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This is no less applicable to New Delhi, as the
degree and number of current strategic threats
India faces have led to a sharp focus for its
Defence Ministry. There seems to be an agreed-upon
path to address those threats, central to which
is establishing a world-class naval force. India,
indeed, is surrounded on all sides by a tough
reality of serious threats to its safety –
and denial is not an option.
India has, in terms of numbers, the fifth largest
naval force in the world. In terms of capability,
this ranking may be brought into question. The
significance of the strategic challenge suggests
that India would be wise to invest predominantly
in a more qualitative future.
The manpower, ships, submarines and aircraft
of the fleet are up to the challenge; what’s
missing is a combat systems overlay that can provide
world class command and control, distributed firepower
and interoperability; and, most importantly, a
strategic defensive capability to match the offensive
reach of India’s potential adversaries. The
best available system equal to that challenge
is the Aegis Weapon System, now in use with five
navies around the world.
Aegis represents not simply a capital investment
for equipment outlays, but an investment in fleet-wide
infrastructure, training, matching systems, adoption
of sophisticated rules of engagement, and, not
least, a partnership with India’s indigenous
defense industry that must support and complement
Aegis in the long term. The cost, though considered
high by some standards, is more than offset by
the level of capability gained in combat power
projection, and strategic and tactical deterrence,
once in place.
So, the Aegis Weapon System is equal to the task
of addressing a strategic reality in which denial
is not an option. What is that strategic reality,
and how can Aegis help to address it, in the naval
realm?
India faces a myriad of strategic defense challenges.
To the north, China is an indirect but very real
concern given their support of Pakistan, politically
and militarily – not to mention a history
of direct conflict, albeit some forty-plus years
ago. China’s defense budget has been estimated
at double-digit growth over the past decade and
their naval expansion efforts are increasing in
the Indian Ocean, with facilities in Pakistan,
Bangladesh and Burma.
As China forges these relationships with India’s
neighbors, the importance of having a viable strategic
and tactical asset like Aegis becomes an interesting
investment opportunity for future security.
While Iran and Pakistan are not noted as naval
powers, their growing potential to increase regional
instability cannot be discounted. Pakistan, with
its nuclear capability and endemic political hostility
is a serious concern.
Iran, thanks to the strategic imbalance it represents
with its stated ambitions of regional hegemony,
and antipathy toward Israel, and their nuclear
ambitions, is an additional significant concern.
Their antagonistic approach vis-à-vis the
rest of the non-Islamic world, chiefly the U.S.,
and support of insurgency and terrorism, suggests
they are architects of regional instability that
has great potential to spill over into India and
other adjacent nations around the Indian Ocean
and Western Pacific.
With that as a backdrop, India has embarked on
a strategic direction that, from most observers’
perspectives, includes the following two elements,
at a minimum:
- A need to solidify its stature as a regional
power that has not only the ability to defend
its own borders, but the strength and image
to positively influence the region toward maintaining
peaceful coexistence and mutual economic benefit.
- A desire to develop strategic partnerships
with regional and global players (including
in the naval arena), for political reasons,
and to connect to available high technology
and weaponry held by partner nations.
 Aegis’
“Fit” with India’s Strategic Future
India’s desire to develop strategic partnerships
in the naval arena is instructive with regard
to the combat-proven Aegis Weapon System. Aegis
ranks among the most successful total weapon systems
ever produced, not least because of its remarkable
ability to continuously evolve in a myriad of
mission areas, and to be easily adapted and fitted
to a host of platforms.
Begun as a stand-alone anti-ship missile defense
capability, Aegis has become a network-centric
total system that can be scaled from unit defense,
to distributed (multi-unit) theater and strategic
ballistic missile defense (BMD). That historical
evolution has really created a naval revolution,
in that Aegis can now be considered the principal
architecture for a fleet’s operational employment
and mission success; so successful, in fact, that
U.S. President Obama recently announced that Aegis
should “move ashore,” as a stand-alone,
land-based system for area and strategic BMD far
inland.
Aegis was born of necessity in the days of the
Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
It has become a versatile overlay of sensors,
command and control systems and weapons that work
in conjunction to provide an entire fleet (and
in fact joint units, including land-based systems)
with a tactical and strategic structure of decision
making and firepower that copes with the highest
state-of-the-art threats where speed and destructive
power reign.
Just as important for the Indian Navy is Aegis’
systems-engineering and open-architecture emphasis,
allowing it to be designed for a long future on
varied platforms; the system, for instance, could
easily be integrated with India’s existing
Prithvi Air Defense Shield (PADS) system.
With the Aegis system in use among key U.S. allies,
its inherent interoperability with other units
also provides a quantum leap in capability through
distributed command and control mechanisms. Together
with the U.S. Navy, the Aegis system is operational
on Japanese, South Korean, Norwegian, Spanish
naval vessels and is under contract for installation
on future Australian naval vessels. Within the
next year, the system will be in use on over 100
naval vessels in these five navies.
Finally, as India’s strategic threats have
– regrettably – matured into very real
nuclear and supersonic conventional threats, Aegis’
scalability into a BMD asset, both at sea and
now ashore – is an equally real and proven
counter, and deterrent. Aegis has matured to the
point that it has intercepted and destroyed an
errant satellite in flight, travelling at a velocity
of ten kilometers per second, and at an altitude
of 130 miles above the earth. This was achieved
with stunning success by the USS Lake Erie in
2008.
It is clear, then, that Aegis represents the
premier air defense umbrella for a world-class
fleet. With the Indian Navy now committed to building
three new aircraft carriers, around which will
be a host of ships to form battle groups of real
potency, AEGIS is the logical choice to ensure
those capital assets are offensively viable, and
defensively secure. Only AEGIS with the SPY-1
radar system and the SM-2 missile can effectively
provide the coverage that will be needed to detect,
track and engage hostile forces.
Aegis for the Indian Navy:
Leading a Strategic Response
As a maritime nation, both by geography and historical
necessity, India has built a world-class navy
that most certainly has quantitative advantage
over its current potential adversaries; but the
country risks qualitative deficits as the strategic
challenges grow.
Indeed, those more global challenges have grown
beyond the navy’s ability to effectively
respond. The nation’s indigenous defense
capabilities have certainly grown to meet fleet
technology demands. But the future strategic imperative
– and the nation’s response to it –
will need to leap ahead to include systems that
allow India’s fleet to operate with allied
nations, and establish it as a stabilizing maritime
force in the region.
The Aegis Weapon System can provide much of –
in fact the basis for – that leap forward.
Being surrounded on all sides by harsh realities
is a sobering thought. It is time for political
leadership and decisiveness in New Delhi to avoid
the denial that India cannot afford at this point
in its proud history.
A former Under Secretary
of the U.S. Navy, the author is the Senior Advisor
for the Asia-Pacific Region for Lockheed Martin’s
Maritime Sensors & Systems business unit.
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