India is celebrating the commissioning of INS Vikrant, the Indian Navy’s first aircraft carrier and flag carrier in over five decades. And with good reason.
It is not just the largest battleship planned and constructed in India; it is also entirely a Swadeshi design, weighing approximately three times as much as the original (16,000 tonnes against 42,800 tonnes).
Being able to construct such a battleship puts India among a select group of countries, which is a source of immense pride. A list so exclusive that you could essentially count the number of fingers on one hand. Obviously, we are not including Britain at this time.
It would take a very unusual Indian to be apathetic to such a national accomplishment, or perhaps someone from the somewhat more common group of war-hating, give-peace-a-chance walas.
Congratulations to the Indian Navy, its inventive and developing design bureau, engineers, visionaries in maritime warfare, and, of course, India’s political leaders over a period of 25 years and the terms of three prime ministers beginning with Atal Bihari Vajpayee. We are none of these things.
He served as the project manager for this Make-in-India or Atmanirbhar car’s design phase. Under his leadership, the Cabinet Committee on Security authorised the project’s start of development in 2002.
We might ponder why it took India, with its strong engineering foundation, 23 years to put this ship into service. In particular, considering that the Chinese would construct one considerably larger in just three to four years, and in any case, the engines for the new INS Vikrant are American GE imports.
The Chinese already own two fully operational aircraft carriers, one of which is entirely home-built. The Chinese carriers are about twice as large as the new INS Vikrant and can carry far more powerful aircraft, such as the J-15 or other Chinese copies of Su-30 variants, in addition to many more. The third is thought to be in the one-lakh-tonne class, and the Chinese, given their speed, may put it into action as soon as next year.
But these are the constant problems with Indian defense production. We have been worrying about things and will keep worrying about them. Now is the time to have an open mind about the future. Therefore, three questions come to mind right away. the most important being
Does India require aircraft carriers? What sort and how many, if any?
Third, with these enormous ships, what kind of weaponry can (and should) India anticipate and where will it come from?
The longest-running argument in naval warfare has been between carriers and submarines for more than 75 years. Marine warfare in World War 2 took on a new dimension because of the enormous American and Japanese carriers.
The Germans centred their attention on their submarines, or U-boats, as they called them.
This is where the concept of carriers exercising sea control over submarines exercising sea denial first emerged. The Soviet Navy and the bloc made significant investments in sea denial, whereas the Western world adhered to the original US strategy for practically the entire duration of the Cold War. It created a sizable fleet of deadly and ultra-quiet submarines.
A significant amount of the literature you read about that discussion informs us that there was not just a cost argument, but also a belief in submarine warfare that was practically fanatical in the Soviet Navy. The Soviet Union’s authorities realised they couldn’t afford to compete with the much wealthier West in the construction of massive surface ships with pricey air components.
Therefore, they had to use sea denial as a means of deterrent and tactical balance while posing the prospect of huge attrition that even the loss of one carrier-sized vessel would bring about. We have heard reliable stories of how Soviet submarines pursued the US Seventh Fleet task group as it travelled into India in the midst of the bloody war of 1971.
In the last decades of the Cold War, this started to shift. The Soviets went ahead and constructed a tiny carrier, ironically giving it the name Admiral Gorshkov in honour of the man who founded and created their navy, which was primarily focused on submarines and missiles. By the way, the Soviets sold India the ship. India’s national airline is currently known as Vikramaditya. It expanded to a 44,500 tonne weight. In the intervening period, the Indian Navy had acquired another abandoned British ship, HMS Hermes, which operated as INS Viraat and weighed 23,700 tonnes, making it 1.5 times as large as the original INS Vikrant.
While a large portion of India’s military was constructed on Soviet and Russian apparatus and training, let’s say from 1964 onwards, the Navy was among the first to develop a carrier culture. The Royal Navy commissioned a number of brand-new carriers in 1942 under the Majestic class designation. When the battle was over, several were just halfway completed. India purchased one of these, HMS Hercules, had it finished in Belfast, and it later became the first INS Vikrant.
With unfavorable outcomes, it won the surface combatant vs. submarine argument in the Indian Navy for more than ten years. The Indian Navy does not want to discuss much of the battle of 1965.
With clear religious messages, a seven-ship task group of the Pakistani Navy under the command of the cruiser PNS Babur was able to approach the Gujarati temple town of Dwarka near enough to bombard it unchallenged with 5.25-inch guns. The Indian Navy stayed out of the conflict. In addition to the fact that INS Vikrant was in dry dock, as it frequently was throughout its service decades ago, there was also trepidation over PNS Ghazi, the sole submarine in the subcontinent at the time.
India didn’t have its first submarines till after this, the Russian foxtrots However, INS Vikrant had to be removed from the Arabian Sea once more in 1971 because of the same worries over the French Daphnes and the Ghazi (which was lured and sunk off Visakhapatnam in a famous operation). One of those (PNS Hangor) sank the frigate INS Khukri not far from Diu.
Naval doctrines, in particular, have a tendency to be far too robust. As a result, the Indian Navy has cherished the concept of several carrier-based task groups. Because of the capital costs, inability to build domestically in the past, and shifting political priorities, it rarely has the luxury of even two carriers at any given time.This might change with the new INS Vikrant.
That brings us a full circle to the initial three queries on INS Vikrant
I asked Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment about this issue because she is well-known in the Indian strategic world. Before answering, he continued, you must establish what India’s geopolitical goals are. It doesn’t require any carriers if these are contained to, say, a 1,000 km radius around its peninsula. Naturally, this would readily include Gwadar and Karachi in its scope. With the aid of mid-air refueling, shore-based aircraft can readily and much more efficiently handle all of this.
He claimed that you need carriers if your goal is to be a player in farther-off regions, such as East Africa and Southeast Asia. What sort of career, then? He contends that the Indian Navy has thus far made the worst decisions conceivable (you can see this exchange here). It is made up of pricey little ships that need a lot of work to build or buy and have insufficient firepower.
Your present complement of 20 or so MiG-29K aircraft from these ships will not provide you with enough range, weaponry, or time on station. We are aware that the Navy has just completed testing for the F/A-18 and Rafale (Marine) next-generation jets. These offer a far larger warload and at least double the fighting radius of a MiG-29. He counters that these carriers are too tiny to have much of an impact. Not economical and not a good value.
He claims that forty years of study and experience in the US Navy demonstrate that a carrier has to weigh at least 65,000 tonnes to be a powerful force. What is the IAC-3 vision for the Indian Navy? But once more, issues with numbers, expenses, planes, and other factors will come up. In any event, funding for these will need to come from another source. Will it be the submarines, the deadlier missiles, or some other kind of ship? The Army or the IAF?
India’s military and political leadership need to discuss and make decisions on these difficult issues. Let’s toast the arrival of the brand-new INS Vikrant right now. It has already made a contribution by rekindling this eternal doctrinal debate, this debate months before the first aircraft takes off from it for testing.
