augment the Indian Air Force’s capabilities in several mission profiles and put India’s hostile neighbours on notice. An additional acquisition of domestically manufactured Rafales post-2021 would buy the Indian defence establishment time to complete its advanced fighter aircraft for the IAF. For an enervated service, the arrival of the Rafales will be a breath of fresh air.


This post appeared on FirstPost on September 22, 2016.

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