By Ankit Panda
India’s spending what it needs to on defense given the threats it perceives.
Is India’s defense budget adequate? My colleague Franz has a useful breakdown of India’s defense spending, as per its recently announced budget (which I look at more generally here). Indeed, India’s defense budget does look rather limited given where most of the spending is going. A large portion of scheduled spending will go into the maintenance of India’s large standing military, the world’s third largest, and a similarly large sum will go to paying military pensions — a sum greater than the budget’s allocation for the Indian Air Force and Navy. At $40 billion, India’s budget will likely additionally fail to realize a major goal of the Narendra Modi government in the immediate term, which is to indigenize the production of advanced weaponry. Still, India’s military budget might be entirely adequate for its expected threat environment.
First, the defense budget should be considered in terms of India’s most important strategic objectives. What is the top external threat for India? If the Indian military were to engage in combat with any other conventional army, the expected enemy would first and foremost be Pakistan. War between India and Pakistan is not a topic of distant possibility; the two neighbors have fought three conventional wars since their creation in 1947. Indian and Pakistani troops continue to constantly engage in skirmishes across the Line of Control in Kashmir. Given this backdrop, the Indian armed forces need to prioritize their readiness over investment in newer technologies, despite the potential benefits of those investments. India has never quite been able to do both. As the 1999 Kargil War — the most recent war between India and Pakistan –demonstrated, the lead up to a full-on conventional conflict may be sudden, demanding an immediate effective response. Thus, any Indian military budget will have to invest in maintaining existing assets and ensuring readiness.
Read the full story at The Diplomat