Why bastion strategy might not be a great idea to emulate for the Indian Navy. An extract
Anubhav Shankar Goswami
Given the limited range of India’s current SLBMs, neither bastion nor open ocean patrol operations are entirely feasible at this point. However, it is only a matter of time before Indian SSBNs patrol with long range missiles. Intermediate and intercontinental SLBMs will put the National Command Authority (NCA) in the sweet dilemma of which deployment strategy to ultimately choose for executing a credible Continuous at-Sea Deterrence (CASD). Vice Admiral Vijay Shankar, the former head of the Strategic Forces Command (SFC), had claimed in a 2014 think-tank event in Washington that India’s sea-based deterrent would eventually “be secured in havens, waters we are pretty sure of, by virtue of the range of the missiles. We will be operating in a pool in our own maritime backyard”. Admiral Arun Prakash is more forthcoming. He claims that it is “likely that India’s SSBNs will operate from sanctuaries or ‘bastions’ in the deep waters of the Bay of Bengal, where they can remain under the protective umbrella of our naval units”. Therefore, one can assume that the Bay of Bengal could become a bastion space for Indian SSBNs.
Drawbacks of Bastion Strategy
Once the K-4 SLBM is commissioned, Indian SSBNs can cover all of Pakistan from the safe waters of the Bay of Bengal itself. However, the K-4 will not have the same deterrent effect on China because it will fail to reach Beijing from the Bay of Bengal. Nevertheless, longer range SLBMs like the 5,000km K-5 and 6,000km K-6 are in the pipeline; their acquisition will allow Indian SSBNs to target heartland China from the Bay of Bengal itself. But a Soviet style bastion strategy has many drawbacks. Soviets had inadvertently helped their adversary overcome the ‘basic strategical challenge of naval battle’, i.e., ‘identifying the enemy’, by placing the majority of their SSBNs in bastion waters. A coordinated effort to attack the SSBNs could be made once the bastions have been located. As a function of time, the ability of a navy’s general-purpose force to protect its SSBNs within the bastion waters will degrade due to constant efforts by enemy intelligence sources to marshal their assets for SSBN detection. As a result, the ‘pro-bastion’ forces would face heavy demands during a protracted conventional conflict.
Risk of Detectability-at-Launch
The risk of detectability-at-launch is another potential issue specific to the bastion strategy in a combat scenario. A single SLBM volley can bring two adverse consequences for a firing SSBN. First, the SSBN may reveal its location, triggering a counterattack. Unfortunately, the SSBN cannot move very far before giving up its bastion cover unlike open ocean operations; so its survivability become difficult to sustain. On the other side, in open ocean patrolling, the SSBN could be able to escape the deadly consequences of a counter-battery firing. Second, by launching its missile, the SSBN will disclose its presence to any adversary ASW assets with prior knowledge of the bastion, increasing the likelihood that it will launch an immediate hunt.
A Chinese SSN lurking outside of a potential Indian bastion, for example, might notice the SLBM launch and be able to go after the Indian SSBN.
Loss of Surprise Element
In addition, the bastion strategy lacks flexibility in terms of patrol areas and missile launch positions. SSBNs operating in bastions lose the ability to surprise an enemy by firing their SLBMs from unpredictable launch locations. That means that if the Indian Navy adopts a bastion defence, it will essentially give away the flight path information of its SLBMs to adversaries. China could concentrate radars and other sensors along the flight path of Indian SLBMs to ensure timely detection and accurate tracking.
SSBNs in the bastion waters are also ‘limited to a degree in their ability to escalate quickly, losing the short warning time available to forward deployed SSBNs’, writes Walter M. Kreitler of the US Navy. If the distance between adversaries is great, SLBMs launched from bastions would have longer flight times and more predictable attack trajectories, compared to missiles launched from patrol areas closer to an adversaries’ mainland. In a nutshell, adopting a bastion approach will deny New Delhi the ability to launch short-notice strikes from forward waters. This is particularly worrisome in the case of ensuring deterrence vis-a-vis China because of the country’s distance from the Bay of Bengal. If Indian SLBMs are launched from the South China Sea, they would have a shorter flight time and a more unpredictable attack trajectory, compared to SLBMs launched from Indian coastal waters which will give a few minutes more to the Chinese antiballistic missiles to intercept the incoming missiles. However, diving into the South China Sea has its own problem. Indian boats could be exposed to Chinese ASW which will trigger ‘use-them-or-lose-them’ pressure.
Bastions are Resource ‘Blackhole’
Finally, creating bastions will require additional naval assets to protect Indian SSBNs. The Soviet Union had to use conventional naval surface ships and SSNs to protect its nuclear assets when it restricted its Atlantic operations to only the Barents Sea. India does not yet have complete maritime control over the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal. If a PLAN Carrier Battle Group (CVBG) in the Indian Ocean becomes a reality in the future, Chinese ASW forces would be able to monitor the Bay of Bengal from the various naval bases and ports China has helped build in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) to make India’s patrolling SSBNs less secure. India would, thus, have to keep updating its conventional naval capabilities in order to prevent a possible PLAN CVBG from pursuing Indian SSBNs in the Bay of Bengal bastions. This may entail putting more SSNs and surface naval assets into service, an undertaking that might prove challenging for the Indian Navy. Therefore, the bastion strategy might not be a great idea to emulate….
DETERRENCE FROM DEPTH: SSBNS IN INDIA’S NUCLEAR STRATEGY
Anubhav Shankar Goswami
KW Publishers and Centre for Air Power Studies, Pg 197, Rs 1,280