Indian Power Projection by Shashank Joshi

Author:Shashank Joshi [Joshi, Shashank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Asia, India & South Asia, Military, General, Political Science, International Relations, Arms Control
ISBN: 9781351712798
Google: kgkqDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-07-14T01:30:47+00:00

III. LAND-POWER PROJECTION

Power projection is about delivering kinetic attacks at a considerable distance from one’s homeland. These attacks can be delivered from the air by aircraft or missiles. But they can also be delivered by ground forces, transported to the target by air, land or sea, and kept there for a matter of minutes or years. While the term ‘expeditionary warfare’ has been used to describe forces forward deployed for long periods, it would be unusual to apply this term to short, sharp operations — such as the Israeli raid at Entebbe in 1976 — so, instead, I use the broader term of land-power projection.

In the West, land power faces a period of reassessment. Large-scale counter-insurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan have come to be viewed as inconclusive at best and disastrous at worst. Air power, meanwhile, furnishes a quicker, cheaper, more politically palatable — indeed, as with American air strikes in Afghanistan through 2015, often domestically invisible — national response. Yet limited interventions, with and without air power, continue to demand important ground components. The pan-Arab intervention in Yemen in 2015 involves, at the time of writing, 2,800 Emirati and Saudi Arabian troops, including an armoured brigade.1 Russia’s intervention in Ukraine over 2014–15 involved over 12,000 troops.2 Campaigns where ground forces are largely absent — as with the coalition against Daesh formed in 2014 — struggle to seize and hold territory, except when third-party forces are present and able to co-ordinate with intervening powers (such as the Kurds and other rebel groups in Syria).

India does have experience of projecting land forces over long distance. As noted earlier, three of its four experiences in overseas power projection — peacekeeping, the Maldives and Sri Lanka — have involved integral contributions from the Indian Army. Yet even fighting in adjacent territory has involved projecting power over long distances, albeit from home bases. One reason for this is that India has unusually long interior lines of communication: one of India’s three strike corps, XXI Corps, is based roughly 900–1,200 km from the Pakistani border. India has no dedicated military railway track and the armed forces are accorded low priority to the congested civilian track in peacetime, which limits the co-operation necessary for rapid wartime mobilisation.3 Railway lines identified as military priorities have received minimal attention, with work begun on just two out of fourteen such lines. Indian roads are relatively poor, with only fifteen out of seventy-three key project roads near the Sino–Indian border completed, despite a 2012 deadline. India’s interior lines of communication are therefore not just long, but also weak. Another reason is that India’s neighbours are also large. India penetrated over 300 km into East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in the 1971 war. In some ways, India’s embryonic mountain strike corps is intended precisely as an instrument of local power projection, allowing theatre-level offensive operations into China over exceptionally adverse terrain. Large-scale airlift was crucial to India in its first war as an independent country over Kashmir in 1947, and would be important in any ground conflict with China.

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