Analysis of India's Ability to Fight a 2-front War 2018

by Ravi Rikhye

  6.10.3 Pay

  This is an interesting topic. One way to approach it is to use the Parity Purchasing Power metric. There is no implication it is precise, but it is considered the best way of comparing “real income” in different countries. According to the World Bank[144] PPP per capita World GDP for 2016 is $16,000 rounded. India is $6,500, and US is $57,500. Extrapolating, a US$1 is worth $1 in the US, and $9 in India. The reality is more complex. For example, an Indian online store next-day delivery for one pound of tomatoes is ~ $0.25[145]; Giant Food in my area is $1.70,[146] or 7:1. That accords well with 9:1 keeping mind food in the US is cheap compared to per capita. But should I want a car, a Toyota Corolla 1.8-liter is $19,000 basic in US[147] versus India $25,000 basic.[148] This is closer to 1:1.3. We will use the 9:1 figure, but keep the calculation difficulties in mind. How is PPP estimated?[149]

  The basket of goods and services priced for the PPP exercise is a sample of all goods and services covered by GDP. The final product list covers around 3,000 consumer goods and services, 30 occupations in government, 200 types of equipment goods and about 15 construction projects. The large number of products is to enable countries to identify goods and services which are representative of their domestic expenditures.

  If like myself, you have no life, the OECD manual for PPP calculations runs an amusing 448-pages.[150] I haven’t read it yet; thanks to a kind person sending a generous Amazon gift card, for once I have more reading on hand than I can handle.

  Here we run into a problem because the OECD’s calculation is that the PPP dollar = INR 4.5, where the World Bank is giving PPP $1 = ~INR 9, or half.

  A US Army 1st Lieutenant gets ~$41,000/year[151], and on World Bank figures, the Indian Army lieutenant (the grade of 2nd lieutenant has been abolished) gets $36,000.[152] By OECD standard the Indian officer is getting $72,000, which is an exaggeration, because it would Indian PPP per capita at ~$10,000/year, or middle income. And this is manifestly untrue: India remains a poor country. The pay rates given here are without allowances. I have not counted allowances to keep the calculation simple.

  What are typical US and Indian salaries for a college graduate with a BA? $59,000/yr[153] vs $12,000/year for leading colleges; but the Indian military academies are also leading schools. So on PPP, that equates to $60,000 vs India $108,000, and we start to see a problem. The Indian civilian is being paid 3x that of his army counterpart. True the Indian officer gets many allowances, but the big ones are for operational deployments. By comparison, the US civilian gets 1.5x more than the Army officer. On a strict economic comparison, it makes no sense for a capable youngster in India to choose the service. Of course, many join for the prestige, tradition, and the satisfaction in being a soldier. At some point, the hardships and physical/mental pressure begin outweighing the intangibles. My guess is this happens when the gap starts widening after 1.5x.

  So, let the GOI increase military salaries by 50%, combine that with the other two suggestions, and the problem should remedy itself. Before the MoF starts whining, we basically have around 40,000 Army officers. The relative sums of money are small. As for the inevitable civil bureaucrats moaning and weeping about pay parity, there is no parity in job descriptions. If the civilians do not understand a 35-hour week in perfect safety is much easier work than serving in the Army, draft them into service and give them the higher pay.

  6.10.4 Reservists

  The Indian Army, despite being the largest in the world, puts little reliance on reserve units. We have a few dozen battalion-sized units of infantry and technical troops, but not a single artillery, air defense, or tank battalion, though we used to have the latter until 1972 when they were shifted to the regular army. There are no helicopter units and not a single brigade in the structure, leave alone divisions and corps. By contrast, the US Army has 8 high-readiness National Guard reserve divisions for 10 active divisions. The Indian Army’s reasoning is as follows.

  (a) In a short war, there is no time no mobilize and give pre-deployment training to TA units. (b) There is no money. (c) TA units are unreliable and cannot fully substitute for army units. The flaw lies in assuming that wars will be short. If all you can do is a short war, then you’ve forced yourself into a self-fulling prophecy. The answer to this is that to gain advantage of adversaries who also are focused on short wars because they don’t have the capability for a long war – Pakistan, or they don’t want to risk the consequences of a long or longer war. This is a bit like entropy. Before battle, you have an entropy of, say, 1 which means your army and events are completely within your control. Every day the war continues, the situation gets increasingly disordered, degrading your ability to predict the future and to control your army. Which in turn keeps increasing the risk.

  If, however, we build a long-war capability, this provides us a powerful tool to dominate the battlespace after the adversary’s control is sufficiently degraded. If he’s out of steam on D+21, but you are equipped to fight at least to Day 42, better yet to Day 63, you will win. This requires money. Possibly $4-billion/day of consumables will be required, so for a 63-day war, you will need $250-billion of parts, ammunition, POL, medical and engineer supplies, attrition equipment, and so on, or $160-billion for 42-days. Of course, you don’t store that much ammunition. You add emergency production lines to the Ordnance Factories, harden the factories against air and missile attack, stack raw materials, and bring the extra production on-line no later than D+ 10. The estimates are at the high end, but – “hope for the best, prepare for the worst”.

  It can be agreed right away there is no money for readiness, and that in turn means TA units will not be fully capable. Years ago, I calculated that a US reserve unit under “One Army” cost as much as 20% of a regular unit. In this system, reserve units are ready to go within days, that too because reservists must be given time to disengage from the civilian part of their lives and arrive at their mobilization base. A quick back-of-envelope calculation is possible. Of the $40-billion Indian budget, 56% goes to the Army, or $22.4-billion.[154] The Army has 50 division equivalents, so each will cost $448-million/year to maintain, operate, and modernize. 33% is the modernization budget, or $148-million. A division in the reserves would cost $96-million a year, of which ~$32-million is for capital procurement. The $32 million for the reserve division is hopelessly inadequate. It would buy just 5 T-90 tanks or 5 M-777 towed 155mm guns or 10 IFV or three helicopters, or 150 vehicles. We’d require 219 years just to get a modern reserve armored division fully equipped. Later, you will see calculation that a 21st Century armored division on US scales would cost $7-billion. You ask: why can’t we use older equipment placed in reserve? Two reasons. (a) for full “One Army” status US style, we’d have to buy the same equipment as regular divisions possess. (b) There is no reserve equipment because new raisings have consumed from war reserve stocks, and the four new divisions are still short of artillery and engineer equipment. Tanks, artillery, IFVs, and APCs are unavailable in reserve stocks, in any case. Further, the US Army can equip its army One Army style because the post-Soviet era saw large amounts of modern equipment rendered surplus.

  Nonetheless, it’s worth considering having, say, 12 reserve divisions by keeping a 20% cadre always manned, and by buying/refurbishing used equipment. This might cost $1.5-billion per division for equipment, say $0.25-billion/year for six years, plus the same for O&M. So say $450-million/year per division, and $5.4-billion/year for 12. Naturally, detailed studies are needed to select the most cost-effective course.

  .

  7. Pakistan Army

  7.1 Introduction

  7.2 Strategic Doctrine: Countering India’s Cold Start

  7.3 National Command Authority (nuclear weapons)

  7.4 Order of Battle

  7.5 Peacetime deployments

  7.6 Equipment

  7.7 Special Forces

  7.8 Army Aviation

  7.9 Border Forces

  7.10 Miscellaneous

  7.1 Introduction


  Keeping track of the Pakistan Army is not easy, especially from overseas. Mandeep Singh Bajwa and Rohit Vats have been of great help. Rohit has a real knack for using open online sources. He identified two new Pakistan armored brigades by looking up the branches of a gym chain! Reminds of the old days when one had to go through telephone directories which were not easy to get. The directories are now online, but the number of connections has grown exponentially. One would have to write a search program, and that is way beyond my computer capabilities. Rohit also searches closed bank accounts, among other sources. Still, the Pakistan Army is more secretive than the Indian, and the Indian is quite secretive. It no longer hits the roof if the vastly expanded press says, for example, that 72nd Mountain Division is being raised at Pathankot. Recently Sparsh Amin told me that I and II Indian Corps had switched artillery divisions; he used Army PR pictures.

  Currently, such secrecy is pointless because anyone who needs to know knows. As far back as the mid-1980s, I obtained an Indian brigade list from a “foreign power”, and no, it wasn’t the CIA. During the 1986-87 mobilization crisis, I managed to persuade a friend in the US Embassy to show me the CIA maps of the crisis. With great ceremony a map was produced, one million-scale, available open source and in the Institute of Defense Studies and Analysis, then at Barakhamba Road in New Delhi. The map showed a few Chinese cities, and that was it. Obviously, there were no notations. Also obviously, someone had a sense of humor and was twisting my tail. The US also had an orbat for the Chinese; I had to ask, purely pro forma; and of course, they couldn’t share it. Very dog-in-the-manger attitude, but that’s the US. By the way, maybe ten years ago, a young Indian enthusiast produced a detailed orbat, 95% correct, of the Indian Army, using years of Sainik Samachar, the official Indian military fortnightly. Though it was all open source, I had to file it away, and as an Indian citizen, not to use it, even though I lived overseas. Sometime later the web I saw a list of postal codes for every Indian Army brigade, cantonments, air units, naval units and so on. It was without attribution, but the signature (the way the information was organized) suggested it had to be my young friend. I sent an email suggesting he might want to remove it, as GOI had no sense of humor about these matters. It was duly removed. Again, I was well out of reach of GOI, but twenty years in India rewires the brain for extreme paranoia.

  And, of course, I must tell the story of my good friend Brigadier ZA Abbassi, the military attaché in Delhi, expelled for spying, and who I learned very recently made a 1990 attack across the northern CFL entirely on his own initiative.[155] This is only a speculation, but the brigadier might have taken the idea from a book of mine. His ideas may have been used to formulate the 1999 Kargil plan. At any rate, in 1965, just as the war was about to start, he was posted to a unit in the Pakistan 1st Armored Division. He rushed off. On arrival at the train station, he realized he did not have a location to which he was to report. A cycle rickshaw person said: “tell me the unit and I’ll take you”, and he did. So much for wartime field security.

  Now, recently the Pakistan Army began construction of a cantonment for a brigade each in Swat and Kanju. The army for a long time had said it needed a permeant division in the area for internal security. Was the Pakistan Army kind enough to tell me the brigade numbers? Of course not. Os there a single local who does not know the numbers? There might be one if he is deaf, blind, and dead. A friend asked what was so important about the number. What difference did it make? It was with the greatest restraint I avoided saying “And what difference does it make to the universe that you are alive?” If you are a collector of information, to be good at it you must be compulsive to the point of being a high-functioning autistic. In other words, you must be totally unbalanced. I once spent two years trying to get the numbers of the Pakistan Air Force’s Crotale SAM squadrons. I managed to get five, and I have been upset for 30-years I never got the sixth. It’s likely in some PAF history book, but these things cost money, and us unpaid spies never have any.

  Particularly annoying about the Pakistan Army is that it makes 3-5 enquires for every weapon it buys, and in any case, China deliveries are not announced unless its warships or fighters. So, while I have a decent orbat, the equipment list, especially for tanks and artillery, is unreliable. In recent years, Pakistan has mechanized several brigades. The APCs are no problem because Pakistan has been buying large number of used M-113. But how many Chinese IFV/APC Pakistan Army has is a mystery, as is if the mechanized and armored brigades since the last delivery of 48 M-109s SP 155mm took place in 2010, for 26th Mechanized Division. After that one rumor follows another. Chinese SP guns, Chinese wheeled SH-1 guns, South African wheeled SP guns, Ukraine wheeled SP guns, Turkish SP guns, Ukraine SP guns. My notes say the 115 M-109 delivered in 2009 and 2010 was part of an order for 297. No sign of the rest. Now take the alleged 2017 order for 100 Ukraine Oplot MBT.[156] For tank details, see Army Technology.[157] Has this really happened? No telling.

  Pakistan’s Southern, Central, and Northern Commands

  The creation of three commands may not be the long-anticipated remedy for the unusual field command structure of the Pakistan Army, where GHQ controls all nine corps plus Strategic Forces Command directly. Technically, the regional commands appear to be upgradations of the army’s logistic areas. They will take over more of their corps’ administrative responsibilities than was the case with the logistic commands.

  A peculiar feature of Pakistan’s commands is they use staff from the corps HQs: XII (Quetta) for Southern; IV (Lahore) for Central; and X (Rawalpindi) for Northern. The corps HQ is also the Command HQ. An odd arrangement to have the corps HQ simultaneously providing the Command HQ. Mandeep Bajwa says its because Pakistan is trying to economize on manpower. Conversely, a Command HQ need have no more than 60 staff and a signal company and can be co-located at the Corps HQs base for other services.

  Brian Cloughly, the former Australian defense attache to Pakistan, who is ritually quoted anytime there is major defense article about Pakistan, has an interesting and plausible reason for the arrangement. The Pakistan Army is short of high-quality senior commanders and staff. Though Cloughly does not say so, the Pakistan Army is very skinny in terms of its non-fighting formations. It would make sense not to add three 3-star generals and their staffs including signals battalion and other units to sustain the Command HQ. But the corps staff is supposed to run its corps, not be responsible for two more corps. Both in 1965 and 1971 GHQ was severely handicapped in directly handling all corps by itself. In 1965, there was only I and IV Corps, plus the Kashmir and southern fronts. In 1971 there was I, II, and IV Corps plus Kashmir and the Southern front. After that war, Pakistan wised up and raised X Corps for Kashmir and V for Sindh. This was followed by XI and XII for their western front because of the Afghanistan war, and then XXX and XXXI Corps for Sialkot and Multan, free I and II Corps to focus on strike.

  Budgets

  Reliability 2 (Good)

  GDP $300-billion 2017

  Government expenditure 20% of GDP

  Defense budget 18.4% of federal expenditure (versus

  12% for India.)

  Personnel 625,000

  The Army is commonly said to have 550,000 personnel, though even given Pakistan’s lean support structure this seems low. Plans are to replace 50,000 orderlies, cooks, and other non-combatants with civilians. Pakistan Army refers to this as a reduction.

  Circumstantial evidence suggests a total military of 900,000, which would give an Army of 700,000 plus.

  A new security force of 15,000 troops for protection of the China-Gwader rail line and highway is being raised, its command agency is not known, and the figure is not counted here. It has three brigades with 9,000 army troops and 6,000 paramilitary troops. A security brigade has also been raised for Karachi port.

  2015-16 $6.8-billion

  The figure of $7.6-billion is widely quoted. We have taken PNR 700-billion, the official figure at PNR 102 = US$1, the rate in July 2015 when the budget was
presented.

  The Pakistan defense budget is not audited by the civilian government. Below is the breakdown, converted at PNR 102 = US$1, for July 2015 when budget was presented. (April 2018: PNR 118 = USD 1)