My tastes are of a "higher" class.
It's like saying let cancer afflict me, if it has to & I'm destined to get it when I'm 75+ & have lived my life.
That's not how this analogy works. We don't have cancer, we have a spinal cord injury right now, with only our arms working.
When you go to war, you are either thrown into the fighting ring where you have no control or you begin the fight at your time and place of choosing. The situation is such that we can begin the time and place of our choosing since we hold the cards.
People with common sense, those not stuck with low quality bamboo grass, will pick the latter. The simple fact is we need to enter the fight after we have taken care of all our business. Two most critical ones are modernisation and getting the economy back on track.
There two factors are extremely critical. I don't have to explain the economic factor, we must do whatever we can in order to reduce dependency on China during this time. Some industrialists have pointed out that it can be done within a few years for essential imports.
But when it comes to military modernisation, here's something important.
Much of India's defence equipment is "obsolete" and the forces are "woefully short" of weapons, army chief General VK Singh says.
www.bbc.com
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In his letter, Gen Singh said India's air defence was "97% obsolete", the army lacked the equipment it needed and its entire tank fleet was "devoid of critical ammunition to defeat enemy tanks".
This was said back in 2012. And in return, the Modi govt signed up for 5 regiments of MRSAM and initiated the development of Akash Prime and QRSAM.
To put things in perspective, a single MRSAM battery is about 4 times more capable than Akash and 16 times more capable than the still obsolete and yet to be replaced existing SAMs. In other words, a single MRSAM battery is as capable of 4 batteries of Akash, without even considering its next generation technology or the fact that it works up to twice the distance.
Without doing this, what you're proposing is the military must fight with systems that can no longer be used on the battlefield. Otoh, if we give it enough time, the army will get a system that the Chinese have no hope of matching at all. The same with the QRSAM, it will go completely unchallenged by the Chinese. Both MRSAM and QRSAM cannot be defeated by existing Chinese aircraft.
Most of the systems we need in order to fight and win were all signed up for during Modi's first term and are in the process of being delivered today. We most definitely should not go to war without these inducted in any sizeable number. And we actually do not need a lot of such systems. The entire Ladakh region needs just 1 MRSAM and QRSAM regiments each.
Same story with our artillery and infantry. Our artillery is mostly composed of 105mm guns with less than 20Km range, while our infantry is still to get new rifles and carbines. Same story with light helicopters, we definitely need a rapid induction of about 50+. You are not going to maintain troop morale if there's no casevac and supplies. And we can't do that effectively with our antique force of Alouettes, that can crash anytime during high tempo operations in bad weather, and without advanced SAMs to protect them.
You say we should go to war right away, great, yeah, we can go to war. But right now, the army's objective is not a victory, it's a stalemate. But replace the systems I named above, the army's objective will switch from stalemate to victory. That's how much of a difference there is. What's funny is we can get all this done within a year.
As an accident victim with a spinal cord injury, you first need to worry about walking and running before you worry about cancer in the future.
The air force and navy are not in a good place as well. The air force need the full complement of Rafales, with ISE, and MKIs with Derby ER and ASRAAM. And the navy needs new destroyers and frigates. Right now, they have just 3 destroyers capable of advanced AAW, the rest of the ships are carrying obsolete SAMs. During this time we will see the induction of near-hypersonic Brahmos as well, and this one's absolutely unstoppable.
Most of the air force and navy's modernisation cannot be done in a year though, but the army's modernisation must be complete to a certain extent, in a year's time, before we even think about going to war. For victory: Barely manageable = Sept 2021. Acceptable = Sept 2022. Overwhelming superiority = Sept 2023. Today: Only a stalemate.
