Indian Navy charts course for oceanic dominance

AS befits the silent service, the Navy is quietly going about the business of creating a service that will, for the first time in the history of our independent Navy, be ahead of the techno-industrial curve of projecting national power continentally, and across the oceans. Inherent in that capability will also be the wherewithal to directly influence the course of land wars.

While this process has its roots in the writings of the great theorists on maritime strategy, it also includes the effects of the technological revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries into industrial processes, electronics, computing and man's conquest of near space.

Of the three services, the Navy faces the greatest obstacles to getting its theory correct at the very beginning, because the lead time to building naval platforms is the largest and the longest, and, hence, the most difficult to correct, mid-stride. Not to be discounted are the changes in concluding a successful war, caused by the presence of nuclear weapons.

Most military, maritime and air strategies were written in a time when war was generally thought to terminate when the enemy capital was occupied by boots on the ground, as happened in Dhaka in 1971.

Notable exceptions exist, such as the capitulation of Kaiser's Germany, purely by privation caused by the British naval blockade, despite the pointless loss of 15 million infantrymen in the trenches. Also, the surrender of Japan in World War II, mainly to air and naval action, with 75 per cent of the Japanese army unblooded on the day of Tokyo's surrender.

States still see the use of force as a legitimate option to pursue national goals when diplomatic and economic measures fail, but are simultaneously wary of the nuclear threshold.

The result is the reliance on dropping ordnance on enemy soil, to achieve a basket of political objectives, which may be summed up in one phrase — to change state behaviour.

In the Indian environment, all three services will follow the same strategy: of causing great pain to the enemy state, with minimum loss to our own side, and this process will be at the heart of each service's strategy. These strategies will evolve after studying warfare in the 20th and 21st centuries to see what technologies already invented have dictated, and what technologies are yet to demonstrate, like AI.

It would appear that for the most technologically advanced states, the overwhelming factor determining warfare is 'omniscience' — or, the ability to "see" everything in the enemy state, down to a resolution of 20 centimetres.

Following from this is the ability to digitally distribute that information to all weapon operations in wide band, and finally the use of AI to prepare and distribute a targeting plan. Medium-sized nations may generate 5,000 targets with three times that number of aiming points.

The US and Chinese navies have already gone down that route, currently owning 8,400 and 4,300 vertical launch silos (VLS), respectively, on-board ships and SSNs, to fire long-range, sea-skimming, contour-hugging land-attack cruise missiles. In the last 30 years, the US navy has 'influenced' the course of world history by firing 2,281 such missiles, the latest event being the 20 missiles fired into the Iranian enrichment facility at Fordow.

Navies have not forsaken the traditional goals of oceanic dominance, but denser weapon packages enable them to go beyond attacking enemy fleets, to attacking their homeland. The Indian Navy in following this strategic route will rely on three different platforms.

The first platform is the SSN or project 77, which, according to open source literature, will be ready in 2036 with an additional boat every two years. While current approval is for six boats, both the government and the Navy would strategise better if they defined a strategic objective of the SSN contribution to the overall VLS capability of the Navy. I put that number at 1,000, with another 3,000 being contributed by surface platforms, notably the type 18 destroyer, the first of which is currently being built at the Mazagon dock, Mumbai. This being the second platform. The naval in-house design team has distinguished itself yet again by designing a warship with 144 vertical launch silos, the largest number in any warship. If the rest of the design meets the NHQ requirements, there is a good case to let the production run to 30 destroyers, with other yards being roped in to expedite their build time.

As the presence of nuclear weapons inhibit full-scale conventional war, greater efforts will have to be made by the armed forces to impose a measure of conventional deterrence, involving pain to the adversary.

Defending territory is good, but not nearly enough. So, the third platform that the Navy is working on is the large indigenous aircraft carrier IAC3. The adjective 'large' arises not from hubris but from the practical requirement of embarking three squadrons of fighter/ground attack, an air-to-air refuelling component and an air early warning (AEW) component, all of which require a catapult launch and arrested recovery.

The PLAN's Liaoning, built with a ski-jump, found itself blind in open ocean operations owing to the absence of a catapult-launched AEW aircraft. The type 18 and India's IAC-3 are mutually synergistic with a carrier escort's 500 VLS missile launch capability destroying enemy anti-ship ballistic missile and drone launch facilities at long ranges. The IAC-3's explosive ordnance embarked, of around 1,500 tonnes, make an invaluable contribution to conventional deterrence.

Oceanic dominance, especially in the Indian Ocean will be centred around the large carrier, of which we need to build three. These are the only platforms that can cope with our geography as the Indian Ocean is 6,500 by 4,700 nautical miles.

Xi Jinping's Grand Strategy involves a giant sweep westwards through the Indian Ocean to securing the operational control of 129 major ports in Africa and Eurasia, situated in 65 countries, going westwards up to the Panama Canal.

Rear admiral Raja Menon (retd) is former Assistant Chief of Naval Staff.