Questions on a Make-in-India carrier

The new INS Vikrant is reason to celebrate. But it also raises tough questions for India's military and political leaderships

The commissioning of the INS Vikrant, the new avatar of the Indian Navy’s first aircraft carrier and flag-carrier for almost five decades, is a day of celebration for India — and for good reason.

At about three times the original (42,800 tonnes versus 16,000 tonnes), it isn’t just the biggest warship designed and built in India. It is also fully a swadeshi design.

That’s a matter of great pride because it places India among an elite list of nations with the ability to build such a warship — a list so elite that you can mostly count it on the fingers of one hand. Of course, we are excluding Britain for now.

You’d need to be a rare Indian indifferent to such a national achievement, or maybe one from the somewhat less rare community of war-hating, give-peace-a-chance walas, to not join in the celebration.

We are none of these, so congratulations to the Indian Navy, its brilliant and evolving design bureau, engineers, marine warfare visionaries, and, of course, India’s political leaders spanning 25 years and the tenure of three prime ministers beginning with Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

It was under his leadership that the designing process of this Make-in-India or Atmanirbhar carrier began. The Cabinet Committee of Security, under him, cleared the project for construction in 2002.

We can ask why it took India, with its engineering base, 23 years to commission this ship. Especially when the Chinese would build a much bigger one in just three to four years, and, in any case, for the new Vikrant, the engines are American, GE imports.

The Chinese already have two fully operational carriers, one of them fully home-made, almost twice the size of the new Vikrant, carrying not only many more aircraft, but way more lethal and potent ones like the J-15 or other Chinese copies of Su-30 variants. The third, which the Chinese with their speed may operationalise as early as next year, is estimated to be in the 100,000-tonne class.

But these are the perennial issues with India’s defence manufacturing. This is the time to look at the future with an open mind. Three immediate questions, therefore, arise.

The most important of these is: Does India need aircraft carriers? And if so, what kind and how many? And third, what kind of firepower should — and can — India field from these mighty vessels, and where will it come from?

“Carriers versus submarines” has been the most enduring debate in naval warfare for more than 75 years now. In World War II, carriers, especially the giant American and Japanese ones, brought a new dimension to marine warfare. The Germans focused on their submarines, or U-Boats as these were called.

This is where the larger idea of sea control (carriers) versus sea denial (submarines) originated. During almost the entire Cold War, the Western world followed the original US doctrine, while the Soviet Navy and bloc invested heavily in sea denial. It built a large armada of super-silent and lethal submarines.

Much of the literature you read on that debate tells us not only was the belief in submarine warfare almost ideological in the Soviet Navy, there was also a cost argument. The leaders of the Soviet Union knew they couldn’t afford to engage in a race to build large surface vessels with expensive air elements with the much richer West.

They were therefore to find deterrence, and tactical balance through sea denial, the threat of massive attrition that the loss of even one carrier-sized vessel would entail. We’ve read authentic accounts of how, when the US Seventh Fleet task force led by the USS Enterprise sailed towards India while the 1971 war raged, it was stalked by Soviet submarines.

This began to change in the last decades of the Cold War. The Soviets went ahead and built a small carrier, ironically named it after Admiral Gorshkov, the founder of its mostly submarine and missile-oriented Navy and the author of that doctrine. That, by the way, is the ship the Soviets sold to India. Renamed Vikramaditya, it is now India’s flag carrier. It moved up in size to 44,500 tonnes. In the interim, the Indian Navy had acquired another junked British vessel HMS Hermes, which served as INS Viraat, somewhat bigger than the first Vikrant.

While much of India’s military was built around Soviet/Russian equipment and training, say, 1964 onwards, the Navy caught the carrier bug early. In 1942, the Royal Navy had commissioned a bunch of new carriers in what was called the Majestic Class. Some were still semi-built when the War ended. One of these, HMS Hercules, was bought by India, completed at Belfast, and became the first INS Vikrant.

That won the surface combatant versus submarine debate in the Indian Navy for more than a decade, and with troublesome results. The 1965 war is not something the Indian Navy would recall very much about.

The Pakistan Navy got close enough to our Gujarat coast to Dwaraka (with obvious religious messaging) and plastered it with their guns. The Indian Navy did not join the fight. This was not only because the Vikrant was in dry dock, as it often was in its service decades, but also because there was a certain wariness about the PNS Ghazi, the only submarine in the subcontinent.

It was only after this that India acquired its first subs, the Soviet Foxtrots. But, in 1971 again, the Vikrant had to be taken far away from the Arabian Sea for the same wariness over the Ghazi (it was sunk off Visakhapatnam in a storied operation) and the French Daphnes. One of those sank the frigate INS Khukri, not far from Diu.

Military doctrines tend to be far too durable, and naval ones most of all. The Indian Navy has accordingly kept the idea of multiple carrier-based forces close to its heart. It is the capital cost, inability to build at home yet, and shifting political emphasis that has rarely given it the luxury of even two carriers at any point of time.

This brings us back to the three questions we had raised.

I raised this question with the Carnegie Endowment’s Ashley Tellis, whose name the Indian strategic community is familiar with. Before you answer that question, he said, you have to first decide what India’s geopolitical objectives are. If these are limited to, say, a 1,000-km radius from its peninsula, it doesn’t need any carriers. Of course, this would easily take Karachi and Gwadar in its sweep. All this can be easily, and much more effectively, covered by shore-based aircraft, especially with mid-air refuelling.

If your vision is to be a player in more distant zones, he argued, say, to East Africa and South-Eastern Asia, then your need carriers. But then, what kind of carriers? So far, he argues the Indian Navy has made the worst possible choices. It has bought/built expensive, small carriers which are hugely manpower-intensive and pack too little firepower.

The current complement of a maximum of 20 or so MiG-29Ks from these ships will give you too little range, weapon-load and time-on-station. We know that the Navy just held trials for the next generation fighters, Rafale (Marine) and F/A-18. These give at least twice the fighting radius of a MiG-29 and much more warload. But then, he argues, these carriers are too small to pack a real punch.

Forty years of research and experience at the US Navy, he says, shows that to be a potent force, a carrier has to be in the 65,000-tonne plus range — which is the Indian Navy’s vision for IAC-3. But again the question of numbers, costs, aircraft, and so on will arise. In any case, money will have to be diverted for these from somewhere else. Will it be the submarines or more effective missiles or other vessels, Indian Air Force, or the Army?

These are tough questions India’s military and political leaderships will need to debate and decide on. Right now, let’s celebrate the arrival of the new INS Vikrant. Months before the first aircraft takes off from it for trial, it has already contributed by re-sparking this eternal doctrinal debate. 

By Special Arrangement with ThePrint