India must build deterrence against China that makes the resource gap less decisive

Maj. Gen. (Dr) Rambir Mann (retd)

A useful way to understand India’s China problem is to begin not with a border incident, a map, or a weapons system, but with scale. SIPRI estimates China’s military expenditure in 2025 at about USD 336 billion, marking its 31st consecutive annual increase. India, by the same estimate, spent about USD 92.1 billion. The difference is not merely large; it compounds. If both countries were to increase military expenditure by the same seven per cent in a year, China would add about USD 23.5 billion in new spending. That single increment would be roughly a quarter of India’s entire annual military expenditure and more than India’s annual capital outlay for modernisation and procurement.

This arithmetic is offered to understand the logic of the argument. India is not going to close the aggregate resource gap with China by attempting to mirror Chinese scale across every domain and it should not try. The more relevant strategic question is whether India can make that gap less decisive in the specific theatres and technologies where its security will be tested. A weaker power can still deter a stronger one if it can impose costs, complicate planning, deny easy success and exploit vulnerabilities that the stronger power cannot easily remove.

The concern for India is not only that China is spending more. It is that China’s growing lead in artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, shipbuilding, space, semiconductors, industrial capacity and defence production may begin to shape Indian choices before it is ever used in war. A technological gap, once absorbed into the assumptions of political and military institutions, can quietly narrow the range of options that decision-makers believe are available to them. That is a form of pressure and coercion that operates without a formal threat, through perception rather than ultimatum. Guarding against it is therefore not just a military task—it is a political and institutional one.

China Is Not Merely Modernising Its Military

Much of the Indian discussion on Chinese military modernisation still treats it as a larger, faster and better-funded version of India’s own indigenisation effort. That is an inadequate frame. Prof. Tai Ming Cheung’s work at the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation offers a more useful way of understanding the shift underway in China. He distinguishes the earlier emphasis on military-civil fusion from the broader idea now described as Integrated National Strategic Systems and Capabilities, or National Strategic Integration. The objective is not simply to pull civilian technology into defence production. It is to align critical parts of the economy, science and technology system, security apparatus, industry and military power into a coordinated national structure.

This matters because it suggests that China is not simply buying more equipment. It is preparing the state, the party and the economy for long-duration strategic competition, including the possibility of crisis or war. Xi Jinping’s repeated call for ‘extreme thinking’ asks the system to prepare for worst-case conditions rather than rely on the stabilising effects of trade and globalisation. Cheung’s May 2025 IGCC brief also points to the growing presence of officials with defence-industrial backgrounds in China’s political system. He notes that roughly 20 percent of China’s provincial-level administrations are led by officials from defence-industry backgrounds. A separate CSBA study, looking at the Politburo after the 20th Party Congress, identified four of its 24 members as belonging to what it called the defence-industry faction, about 17 percent of the body.

The precise numbers will change as personnel change, but the trend is more important than the percentage. China’s defence-industrial constituency has moved closer to the centre of power. Its mobilisation planning, strategic reserves, supply-chain security, civil-military coordination and industrial resilience are not secondary matters. They are increasingly part of how China understands national power. India must therefore avoid the comforting assumption that China is only outspending it. China is also organising better for the kind of sustained confrontation in which scale, resilience and speed of adaptation matter as much as platforms.

Gwadar port of Pakistan. Photo by Umargondal

After Taiwan

Taiwan remains the most visible flashpoint in East Asia, but India should not treat it as a separate problem that ends at the Taiwan Strait. The question for India is what China may do if it stabilises the Taiwan problem on terms favourable to Beijing, or if it believes that American resolve has weakened. President Trump’s 2026 visit to Beijing, his remark that the United States sits ‘9,500 miles away’ from Taiwan, and his refusal to give a clear assurance on future arms sales unsettled assumptions about the deterrence equation. Xi Jinping, by contrast, restated China’s red lines with clarity.

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is not inevitable as it would be operationally difficult, militarily risky and strategically uncertain, as recent wars in Ukraine and Iran launched by big powers have shown. Taiwanese public opinion also remains overwhelmingly opposed to Beijing’s ‘one country, two systems’ formula. The more likely Chinese approach, at least in the near term, is coercion without full-scale war: economic pressure, information operations, cyber disruption, military signalling, diplomatic isolation and political exhaustion. The aim would be to make resistance seem increasingly costly and external support increasingly doubtful.

For India, the significance of Taiwan is not only what happens to the island. It is what a post-Taiwan China, or a China less preoccupied by Taiwan, may do elsewhere. The dragon’s approach towards India could have elements of the same playbook but would be majorly different in content as India is too large, nuclear-armed and strategically deep. It would mainly seek to demonstrate that the one Asian power with the demographic, geographic and civilisational scale to balance it can be pressured, isolated or kept strategically cautious. It would also serve as the leader’s next rallying point, for its audience and enable sustenance of the existing system. In that sense, India is not a secondary concern after Taiwan. It may become the next major test of Asian hierarchy.

International Engagement

The South China Sea attracts international attention because it is deeply embedded in the world economy. CSIS’s China Power project estimates that roughly one-third of global shipping passes through it. Any serious disruption there affects insurance costs, freight rates, energy flows and supply chains in countries far removed from the dispute. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the European Union and the United States all have a direct economic interest in keeping that theatre open. That interest automatically creates diplomatic cost for Beijing.

The Himalayan front has no automatic international audience, and the Line of Actual Control does not have the same global impact. No global shipping lane runs through Tawang. No insurance market prices risk on the Doklam plateau. A confrontation in eastern Ladakh does not immediately raise freight rates in Europe or disrupt semiconductor production in East Asia. The world may express concern, and India’s partners may offer support, but the economic machinery of globalisation does not automatically move in India’s favour. The same is also partly true of India’s western front. An India-Pakistan crisis attracts international attention because of nuclear risk, but it does not carry the same direct economic stake for outside powers.

This produces a difficult but necessary conclusion. If China wants to impose costs on India while limiting the automatic international response, the Himalayan frontier is a rational theatre as it lowers the diplomatic price of pressure. China can combine infrastructure build-up along the LAC including in disputed areas, cyber and grey-zone pressure, water leverage on the Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra system and Pakistan-channelled coercion in ways that affect India directly without forcing excessive international diplomatic pressure.

Contours of the Siege are Already in Place

China’s peacetime leverage over India is already considerable. India’s goods trade deficit with China reached a record USD 99.2 billion in FY 2024-25. Reuters has reported that more than 60 per cent of India’s pharmaceutical ingredients are sourced from China, while Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) imports from China account for 70 per cent or more of India needs. Rare earth exposure is sharper still. Official trade data showed that India imported 93 per cent of permanent magnets in FY 2024-25 from China. Beijing’s rare earth export restrictions have already shown how quickly such dependence can become a strategic vulnerability.

These dependencies constrain policy without any military action. They create hesitation in crisis, complicate industrial planning and raise the cost of strategic choices. They also interact with the Pakistan factor. The May 2025 India-Pakistan clash gave the collusive threat a more operational face. Pakistan relied heavily on Chinese-origin systems and support, and that China used the episode to test, observe and promote its defence capabilities.

Pakistan’s higher visibility in Gulf security diplomacy adds another layer. The 2025 Saudi-Pakistan mutual defence pact does not by itself alter the regional balance. It does, however, raise Pakistan’s profile in a region where India has spent years carefully balancing relations with Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iran, Israel and the United States. Whether or not this is the product of a fully designed Chinese strategy, the effect is favourable to Beijing. India’s exposure to pressure widens beyond the Himalayas and the subcontinent. The Chinese-supplied platforms being deployed in West Asia, add a different context to the Pak-China coalition.

The Siliguri Corridor remains the physical symbol of this layered vulnerability. At its narrowest, it is about 20 to 22 kilometres wide. It connects the Northeast to the rest of India while sitting close to the Chumbi Valley and to Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh. Its significance does not lie only in the possibility of being physically cut. It can be used for pressure, signalling and diversion, especially if activated alongside economic, water and Pakistan-linked tools, forming part of a larger system of coercive possibilities.

His Holiness The Dalai Lama

India’s Complex Deterrence Problem

India’s strategic problem is sometimes compared with Israel’s, but the comparison can mislead. Israel has an explicit American security guarantee, compact territory, shorter response lines and conflicts that often carry enough energy-market significance to trigger immediate outside engagement. India’s position is different. It must deter two nuclear-armed adversaries from different directions, one of which has far greater economic and technological capacity, without the support of a coalition. This means that India’s deterrence must be built around Indian geography, Indian political conditions and Indian resource constraints, and imported analogies are useful only up to a point.

Rising to the Challenge

India’s answer cannot be symmetrical competition. It needs a deterrence model built around denial, dispersal, reconstitution and cost imposition. The purpose should be to make Chinese planning against India complicated, uncertain and expensive, rather than to match every Chinese capability with a similar Indian platform.

The first requirement is a much denser ecosystem of distributed and attritable capability. Cheap unmanned systems, drone swarms, loitering munitions, electronic warfare nodes, decoys, deception networks and locally reconstitutable sensors can complicate Chinese operations at far lower cost than traditional platform-for-platform competition. Directed-energy systems and high-powered microwave capabilities should be pursued towards this end for integration into layered air-defence and counter-drone architecture.

The second requirement is a stronger undersea posture. Geography gives India advantages in the Indian Ocean that it does not possess on the land border. Every PLAN vessel entering the Indian Ocean operates far from China’s principal home ports and through identifiable chokepoints. A larger Indian submarine force, better undersea surveillance, seabed sensors and maritime domain awareness around the Andaman and Nicobar Islands can impose persistent risk on Chinese naval deployments without India having to compete surface fleet for surface fleet. Similar constraints can be imposed on the ‘Belts and Roads’ that end up in the Arabian sea or the Bay of Bengal, 

The third requirement is terrain contestation in the Himalayas and around Siliguri. The aim should not be only to defend vulnerable geography. It should be to make an adversary spend time, ammunition, aircraft, drones and electronic effort suppressing Indian positions before it can pursue its own objectives. High terrain should become a cost-imposition system. Properly prepared, India’s most acute geographic vulnerabilities can be converted from passive exposures into active operational burdens for the adversary.

The fourth requirement is credible long-range precision strike against the logistics system that sustains Chinese coercion on the Tibetan plateau: rail nodes, fuel storage, forward air bases, bridges, depots and command infrastructure. China’s infrastructure build-up gives it speed and reach, but it also creates visible and targetable nodes. While guarding against escalation, India needs the credible ability to hold at risk the systems that make coercion possible.

Finally, India needs practical counter-space and cyber resilience. The emphasis should be on jamming, dazzling, redundancy, passive protection, rapid restoration and distributed command networks. What is important is the quiet ability to keep fighting when satellites, communications and networks are under pressure. The objective should be to deny China confidence that it can blind or paralyse India early in a crisis.

India’s Political Leverage

India also has political leverage that it has historically used with great restraint. That restraint has often served diplomacy well. It has allowed India to manage crises, preserve options and avoid unnecessary escalation. But excessive caution can become a strategic liability if it allows adversaries to impose costs on India without paying any reputational or political price in return.

Tibet is the clearest example. China’s anxiety over the succession to the Dalai Lama is real and growing. India’s hosting of the Tibetan government-in-exile gives New Delhi a standing political card, but India has mostly treated that card as something to preserve rather than employ. The argument is not for reckless escalation or formal recognition that would close diplomatic options. It is for a more active informational and diplomatic approach that ensures the succession issue is visible internationally on India’s terms, not only on Beijing’s. India must build upon this leverage to the maximum extent possible, while keeping below Chinese red lines.

Xinjiang presents a related but more sensitive issue. Western governments and human-rights organisations have repeatedly raised concerns about China’s treatment of Uyghurs. India has generally remained quiet because it has avoided widening confrontation with Beijing, while it continues to absorb diplomatic, military and economic pressure from China and Pakistan. India may consider a calibrated Indian voice in multilateral forums where Xinjiang is already discussed.

The China-Pakistan leverage needs also to be deterred through Pakistan’s immediate vulnerabilities. Balochistan’s insurgency, local resentment around Gwadar and CPEC, and repeated attacks on Chinese interests create costs for Beijing’s land-bridge strategy. Gilgit-Baltistan, through which CPEC passes, has its own grievances and strategic sensitivity. Afghanistan forces Pakistan to divide attention between its western and eastern fronts. None of these require India to intervene in any direct manner except to enable their diplomatic visibility, analytical development and presence in India’s strategic messaging. Deterrence is not only a matter of weapons. It is also a matter of ensuring that adversaries cannot externalise costs without consequence.

exercise Shaheen

Industrial Base Behind Deterrence

The capabilities described above cannot emerge quickly enough from a procurement system designed mainly to replace foreign suppliers with domestic ones. India’s Defence Acquisition Procedure has helped advance indigenisation, but indigenisation and strategic autonomy are not the same thing. A weapon assembled in India but dependent on imported propulsion, seekers, chips, energetic materials or rare earth supply chains is not fully sovereign in a crisis.

India therefore needs a doctrine of controlled dependence as full autarky is unrealistic, while import dependence is dangerous. The correct approach is to identify what must remain sovereign regardless of cost and what can be co-developed, licensed or pooled with trusted partners, provided access cannot be easily denied in crisis.

This also requires procurement cycles suited to the technologies involved. Software-defined systems, AI-enabled tools, drones, counter-drone systems and electronic warfare cannot wait for five-to-seven-year acquisition loops. They require outcome-based procurement, rapid trials, spiral upgrades, standing test ranges, multi-year demand signals and surge capacity in munitions and energetics. The issue is not whether the private sector signs more contracts. The issue is whether the state can create the certification pathways, production depth and operational feedback loops fast enough to matter.

Approach to National Security

The lesson for India is that it must learn from the seriousness with which China treats national security as a whole-of-government project. India’s present system still tends to divide security, industry, technology, finance, skilling, infrastructure and diplomacy into separate administrative lanes, each moving at its own pace and often according to its own procedures. Against an adversary that is integrating these domains, such fragmentation becomes a strategic liability. India therefore needs a national security-industrial architecture in which the armed forces, ministry of defence, finance institutions, scientific agencies, private industry, start-ups, state governments, academia and skilling institutions work from a common threat-based roadmap. Critical capabilities such as propulsion, sensors, seekers, secure communications, energetics, rare-earth processing, AI-enabled systems, cyber resilience and unmanned platforms cannot be treated as procurement items alone; they must be treated as national missions with assured funding, clear ownership, time-bound outcomes and accountability at the highest political level. China’s example shows that armament in the 21st century is not merely about buying weapons. It is about organising the state so that technology, industry, infrastructure, human capital and diplomacy reinforce military power before a crisis begins. India’s democratic and federal structure will necessarily produce a different model, but it cannot afford a slower or more fragmented one.

Conclusion

India may soon face a difficult strategic environment which may not engender outside support despite its extensive diplomatic outreach and global visibility. This will arise from geography and economics, as the theatres in which China can pressure India most effectively are not necessarily the theatres in which the rest of the world immediately feels pain. 

This is why the oft repeated slogan of ‘strategic autonomy’ may not remain merely a diplomatic preference but may become a condition on the Himalayan front. India cannot assume automatic coalition intervention, and it cannot also match China’s aggregate resources, but it can make Chinese planning against India uncertain, costly and politically risky. This requires three choices. India must resist the psychological effects of China’s technological lead. It must build asymmetric capabilities that impose costs in the precise theatres where China is exposed. And it must use its political leverage over Tibet, Xinjiang, Pakistan’s fault lines and CPEC more deliberately, without crossing into reckless escalation.

China made American power projection inside the first island chain increasingly difficult not by becoming America’s global equal, but by identifying specific vulnerabilities and exploiting favourable cost-exchange ratios. India has comparable opportunities in the Himalayas, the Indian Ocean, the Tibetan plateau, the information domain and the vulnerabilities of China’s partners. The next decade should therefore not be treated as a period for incremental procurement. It should be treated as the decisive period for building an Indian deterrence architecture that makes the resource gap less decisive than Beijing assumes.