Power for Projection

AVM Anil Golani (retd)

A strategic force can be defined as a military force capable of assuming command of its own medium by its own resources. Until the advent of the aeroplane, the army and navy were valid expressions of the nation’s ultimate military power on land and sea respectively. With the development of aircraft, however, that ceases to be true — Lord Trenchard

‘The bomber will always get through.’ This phrase used by Stanley Baldwin in his speech A Fear for the Future given to the British Parliament in 1932 had its essence in the fact that the man on the street cannot protect himself from a relentless bombing campaign from the air. True to the times that were then prevalent there was very little air defence could do until the invention of radars before the second world war.

The nature of war continued to change and evolve with the growth of technology, however the three basic characteristics of war i.e., firepower, mobility and the freedom to exploit the same remained. Firepower increased with modern precise munitions, mobility increased from mechanised forces on the ground to fast attack crafts, frigates, submarines and carrier strike groups on the high seas and supersonic stealth fighters and bombers in the third dimension. Until the advent of air power, warfare remained two dimensional and therefore air power in its initial years was treated as an adjunct of land or maritime power. It was only when the effects of utilising the third domain gained salience that a gradual and reluctant admission of the air force as an independent and separate fighting force was acknowledged.

In an amorphous and changing global environment the concept of national security has also evolved from the ancient kingdoms and civilisations to the present-day nation state. Major wars on the scale of the world wars in the last century may have been averted in the last seven to eight decades but inter and intra state conflicts continue to challenge national, regional and global powers in their quest for peace. National security has come to encompass varied components from environment, energy, economy, food, health, cyber, demography, physical infrastructure etc. The threats to a nation’s security also increasingly emanate from diverse domains of space, cyber, information, economic, biological and perception/ cognitive warfare domains. As technologies continue to mature and innovations challenge the strategists and policy makers the salience of air power or aerospace power as the key enabler to achieve national security objectives remains unchallenged.

Emerging as a growing economy despite the Covid pandemic, India continues to increase its GDP year after year. Surpassing the United Kingdom, India is today the fifth largest economy in terms of nominal GDP even as its per capita GDP remains low because of the size of its population. The latest Global Firepower Index ranks India in the fourth position among the 140 countries considered in the survey.

Having unsettled borders with two nuclear armed neighbours who pose a collusive threat, India has no option but to have a strong and resilient military capability that can deliver in the hour of need. As one of the largest democracies that takes pride in its strategic autonomy by not being a part of any military alliance, India also has the moral obligation of being a net security provider in the region. Aerospace power forms an essential and inescapable component of the nation’s comprehensive national power equation without which peace would not only be difficult, but well-nigh impossible to maintain and sustain.

Air Power as a Deterrent

The key to maintaining peace is to ensure that you have a strong capability with the national resolve to utilise it when required. India has come a long way from the limitations imposed upon the employment of air power in the 1962 Indo-China war to the punitive strikes carried out by the IAF in February 2019. The air strike carried out by the IAF early in the morning on 26 February 2019, by Mirage 2000 aircraft on a terror training camp across the border in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan took the adversary by surprise. Carried out at a time and place of its choosing, in retaliation to the Pulwama terror attack a few days earlier, the message was loud and clear.

Air power had demonstrated its key attributes of precision, surprise, stealth and shock effect by these air strikes. Even though there was retaliation by the PAF a day later, the reality had probably dawned that the risk of escalation would probably be a heavy price to pay. The retaliatory strike and the capture of the IAF pilot Wg Cdr Abhinandan after his MiG-21 had been shot down was proclaimed as victory by the PAF, terming it ‘Operation Swift Retort’ largely for the domestic audience in Pakistan. With India on the ‘moral high ground’ international opinion was against Pakistan and air power had proved itself a valuable coercive and deterrent tool, forcing Pakistan to change its behaviour. The punitive strike carried out by the IAF ensured that Pakistan would think twice before aiding and abetting terror strikes across the Line of Control.

The IAF capability since then has increased with the induction of Rafale fighter aircraft equipped with long range precision stand-off weapon capability. The nation’s air power capability would need to continuously train, equip and demonstrate