Over the last couple of decades, China has taken enormous strides in its military modernisation. Its development and production rate is outpacing that of the United States (US), sending alarm bells ringing in Washington and around the world. In response to this threat, India’s military modernisation looks comatose. The main difference between the two lies in China’s ability to build and fight with its own weapons. Its weapons development, procurement, and deployment are marching synergistically to their common national goal of global supremacy. If India wants to develop a credible and sustainable military deterrence to China, then it must shun its traditional crutches of stop-gap imports and license production and focus on the development of its own weapons. It must develop the psyche of a builders’ nation.
Developing and utilising a domestic military-industrial (mil-ind) complex is a chicken-and-egg problem. When the industry is not mature, its weapons are difficult to utilise, but without significant employment, those very weapons cannot mature. This is the growth pain that every nation that builds its own mil-ind complex must endure. The US and China have already endured this pain and can now enjoy the fruits of their respective labours. India has also succeeded in a few fields, for example, in missiles, radars, nuclear submarines, helicopters, satellites, and satellite launch capabilities. However, as seen in several instances, particularly those projects where the escape route of importing has been present, it has failed. This worked until recently, when limited imports allowed India to maintain a quantitative edge over Pakistan and a qualitative edge over China. But these edges have now vanished. China has acquired both the quantitative and qualitative edge, and Pakistan is just an extension arm of itself.
Making matters worse, the capability gap between India and China is widening at an alarming rate. Take fighter aircraft, for example, only last year, China produced and inducted over 250 fourth and fifth-generation aircraft. That’s roughly the same amount as all the Western countries put together. Coming to the Indian Air Force (IAF), the Chinese production figures are roughly equal to half the strength of its current fighter fleet. In other words, China could replace the entirety of the IAF’s fighter fleet in approximately two years. Moreover, China started flight testing two Sixth-generation fighter aircraft last year. The rest of the world put together is testing one of the same. To counter such a threat from a Chinese qualitative leap, India plans to acquire 114 Rafale jets from France. Delivery of these aircraft is likely to begin in about five years and continue for about eight years thereafter. Some of these aircraft will be “license-produced in India under transfer of technology”. This is the second crutch that India often leans on. It makes the decision more palatable than outright imports.
The transfer of technology is limited to manufacturing know-how. The much more critical design know-why is almost always withheld as a closely guarded national secret. Even when the intent to transfer is present, it is almost impossible to accomplish. This is because design know-why mostly resides as tribal knowledge of the developers who have built, tested, validated, and operationalised a product. It is reflected best in the methods and tools developed for testing and manufacturing the product, rather than the product itself. And this knowledge is passed on to the next generation through careful handholding during the testing and initial setup for manufacturing of the next generation of improved products. Take the development of Rafale, for example. The legendary Marcel Dassault passionately argued with the French government to exit the Eurofighter program and fund its own Rafale program. He argued that it was of critical national interest to maintain the expertise the French had painstakingly gained over the development of the Mirage fighter jets. To the credit of the French government, it understood its importance and invested a whopping $2 billion in Rafale’s development programme in the 1980s to maintain this continuity. Today, it has recouped its investment many times over. India alone has ordered or is about to order Rafales and associated weapons to the tune of over 50 billion US dollars.
Study after study has shown that Rafale’s example is not an exception, but the rule. Investments made in domestic design and development capability have always provided compounding returns as long as development continuity is maintained. This is because the ambitions and defence requirements of most countries appreciate with time. If the local industry can cater to these growing requirements, then the returns are guaranteed. Iterative refinement and economies of scale continue to improve efficiency, quality, speed, and costs. Export orders tend to follow. In most cases, the industry becomes self-sustaining and profitable. The reverse is also true. If development discontinues, then the capabilities of even well-established industries start to atrophy and disappear. For example, this is evidenced in the decline in the aerospace industries in the UK and Russia. India itself has seen effects in a variety of projects. For example, after the grounding of the Marut aircraft and its turbofan engines. Or in the numerous stops and starts of the attack submarines.
If “technology delayed is technology denied”, then the same is also true for the funds required to develop that technology. This is probably one of the biggest impediments to India’s current procurement psyche, which is still stuck in decades of operations in public-sector units. A public sector unit can continue to function with machines and workers lying idle while waiting for orders. But a private company cannot. If its revenue dries up or gets sufficiently delayed, it must pivot or perish. This is the scenario with many defence private companies. They have either perished or successfully pivoted and become extremely successful in alternate areas.
A builder’s nation, especially, makes sure that its designers develop and retain expertise across all four distinct stages of development, namely stage 1: building prototypes, stage 2: testing and qualifying prototypes, stage 3: scaling up production, and stage 4: mass deployment. With endless testing cycles and without significant orders, the Indian procurement system holds its designers captive to stages 1 and 2. If India adopts the builder’s psyche, it will immediately benefit from the following advantages. Any numeric shortages can be addressed using good enough weapons. Second, the industry will get a revenue stream to sustain itself while it refines the product in the next generation. Third, this refinement is more holistic because the designer can incorporate lessons from stage 3 of mass production and stage 4 of mass deployment to ensure better manufacturability and easier maintenance for the next generation. Mass deployment exposes test cases that arise due to differences in manufacturing, usage, or environment, which are difficult to devise without these experiences.
The predominant administrative psyche in India is that of an accountant, perhaps from a colonial hangover. It prioritises getting the highest quality product at the lowest acquisition cost. When India wants to develop a new product, the user draws up the requirements predominantly considering the state-of-the-art available worldwide without considering the state-of-the-domestic industry. Next, a winner is chosen through an elaborate tendering and selection process and based on the lowest (“L1”) bid and a “no-cost-no-obligation” commitment. In other words, the entire developmental cost and risk is passed on to the builders. The industry responds by adopting the path of least risk! License manufacture of an established product under “Transfer of Technology” with no developmental risks provides the perfect route. The industry sustains itself but remains at the status quo! When the next development cycle comes along, nobody has the design know-why or test data to improve any existing product or develop a new one. The vicious cycle continues.
Now, let us contrast this to the developmental process in a builder’s nation, for example, in the US. Although the user still drafts the requirements, it is largely done from the domestic-industrial capability point of view. This “meeting the industry where it is at” is achieved by allowing industry research officers who are directly embedded within the industry or in adjacent research labs to draft the main operational requirements. The industry comes up with innovative solutions to meet those operational requirements. Next, instead of a tendering process, a time-bound competition is held. The competition proceeds in stages. At every stage, competitors are progressively filtered out, minimising their sunk cost. The selections are based on the quality and maturity of prototype development, rather than the cost. An almost insurmountable penalty is placed on technology with foreign origins. For example, in the recently concluded T-7 advanced jet trainer program, Lockheed Martin fielded the TA-50, a jet it had helped South Korea to design and develop. The TA-50 is one of the most advanced fighter trainers in the world today. A highly capable and economic jet that utilises many US-source parts, including its engines. However, it was filtered out in favour of a far less capable Boeing concept built from scratch in the US!
A builder’s psyche also ensures that there is enough volume for at least two competitors. For example, while Boeing was chosen to build the advanced trainers, Lockheed was chosen for the F-35s, and Northrop Grumman for the stealth bombers. This healthy competition drives down costs and time, maintains and rewards expertise, and generates cutting-edge, timely solutions as a consequence.
China successfully started adopting these Western approaches to the builder’s psyche in the early 1990s. For example, it developed three Fourth-Generation, two Fifth-Generation, and two Sixth-Generation fighter jets. Chinese Fourth and Fifth-Generation jets were not as capable as their Western counterparts. Nonetheless, it fielded them in large numbers, continuously gathering data and iteratively refining the designs after every few years of serial production. However, China went a step further. It combined the civilian and military industrial complexes to feed off each other’s strengths. Such mergers are often done in wartime, but China has institutionalised them during peacetime. The large-scale manufacturing know-how of consumer products can be directly incorporated in the design of its next-generation of military products. Next, the economies of scale of a consumer product can be brought to bear on the efficient manufacture of many fewer military products. This provides unprecedented cost efficiency and scale of development to both sectors, especially the military. Imagine using the extremely compact battery packaging technology of electric cars and trucks in submarines. Or, Artificial Intelligence from self-driving cars in drone swarms or other autonomous military robots. Or, the compactness of mobile phones in the avionics, the scale of commercial shipbuilding to defence ships. And so on! In fact, this model, accompanied by prompt funding, has been so successful that Western Intelligence services say that it is almost impossible to track their rapid growth. China no longer makes copies of Soviet and Western weapons. Its latest designs show significant innovation and novelty. The Western world is reactively trying to adopt this model.
It is high time for India to bite the bullet. If it can embrace the insecurities and challenges of building up its domestic military industry, then it can emerge with a credible deterrence and industrial might to rival or surpass that of China’s. Thankfully, there are some major silver linings. First, India has the world’s largest talent pool, i.e largest population of young people with a healthy respect for scientific education. Second, it has a large and fast-growing economy to fund this industry. Third, its private sector manufacturing has become quite mature in recent years and is being tapped into by major top-tier global OEMs. They are not only supplying 1000s of large and complex parts and subassemblies at globally competitive prices and ahead of schedule, but also innovating on their deliverables. Fourth, India already has some success stories that can be studied and replicated elsewhere. Take, for example, the missile complex. They have delivered missile systems that have performed admirably in conflict. The design know-why and manufacturing know-how allow them to go from a drawing board to flight testing of a new missile in months.
The missile complex exemplifies the benefits of adopting the builders’ psyche to become atmanirbhar in defence. The ability to fight with lesser than state-of-art domestic weapons in the beginning and iterate quickly over multiple generations allows holistic refinements that can provide sustainable results. The development cycle is incomplete if the product is not mass-produced and mass-deployed. “Transfer of technology” is a myth. We have tried and failed many times. True design technology is acquired through the development of the men and women who build, test, and stabilise the mass production of multiple products. Continuous employability of these folks so that their knowledge and intuition can be passed on to the next generation of developers is a critical need of the nation. There must be sufficient order volumes to justify and foster competition within the industry. In summary, remember the three mantras – “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good”, at least in the beginning. “Technology is People, People are the technology”. Developing them takes time. But once developed, they can provide exponential benefits. Be patient and persistent, because “we often overestimate what can be achieved in a year and underestimate what can be achieved in a decade”.
