Aircraft Carriers Do Not Offer a Strategic Panacea

Aircraft carriers, despite their great cost, have always been seen as strategically important by the Indian Navy due to what must be a misplaced sense of grandeur. Today, they are seen as vital for India to establish a naval presence as a world power, even as they have lost their signifi cance elsewhere.

Atul Bhardwaj (atul.beret@gmail.com) is ICSSR Senior Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi.

On 21 February 1946, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi wrote to G E B Abbey, private secretary to the viceroy, Archibald Wavell, suggesting that the small and medium sized vessels of the Royal Indian Navy (RIN) be converted for the purpose of fishing to provide an additional source of food supply to meet the food crisis in India.¹

This was the time when RIN mutiny was at its peak and vice admiral J H Godfrey, the flag officer commanding, RIN announced on the All India Radio that he would blow up the very navy he was commanding, if the striking ratings did not surrender. It was from such deep internal crisis that independent India’s navy emerged to launch its quest to be a blue water fleet. The direct influence of British officers (vice admiral S H Carlill was the last British Chief of the India Navy) on Indian Navy lasted till 1958. However, the intellectual imprints of British admiralty have ensured that the 21st century Indian Navy continues to rely on carrier battle groups (CBG) as the lynchpin of its maritime strategy.
The fading away of the old British aircraft carrier (INS Viraat likely to be decommissioned in 2018) and the commissioning of Russian made 44,570 tonne INS Vikramaditya (R33), and the likely induction of indigenously built 37,000- tonne INS Vikrant by 2018 represent a symbolic coming of age for the Indian Navy.² The twin carriers are expected to serve the navy for the next 40 years. The fleet may see a probable addition of another 65,000-tonne indigenous vessel after a gap of 10 years or so.
Despite the impressive numbers, one remains sceptical about the strategic thought behind the Indian Navy’s perspective planning. The only visible novelty in Indian naval thought is the use of postmodern symbolism to sell its modernisation plans to the public at large. Till a few years ago, the navigation track of a warship at sea was a highly guarded secret. In the age of transparency, the full electronic track of R33, from Russia to India, is now available on social media for the military-machine enthusiasts to speculate on all the minor and bold alterations of courses ordered by the command.
However, what is more crucial is that despite the decline in universal appeal of aircraft carriers, they continue to be the “queen ship” of the Indian Navy. Over the past half a century, besides laying the foundation of the Indian naval air arm, the two ex-British carriers have given India no tactical or strategic advantage in the Indian Ocean. In fact, the history of the aircraft carrier purchases by India clearly suggests that they were bought for considerations other than the strategic.
Misplaced Ambitions
In 1956, when India decided to buy the redundant British light fleet carrier HMS Hercules, there was neither any justification nor any reason for a nine-year-old infant nation to catapult itself to great power status by spending precious foreign exchange in times of extreme food shortages in the country.³ The cost of the old English carrier was close to one instalment (£50 million or Rs 65 crore) of what the British had promised to pay the Indians under the Indo-British sterling agreement.⁴ Interestingly, the Indian Navy’s aircraft carrier dreams were drawing funds from the Second Five-Year Plan that had envisaged a foreign exchange shortfall of Rs 11,000 million and was looking at raising Rs 1,000 million through new private foreign investment (Tyson 1956: 123).
The mid-1950s was the time when India was demanding the delinking of the rupee from the plummeting sterling and converting the £542 million Indian sterling reserves into dollars. Fearing damage to the international role of the sterling, the Bank of England and the Chancellor of the Exchequer pleaded with India to refrain from taking any drastic step. It is in this period of financial stress that both India and Britain initiated the Gnat fighter and aircraft carrier deals (Anderson 1999: 269).
Perhaps the only solace was that India was not the only third world nation on which an old aircraft carrier was being dumped. Debt-ridden nations – Argentina, Brazil and Thailand were the other gullible buyers in late 1950s and early 1960s.
India’s second aircraft carrier INS Viraat (ex-HMS Hermes) came along with British Sea Harrier aircraft. The deal for Harriers for the Indian Navy had started as early as 1970s (Krishnappa 1972: 1862, 63).In 1972, the British aerospace industry as well as their government pitched for the sale of 100 Sea Harriers to the Chinese (Crane 1981: 227-50).The Chinese who had a more urgent strategic requirement of getting Margaret Thatcher to sign an agreement for return of Hong Kong indulged the British till 1979 and finally refused to buy the Harriers. India had no substantial aim vis-à-vis Britain, yet, misplaced ambitions of grandeur led New Delhi to inadvertently pay for Thatcher’s extravagance in 1982 Falklands war through the purchase of Hermes and Harriers.
The third Indian carrier, INS Vikramaditya, was built by the Soviets towards the fag end of the Cold War. The dissolution of Soviet Union and the declining Russian stature in international politics in the Boris Yeltsin era made the Russian distaste for aircraft carriers even more pronounced. The Russians offered the raw platform to the Indians free of cost. The deal was signed with the Russians in 2004.
The Indian naval planners’ dogmatic allegiance to aircraft carriers has led to the refurbishment of Vikramaditya at a cost of $2.33 billion. Such spending is being justified in terms of India’s growing economic reach and the global gaze shifting to the Asia-Pacific region. According to Kaplan, of late, a greater interest is being evinced in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).⁵ The European interest in IOR is being fuelled “as a result of what is perceived to be a growing mixture of shiny gunboats, new naval stations and geopolitical intrigue among countries of the IOR such as India, China, the United States and Iran” (Botez 2012: 369). Admiral (retd) Arun Prakash posits, “The surge of interest in the Indian IOR, of which India is a major geographical constituent, is
a new phenomenon.”⁶ Some Chinese scholars see “a progressively assertive India, setting the pace of the impending maritime rivalries among the great powers” (Yoshiyara 2012: 489). Contradicting the Chinese, former naval chief, admiral Sureesh Mehta feels that India “lacks strategic thinking in terms of maritime affairs, and also paucity of planning to counter Chinese moves in the IOR”.⁷ This growing mismatch between the Indian and Chinese perceptions of maritime security in the IOR is being aided and exploited by the America’s “Asia pivot” and their resolve to maintain their predominance in the region.
Current Debates
The current debates based on booming Indian economic might and intensification of competition with China are indicative of a fresh urge among the maritime strategists to resurrect Mahanian concepts of sea power and naval strategy (Mohan 2012). What is discernible in these trends is that there is a growing salience of strategic theories that are pushing India to look beyond their borders, and move into a global arena using their sea power. As a former naval officer says,
Earlier India’s naval strategy was focused on its ability to defend its territorial waters and the accompanying Exclusive Economic Zone. But the expansion of India’s maritime interests has seen an increase in the area of interest/influence extend`ing from Suez to South China Seas, instead of earlier Aden to Malacaa (Ghosh 2013).
The advocates of a Realist foreign policy see Indian Navy’s proactive operations in IOR and South China Sea as an instrument to achieve great power status for India (Pant 2012). The key tenets of Realist thought on Indian maritime security are: (1) maritime security is intrinsically linked to trade and commerce; (2) the impact of national sea power is best felt beyond the exclusive economic zone (EEZ); (3) the Indian Navy should be the net security provider in the IOR; (4) naval bases on foreign territory are a must to exercise sea power; and (5) the Indian Navy is the foremost instrument of Indian military diplomacy.
This seeming theoretical clarity is largely based on western scholarship on maritime affairs. Behind such formulations is a belief that the next stage of capitalist development in India and China will lead to imperialism – a competition for colonies. And since historically, force at sea has been a quintessential ingredient for any imperial powers, therefore, India must be a sea power to be a great power. Such delusions of grandeur lie behind the borrowed strategic themes as “out of area operations”, cooperative security at sea and the support they render to the concept of aircraft carrier as the bulwark of Indian naval strategy.
Subsidising the Imperium
However, what is normally overlooked is that theories which are applicable for truly great sea powers like the US may not fit the medium power requirements. The reach and range of American maritime assets places it in an absolutely different league. Despite this common knowledge, naval planners continue to insist on making Indian Navy a miniaturised version of the US navy. Fifty years ago, India paid to bail out England, and now, once again, India is digging deep into its pockets to sustain the dwindling fortunes of the falling American Empire.
In the next couple of decades, India is not likely to reach a stage where it would be able to exercise any maritime adventure on its own steam – position its CBG to launch its fighters for firing missiles on enemy land from the sea. Operating any aircraft carrier in close proximity to enemy territory enhances its vulnerability manifold. Establishing sea control even for a limited time of period is a difficult proposition in the age of sophisticated submarines and nano-technology. Therefore, the only option for the Indian Navy to use its costly carrier and its organic air is to operate under guidance and cover of the US military diplomacy, a proposition that would not only curtail strategic autonomy, but create conditions for the Indian fleet to be constantly in tow of the US fleet.
It is now well established that the US navy is shrinking under the burden of budget cuts. To obviate this difficulty, the US wants to broaden its military alliance base beyond the Atlantic. The game plan as enunciated by US military strategist Thomas Barnet is

We want to administer the global security system, not rule it. Like those ‘system administrators’ that keep the Internet up and running, America needs to play system administrator to the global security network. We need to keep globalisation up and running – to be, in effect, its bodyguard.
Rekindling the imperial desires of France, Japan and the Indian elite is part of the global security structure envisaged by the US.
The Indian strategy disregards facts and relies on theories that make it don an oversized jacket designed to fit an imperial power. Strategies for medium powers need not always rely on marrying military means with political objectives. The problem arises because conventional strategists are preoccupied with “use of force” and its calibration to achieve national objectives. This assumes that the state’s monopoly over means of violence is absolute and the only restraining factor is the adversary’s military strength. Therefore, adroit management of limited wars or threat of use of force is considered to be the lynchpin of strategy.
It is such thinking that makes costly platforms like aircraft carriers look attractive national weapons and disregard all military lessons that a medium power like India must learn from the experience of invaded nations. What prevented the sophisticated, modern military machines in Iraq and Libya from offering resistance against their invaders is a question that needs to be studied in greater
detail. Spending money on techniques to penetrate no-fly zones created by a big power and jamming the incoming missiles of an invading airpower should be the strategic imperative rather than splurging money on gaining a false sense of prestige.