On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 12:54 PM, J. Andrew Rogers < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > Most of Europe has lived with this reality for a long time, for better or > worse. I would make the point that one does not invade a country without > telegraphing that fact weeks to months ahead of time; there is plenty of > time to make those "hours" to the Capital turn into days and weeks with > proper preparations in even the most pessimistic scenarios. I might be > mistaken, but I was under the impression that the Indian military was > capable of a fairly hardened defense given adequate warning from a country > with comparable military technology like Pakistan. That becomes some very > costly ground to cover, a fact obvious to even the most delusional Pakistani > General. >
I have very little confidence in the ability of Indian intelligence agencies to even detect the ground moving beneath their feet, far less a potential military build-up in Pakistan. But that is the subject of an altogether different conversation :) You would be right in saying the Indian military is capable of robust defense. My qualification to that is "in the right areas". It is no coincidence that the Western Command in India gathers the lion's share of resources. No military general, however deluded, would ever consider attacking across Kashmir where the terrain forces an army to go slow and open themselves up to attack. The flat fields of Punjab are militarily easier and hence correspondingly well defended. The "what-if" scenario considered the situation wherein the Pakistani army could entirely bypass the natural Maginot line of the Himalayas and start attacking the heart of India's command structure with no natural obstructions to slow them down. If I may, could I ask you to go up to the first link I had posted earlier ( http://is.gd/1L9l ). There is a very specific logic underlying the blue track from the border of Kashmir to Rajpath. That route avoids almost every single large military base to the north of Delhi (there aren't that many to begin with). The attacking force gets the benefit of roads that are well maintained to permit rapid deployment of the Indian Army to Kashmir and turns it against them. The red track on the other hand runs through (or within easy distance of) atleast 2 large military bases in Kashmir - Srinagar and Anantpur. As a final exercise, if I try to draw a straight line from Lahore to Delhi, I will go through the following military bases - Amritsar, Ludhiana, Ambala, Panipat and Meerut. Not to mention a few more that are nearby. [1] [2] It's this enormous difference in military buildup between the North and the West of Delhi that tells me if India did in fact lose Kashmir, the uptick in military spending would be enormous. That was in essence my argument about why losing Kashmir would not reduce military expenditure in India. > I think it is a little more complicated than that. The object of the > military is to make a country too expensive to invade, and to a lesser > extent, attack. There are many ways to maximize the return on investment > toward that end, and the logistics of supporting vast land buffers is not > particularly efficient by the reckoning of many competent military > theorists, largely because the idea is predicated on putting large > quantities of military equipment in those buffer zones. Buying time is > almost purely a function of the ability to resist, which has only a slight > relationship to land distances. > > One of the basic strategies of the US military that has served it well over > the last several decades is to convert the operational expense of massive, > region-covering hardware into research-fueled CapEx that creates a buffer at > least as hard but with a much smaller logistical footprint -- militaries > live and die on logistical footprints. It turns out that for modern > military systems, the reduced OpEx of more modern designs can fully amortize > the research and CapEx within a decade or so. It is a virtuous cycle of > sorts; the more research that is done, the cheaper a given level of military > power actually is, in inflation-adjusted currency. It is not intuitive and > so many people resist the notion. It might be better to invest the money > for supporting a huge land buffer into research and technology that obviates > the land buffer in the military calculus. It is not only less costly on many > different levels, but investments in technology research tend to pay off for > the broader economy in ways that are hard to predict. > > In short, there is substantial empirical evidence that research and CapEx > is much more efficient than dumping resources into OpEx for military > purposes, though many people find the notion counter-intuitive. While it > was famously said that quantity has a quality all its own, that "quality" > has proven to be ersatz in modern practice. Given a sufficiently hard > technology wall, the amount of physical buffer land becomes superfluous and > in the worst case buys little more than a sliver of time. > > I agree with you in that the strategy of increasing CapEx has served the US military well, historically as well as today. However, I would like to point a different set of factors at play in India (and in most Asian military strategies) - technology was mostly too expensive (lousy exchange rates) or simply not accessible (political alignments). A few other factors came into play - The experience of WW II where a large and poorly equipped Russian army had beaten back the well armed German army (yes the weather helped); a large population with low employment levels; the pressure to conserve valuable forex reserves vs. spending free money (your own currency); the need to show some kind of deterrent against nearby enemies vs. investing in new technologies that might come online only decades later.. It's no coincidence therefore that almost all Asian militaries followed the same pattern - large standing armies (your Opex) and small, underfunded air force/navies (your typical Capex). With these constraints, having a large land buffer that you could stock with large cheap armies and afford to lose as you traded space for time in building a counter-attack has its own attractions. Now, as their economies have grown Asian militaries have pulled out a high-tech shopping list - witness the investments that India & China have been making in building a true blue-water navy and India's LCA project. The generals have understood the strategy of reducing logistics through Capex; they just haven't been able to afford it. [1] http://indianarmy.nic.in/mco.html [2] http://indianarmy.nic.in/territorial_location.html -- Balaji
