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Lt Gen J P Singh, former Deputy Chief of the
Army Staff, said in an interview with the CLAWS
Journal, “The critical capabilities that
are being enhanced to meet challenges across the
spectrum, include battlefield transparency, battlefield
management systems, night-fighting capability,
enhanced firepower, including terminally guided
munitions, integrated manoeuvre capability to
include self-propelled artillery, quick reaction
surface-to-air missiles, the latest assault engineer
equipment, tactical control systems, integral
combat aviation support and network centricity.”
While the Army has drawn up elaborate plans for
modernisation and qualitative upgradation of its
capabilities, the pace of modernisation has been
rather slow due to the lack of adequate funding
support and timely decision making. India’s
defence budget is pegged at less than 2.0 per
cent of the GDP at present. According to Defence
Minister A K Antony, "New procurements have
commenced… but we are still lagging by 15
years.” Unless immediate measures are taken
to speed up the pace of modernisation, the present
quantitative military gap with China will soon
become a qualitative gap as well. Also, the slender
conventional edge that the Indian army enjoys
over the Pakistan army will be eroded further
as Pakistan is spending considerably large sums
of money on its military modernisation under the
garb of fighting radical extremism.
Main battle tanks are the spearhead of India’s
conventional deterrence in the plains. Pakistan
has acquired 320 T-80 UD tanks and is now acquiring
Al Khalid tanks that it has co-developed with
China. The Indian armour fleet is also being modernised
gradually. The indigenously developed Arjun MBT
has entered serial production to equip two regiments.
310 T-90S MBTs have been imported from Russia
and a contract has been signed for 347 additional
T-90 tanks to be assembled in India.
A programme has been launched to modernise the
T-72 M1 Ajeya MBTs that have been the mainstay
of the army’s Strike Corps and their armoured
divisions since the 1980s. The programme will
upgrade the night fighting capabilities and fire
control system of the tank. Approximately 1,700
T-72 M1s have been manufactured under license
at the Heavy Vehicle Factory (HVF), Avadi. The
BMP-1 and, to a lesser extent, the BMP-2 infantry
combat vehicles, which have been the mainstay
of the mechanised infantry battalions for long,
are now ageing and replacements, capable of employment
for internal security duties and counter-insurgency
operations in addition to their primary role in
conventional conflict, need to be found soon.
Despite the lessons learnt during the Kargil
conflict of 1999, where artillery firepower had
paved the way for victory, modernisation of the
artillery continues to lag behind. The Corps of
Army Air Defence is also faced with problems of
obsolescence. The vintage L-70 40 mm AD gun system,
the four-barreled ZSU-23-4 Schilka (SP) AD gun
system, the SAM-6 (Kvadrat) and the SAM-8 OSA-AK
need to be replaced by more responsive modern
AD systems that are capable of defeating current
and future threats. The indigenously developed
Akash surface-to-air missile has not yet been
inducted into service. The modernisation of short-range
and medium-range SAMs also needs to be speeded
up.
The modernisation plans of India’s cutting
edge infantry battalions, aimed at enhancing their
capability for surveillance and target acquisition
at night and boosting their firepower for precise
retaliation against infiltrating columns and terrorists
holed up in built-up areas, are moving forward
but at a slow pace. These include the acquisition
of shoulder-fired missiles, hand-held battlefield
surveillance radars (BFSRs), and hand-held thermal
imaging devices (HHTIs) for observation at night.
Protective gear also needs to be acquired to reduce
casualties in war and counter-insurgency operations.
Stand-alone infra-red, seismic and acoustic sensors
need to be acquired in large numbers to enable
infantrymen to dominate the Line of Control (LoC)
with Pakistan and detect infiltration of Pakistan-sponsored
terrorists.
Similarly, the operational capabilities of army
aviation, engineers, signal communications, reconnaissance,
surveillance and target acquisition (RSTA) branches
need to be substantially enhanced so that the
overall combat potential of the army can be improved
by an order of magnitude. Modern strategic and
tactical level command and control systems need
to be acquired on priority for better synergies
during conventional and sub-conventional conflict.
Plans for the acquisition of a Tactical Communications
System (TCS) and a Battlefield Management System
(BMS) need to be hastened. Despite being the largest
user of space, the army does not yet have a dedicated
military satellite to bank on.
The author is Director,
Centre for Land Warfare Studies, New Delhi.
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