Introduction

In the thirty years before India became independent, its army was sent abroad to fight Afghans and Bolsheviks, Germans and Ottomans, Japanese and Iranians. It was a truly expeditionary force, hardened in high-intensity warfare at great distance from Indian soil.¹ But in the nearly seventy years thereafter, Indian military history has been written largely on the country's northern land borders.² The three most important exceptions have been numerous UN peacekeeping operations (1947–present), an ill-fated counter-insurgency campaign in Sri Lanka (1987–90) and a modest intervention in the Maldives (1988). But the fiercest, bloodiest and most consequential wars have been local ones. ‘India’, noted the American scholar George Tanham in a seminal 1992 essay, ‘remains a largely land-oriented nation’.³ ‘Indian military power’, agreed a major Indian study twenty years later, ‘has a continental orientation’.⁴

This is still true. Vast swathes of India's northern and eastern periphery are unsettled: China and India share the longest disputed border in the world; rebels move freely in and out of Myanmar; and the Line of Control that divides India and Pakistan is increasingly violent as the decade-old ceasefire has eroded in recent years. India's military machine – built around roughly three-dozen divisions, around half of which are foot-mobile infantry – is tailored to these traditional theatres of war. In addition, huge paramilitary forces are deployed to fight jihadist, left-wing and separatist militancy across the country.

Yet, in important ways, India is surmounting some of the natural inertia of a large land power. Its policy elite – elected leaders, diplomats, military officers and writers – are still wary of entangling alliances and military adventurism, which they associate with colonial and superpower excess, but they are nevertheless embracing new and more ambitious tasks for the country's growing military. The farthest-reaching of these tasks, figuratively and literally, is military power projection: using force hundreds or even thousands of kilometres beyond the plains of Punjab or mountains of Kashmir, right up to the Indian Ocean littoral and perhaps farther still. Such power projection was, and remains, the preserve of a handful of world powers – largely the US and its two major European allies, Britain and France, conditioned to faraway wars by history, hardware and geography. Other states, like Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), have embraced some types of power projection in recent years – though largely into adjacent territory, with extensive American involvement, and under an American security umbrella. Others still are rediscovering habits of power projection, most notably Russia with its foray into Syria since September 2015.

India is in a significantly different political and strategic position. It lacks political consensus and instinctive national support for long-distance wars, as well as the natural closeness to the US that drives and enables British power projection. Its defence budget, as we shall see, is large and growing, but remains smaller in aggregate than that of every permanent member of the UN Security Council, four-fifths that of Saudi Arabia and scarcely larger than Germany's. Most importantly, its threat perception remains dominated by the allied nuclear powers of Pakistan to the northwest and China to the north that create the daunting possibility of a two-front war.⁵ Contrary to commonly held wisdom, India's conventional superiority over Pakistan is largely a myth, given India's long mobilisation times and small munition stockpiles.⁶ India, in short, has much on its plate at home. Why, then, is it also sending signals and acquiring combat platforms – aircraft carriers, landing ships, refuelling tankers and transporters – that suggest a broadening of military horizons? And are India's emerging capabilities commensurate with these ambitions or merely the accoutrements of a rising power more interested in status than combat power?

This introduction seeks to do three things. First, it sets out why India might be investing in military capabilities that, on the face of it, divert resources away from land wars that could directly affect the country's territorial integrity: Why, in short, is India considering power projection at all? Second, it defines power projection as a concept: Why is projecting military power different from using it in the ordinary fashion? Third, it explains the component parts of power projection and therefore the structure of this study: Why is it useful to draw a distinction between air-power projection and land-power projection?

Why Power Projection?

Power Projection in Indian History

Indian power projection has not emerged out of the blue. India's military commitments during both world wars, though under British direction, were among the farthest-flung of any major power. India began sending forces to UN peacekeeping operations from 1950 onward, becoming one of the world's largest troop contributors. Today, India is giving belated attention to its contributions in the World Wars and renewed recognition to its peacekeeping operations – in part as an effort towards its bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.⁷ In addition, India also sent forces to both Sri Lanka and the Maldives in the 1980s outside of a UN mandate, though ostensibly at the invitation of host governments, and even despatched a sizeable contingent of paramilitary forces to shield Indian construction workers in Afghanistan after 2001. These episodes are detailed in Chapter I.

India acquired its first aircraft carrier, the INS Vikrant (the ex-HMS Hercules), in 1961, at a time when its per capita GDP was two-thirds the average for sub-Saharan Africa.⁸ India's naval investments dried up after a massive military defeat at China's hands in 1962. But by 1989 – when India made up just 0.5 per cent of world trade and 1.5 per cent of global output,⁹ had a per capita GDP still less than that of Pakistan, Liberia and Ghana,¹⁰ and was about to embark on over a decade of gruelling counter-insurgency in Kashmir¹¹ – the Indian Navy was operating two aircraft carriers, a fleet of Sea Harriers, and a nuclear-powered submarine leased from the Soviet Union.¹²

These capabilities were outwardly impressive but militarily limited. The civil servant in charge of India's defence ministry noted plaintively at the time that, while he had heard much talk of a blue-water navy, ‘he would be happy to have a clear-water navy’, suggesting that India's practical reach was quite limited.¹³ India's peacekeeping operations were, with a few exceptions, sedate affairs. Some that were not, like Sri Lanka, resulted in abject failure, leaving a cautionary Vietnam-like imprint on its political elite.¹⁴ India's political and economic circumstances – the breakdown of single-party dominance in the 1960s, the suspension of democracy in the 1970s, domestic insurgency and a ‘crisis of governability’ in the 1980s,¹⁵ and six prime ministers in fewer than ten years in the 1990s¹⁶ – also kept India's ambitions limited. While the late 1980s and 1990s were a time of quiet rapprochement in Sino–Indian relations, Indo–Pakistani relations were in (potentially nuclear) crisis in 1986–87 and 1990; both states fought a small war in 1999; and India faced a Pakistan-backed rebellion in Kashmir throughout the period.¹⁷ India lacked the surplus resources – economic, political and military – to project significant force at a distance. But over the past twenty-five years, these circumstances have changed greatly.¹⁸ India's rise has involved concomitant economic growth, political stability, diplomatic realignment, a re-casting of its international role and military modernisation.

Drivers of Indian Power Projection

The most important of these enabling conditions is the first: economic growth. During 1990–91, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the resulting crisis caused a spike in oil prices, and in turn a balance-of-payments crisis in India's weak and unproductive economy.¹⁹ India responded by partially liberalising its economy. In the forty years before that point, India's annual GDP growth had averaged 4 per cent; in the period since, it has averaged 6.7 per cent.²⁰ Between 2003 and 2010, a period that roughly coincides with the first term (2004–09) of the Congress Party-led government headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, India underwent the most dramatic and sustained expansion in its modern history even as the global financial crisis hit Western economies from 2007.²¹

More resources enabled more to be spent on hard power. As detailed in Chapter I, real-terms Indian defence spending more than doubled between 1990 and 2014, growing at a faster rate than all the large military powers other than Saudi Arabia and China. India spent more of this on procurement and less on salaries and other expenditure, enabling it to invest more in the large and increasingly costly platforms necessary for modern power projection. Some plans, such as that for an indigenously built Indian aircraft carrier, pre-dated economic liberalisation, but were nevertheless buoyed by it. Others followed. In 1994, for instance, New Delhi opened talks with Moscow to buy the aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov, finally receiving the ship a decade later in 2014.

As India has grown in wealth and military power, so too have its interests. As the American analyst Ashley Tellis observes, ‘India's rising national power has sensitized New Delhi to its larger interests throughout the vast Indo-Pacific region – from the east coast of Africa to the Persian Gulf to the Southeast Asian straits and even beyond, to the distant East Asian rimlands.’²² This is unsurprising: as powers rise, they typically acquire new interests, and attach greater importance to – and, in due course, sometimes defend – previously marginal ones. The US between the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century presents a number of examples of this phenomenon.²³ Crises that might once have been viewed as safely distant become transformed, by the alchemy of prosperity and power, into more pressing threats to vital national interests. As Fareed Zakaria argues, however, this process can be slow and halting, with ‘crises and galvanizing events’ resulting in reassessments of national power and bursts of expansion or activity.²⁴

The clearest manifestation of this shift is the way in which Indian politicians have described the domain of Indian interests. In the late 1990s, ‘Aden to Malacca’ became popular shorthand, invoked by Indian officials up to the prime minster himself.²⁵ In 2004, Prime Minister Singh told a conference of Indian military commanders that ‘our strategic footprint covers the region bounded by the Horn of Africa, West Asia, Central Asia, South-East Asia and beyond, to the far reaches of the Indian Ocean’, and that ‘awareness of this reality should inform and animate our strategic thinking and defence planning’.²⁶ In 2006, Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee described this as India's ‘extended frontier’. In October 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi told commanders that he envisaged India as ‘one of the anchors of regional and global security’.²⁷ Such language has come to be seen as normal, but it represents a rupture from the rhetoric of the 1980s and early 1990s.

What are those Indian interests that supposedly span such a large distance? They include a mixture of the old and the new, the explicit and the unstated. Some reflect longstanding concerns which India was previously less able to influence, while others arise from the country's deepening integration into the global economy and the changing balance of power in Asia.

Some of the most important interests might be grouped into five categories, in no particular order.²⁸ First is the regional balance of power. This includes Pakistani and Chinese influence and presence in the region, and adverse political shifts in third countries that might affect this. Second is transnational terrorism that could target India, notably in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but stretching beyond those two states. Third is economic security, including reliable energy flows and the security of Indian capital overseas. Fourth is the security and status of Indian diasporas abroad. Fifth is the so-called global commons, ranging from sea-lane security to the other types of policing and stabilisation. A sixth factor – more a means than an end – is the flourishing of the Indo–US relationship in the past ten to twenty years. While this does not drive Indian power projection, it plays a role in Indian debates over it, and is therefore considered here too.

The first of these five factors – India's interest in maintaining a favourable regional balance of power – is especially affected by the fundamental change in China's position. Between 2005 and 2015 alone, China's economy grew four times larger, while its military spending tripled. ‘Never before in history’, writes the Harvard scholar Graham Allison, ‘has a nation risen so far, so fast, on so many dimensions of power’.²⁹ The growth of Chinese power has broadened the traditional scope of the Sino–Indian rivalry from continental to maritime dimensions, and therefore lent new importance to power projection. The sustained growth of China's economy through the 2000s coincided with a period of heightened antagonism over the Sino–Indian border, likely fanned by Chinese concerns over the stability of Tibet and the implications of Indo–US rapprochement. India grew increasingly worried about the widening economic gap as well as China's military modernisation. Part of the Indian response was a localised military build-up, such as the construction of new roads and airstrips near the border, and investment in new, mountain-oriented units. But India also sought alternative means to counter Chinese strength, one of which was exploiting China's dependence on long, vulnerable sea lanes that pass through numerous chokepoints. Some Indian analysts, for instance, argue that India could ‘shut down the Indian Ocean shipping lanes whenever it chooses’, and that investment in the power-projection platforms necessary for this mission against the ‘Chinese jugular’ ought to be prioritised over land power.³⁰

It is also important to recognise that India's armed forces have translated these new interests into new roles, with greater or lesser degrees of enthusiasm. The Indian Army, the most focused on traditional fronts of all three services, has done so haltingly and with little zeal. The air force has been more eager, and the navy, the most intrinsically expeditionary, most of all. Army doctrines of 2004 and 2009 both make reference to power projection, while the latter lists ‘out of area contingencies’ as of one of five major priorities.³¹ Successive statements of Indian Navy doctrine and strategy, notably in 2007 and 2009, list power projection as a task and define ‘primary areas of maritime interest’ to include the Persian Gulf, the Cape of Good Hope and the Strait of Malacca and Singapore.³² The Indian Air Force's (IAF) doctrine of 2012 places ‘force projection within India's strategic area of influence’ in its basic vision statement.³³ That same year, India's twelfth defence plan published by the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), a body headed by the defence minister, and whose decisions are implemented by three boards, notes that its naval objectives are, inter alia, to ‘build adequate stand off capability for sea lift and expeditionary operations to achieve desired power projection force levels’.³⁴ The growing salience of power projection to the military is taken up in Chapter I.

One last factor is worth considering: growing Indo–US alignment, and American support for India as a regional security provider. This is not a major driver of Indian capabilities, but it might support them, both directly and indirectly. Beginning in the late 1990s, accelerating in the early 2000s and surging after a major Indo–US defence agreement was signed in 2005, many American observers have viewed India as a partner, or ‘natural ally’.³⁵ This rapprochement, coming after decades of Indo–Soviet partnership and Indo–US estrangement, was related to broad, structural factors – the shift of economic power towards the Asia-Pacific, the sustained economic growth of China and various American efforts to manage the effects of China's rise in Asia – as well as key policy initiatives taken by successive American presidents, notably George W Bush.³⁶

One central feature of American perceptions of India has been the notion that India's economic and military rise allows it to ‘provide’ security to a much broader area than before, rather than simply protect its own national borders. When then-Secretary of State Colin Powell underwent confirmation hearings in 2001, for instance, he told the US Senate, ‘India has the potential to help keep the peace in the vast Indian Ocean area and its periphery’.³⁷ The 2006 US National Security Strategy (NSS) declared: ‘India now is poised to shoulder global obligations in cooperation with the United States in a way befitting a major power’.³⁸ In 2009, then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced, ‘we look to India to be a … net provider of security in the Indian Ocean and beyond’, phrasing that was repeated in the next year's Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR).³⁹ Then in 2015, the NSS endorsed ‘India's role as a regional provider of security’ in more explicit terms than ever before.⁴⁰ Others have echoed this language. Ashley Tellis, who played an important role in this process a decade ago, writes that ‘if India can achieve the economic and geopolitical success it seeks for its own development, it could in time become a security provider in the Indian Ocean basin, easing U.S. burdens there’.⁴¹

Indians themselves have accepted and echoed this language, though not without significant reservations. In 2013, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh agreed that ‘we are well positioned … to become a net provider of security in our immediate region and beyond’.⁴² In 2015, India's foreign minister took this a step further and declared at the UN General Assembly that ‘India has emerged as a net security provider’ (though tellingly, she cited only non-combat humanitarian and evacuation operations in Nepal and Yemen).⁴³

Net security provision, nebulous as the term is, would seem to include at least the possibility of India contributing military forces to address threats to the regional or global ‘commons’, such as patrolling sea lanes, or contributing to multinational military operations to protect or restore the status quo, even where Indian interests may not directly be at risk. To be sure, Indian elites continue to reject any notion of a formal military alliance. India is not interested in deputising for the US as a junior partner, as Britain is sometimes seen to have done.⁴⁴ But the willingness of the Modi government to all but endorse the US rebalance to Asia and to invoke the South China Sea dispute in successive top-level communiqués is a powerful indication of India's willingness to align its rhetoric on security with that of Washington. This may well influence its future decisions about power projection. India rejected joining the US war in Iraq in 2003 after giving it serious consideration, and again rejected participation in air strikes in Iraq and Syria in 2014, but it may look upon other more modest or regionally focused requests in the future with greater favour. The US, in turn, has offered unprecedented military technology transfers to India, including assistance with India's indigenous aircraft carrier, which would meaningfully augment India's power-projection capabilities.⁴⁵

Understanding These Drivers

These factors – economic and military growth, broadening interests, the rise of China and the military's willing adoption of new roles – have been among the primary drivers of Indian interest and investment in power-projection capabilities. A sixth related factor, US support for India as a regional security provider, is shaping the Indian and international debate around India's military roles. These factors are clearly interrelated. For instance, parochial pressures for service-specific prestige platforms can shape a country's force structure and that, in turn, can generate incentives to find rationales for the new capabilities. This is a military variant of the hammer-nail problem: a country with long-range capabilities might ‘learn’ to fear more distant threats that do not trouble lesser-endowed peers. Britain and France, for instance, are far more militarily active in the Middle East than equally large economies with similar equities in the region.

It is also far from clear how, exactly, India plans to prioritise that long list of interests, which spans the highly specific to the very general, and the modest to the ambitious. Patrolling sea lanes is relatively straightforward and will be interpreted by smaller powers in benign terms; targeting terrorists in Central Asia or joining a multinational stabilisation force in Southeast Asia is much harder and more likely to elicit questions about India's ambitions. Beyond its immediate neighbours, India is currently seen as a largely – though certainly not exclusively – benign military actor, and a more activist defence posture could erode that status, particularly among those smaller states that sit closer to India than China and have in the past been at the sharp end of Indian power.

We can, however, deduce some answers to the question of prioritisation by looking at the shape and direction of India's power-projection capabilities, taken up in Chapters II, III and IV. What is clear is that Indian elites have often defined Indian objectives in aspirational terms, while making specific policy choices that point to more modest aims in practice. While Indian capabilities are growing at a quickening pace, investments have nevertheless been incremental, limited and have an emphasis on ‘dual-use’ capabilities that have applications in local wars (for instance, transport aircraft). India is currently more interested in soft power-projection missions – such as disaster relief or anti-piracy – than harder and more demanding missions. It can perform some more demanding missions, but only – as this study shows – in a narrow range of circumstances. Of course, even these limited investments lay the groundwork for a more ambitious turn to power projection, should future Indian governments opt for this.

What is Power Projection?

Why Power Projection Matters

There are plenty of books and journal articles on India's armed forces, many of them providing in-depth analysis of how India's military is structured and how it might fare in a war with Pakistan. Is power projection different?

For one thing, military history and modern strategic studies have tended to treat the use of force differently depending on whether it occurs within or adjacent to national borders, or beyond. This is in part a legacy of the distinction between interior and exterior lines of communication: the presumed ease of movement and supply of armed forces within one's own terrain relative to doing so on neutral or hostile terrain.⁴⁶ The distinction between types of force also stems from a related, but distinct, idea, popularised by the American academic John Mearsheimer, of the ‘stopping power of water’: the notion that the power of armies is sharply limited, in number and firepower, when traversing large bodies of water to hostile territory.⁴⁷ One might add to this the stopping power (or, more properly, resistance) of spatial distance in general.⁴⁸ In other words, it is harder for states to move armed forces over water than land, harder to move them over territory that is not theirs, and harder to move over longer distances than shorter ones. Naturally, it would be harder for India to fight a war deep inside Tibet or on the Arabian shoreline than on the edges of the country – much as, other things being equal, it is harder for NATO to fight in Afghanistan than on the North German Plain.

As a consequence, many scholars accord a special status to those states capable of surmounting these difficulties. Jack Levy, for instance, defines a great power as one that possesses not just ‘relative self-sufficiency with respect to security’, but also ‘the ability to project military power beyond its borders in pursuit of its interests.’⁴⁹ Great powers are distinguished in this projection by ‘the total amount of power projected, the logistical ability to sustain it over an extended period, and the ability to affect the overall distribution of power at the systemic level’ – that is, between the top handful of states.⁵⁰ In his 1993 article ‘The Unipolar Illusion’, Christopher Layne described the central feature of US hegemony – and of the responses of other large powers to it – largely in terms of power projection.⁵¹ Popular discussions of the great-power status of the UK, France and China frequently invoke possession of aircraft carriers. Power projection, then, allows a state to influence developments and exert leverage at a greater distance, and is associated with a particular status in world politics, which can itself bring particular benefits, such as inclusion at the proverbial ‘top tables’ and privileged relationships with smaller powers. Despite this, the component parts of power projection remain under-theorised.

Defining Power Projection

The US Department of Defense defines power projection as ‘the ability of a nation to apply all or some of its elements of national power – political, economic, informational, or military – to rapidly and effectively deploy and sustain forces in and from multiple dispersed locations’.⁵² This is a confusing and over-broad definition, one that would include nearly any use of military force, whether in neighbouring territory or on the other side of the globe, as well as non-military power. Power projection is better understood as the use of different elements of national power beyond – and typically a significant distance from – one's immediate land and maritime borders.⁵³ British doctrine accordingly defines ‘expeditionary warfare’ – here, synonymous with power projection – as ‘the projection of military power over extended lines of communication into a distant operational area to accomplish a specific objective’.⁵⁴ This would exclude purely non-kinetic instruments, such as sanctions. It should also presume the possibility of conflict: deploying platforms into wholly permissive environments, such as friendly port calls, is better understood as influence projection rather than power projection. Other environments, where direct combat is unlikely, but resistance and opposition of some kind are possible – such as Iran's use of naval vessels to challenge the Saudi-led coalition's blockade of Yemen in 2015⁵⁵– lie within my definition.

We should also distinguish between conventional and unconventional power projection. The latter would include the use of cyber-weapons, information warfare or support for non-state actors. Each of these activities has proved important in modern conflicts. Examples, respectively, include the kinetic effect the US achieved with its use of the Stuxnet malware against the Iranian nuclear programme from 2007 onwards; Russia's sophisticated disinformation campaign to accompany its invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territory in 2014; and the 2001 US air campaign in Afghanistan in aid of the Northern Alliance.⁵⁶ These are examples of enduring and important elements of national power, capable of being used independently or in aid of conventional power projection. In this study, they are relevant insofar as they enable and enhance conventional military power projection, something explored in Chapter IV.

A Typology of Power Projection

Having defined power projection, it is necessary to specify its different elements. Walter Ladwig, in his assessment of Indian power projection, breaks the concept down in two ways: first into three components of military power (sea, land and air); and second into nine different missions (from ‘soft’, such as non-combatant evacuation, to ‘hard’, such as armed intervention abroad).⁵⁷ In the interests of parsimony and generalisability, I propose disaggregating power projection somewhat differently, into two broad and more fundamental categories of capability: air-power projection and land-power projection.

Almost all types of power projection can be distilled down into these two forms, because kinetic effect is, in the vast majority of cases, ultimately delivered by air (air power) or ground forces (land power) even if it is conveyed by air, land and sea.⁵⁸ Air-power projection refers to destroying targets at long range using air-delivered platforms and munitions. This includes land-based and naval strike aircraft, as well as ground-, air- and sea-launched missiles. Land-power projection refers to sending ground forces to the target. This includes both the combat forces themselves – including air-assault, airborne-assault and amphibious forces – as well as the transport platforms that deliver and supply them, such as transport aircraft and ships.

There are three caveats to this schema. First, I avoid the term sea power in this study, because its relevant aspects – aircraft carriers and amphibious forces – can be subsumed under each of these two respective headings. In almost all cases, sea power is ultimately delivered from the air (as with carrier-based strike) or by ground forces (as with amphibious operations). This is an unorthodox categorisation, but it confers the advantage of allowing us to analyse comparable platforms, such as land-based and naval aircraft, alongside one another. Second, and in part as a result, I have avoided discussing sea control and sea denial. The former might be better understood as a prerequisite to power projection, rather than being projection in its own right, and is closely linked to naval air power; the latter, in an offensive sense, refers to strikes against a very specific range of targets (ships), and is addressed briefly and partially in Chapter II in the context of India's modest submarine fleet. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that the narrow case of interdiction and blockade deserves greater discussion than has been possible here. Third, I recognise that these are not clearly distinct categories. As I discuss in Chapter III, naval air power is an important component of virtually any amphibious operation, and air-assault or airborne forces are dependent on broader air-lift capabilities. Notwithstanding these issues, this schema provides a structure to assess the power-projection capabilities of any state, including India, in a systematic manner. It splits up capability by what is being projected (air strikes or land power), rather than the service doing it or the specific mission (showing the flag or a major amphibious assault).

Power-projection capabilities can also be assessed in terms of the threat, persistence and range of any given operation. Threat refers to the degree of enemy resistance to the projected combat forces; persistence to the time for which the force has to be projected and sustained; and range to the geographical and effective distance involved. This division, summarised in Table 1, is worth bearing in mind as we consider the potential applications of Indian power projection in subsequent chapters. The number and type of Indian capabilities point more to short- and medium-term operations in the lower row, and particularly in the bottom-right cell.

Table 1: Examples of Force Projection by Threat and Persistence.

	High Persistence	Low Persistence
High Threat	Longer Range	Longer Range
	Iraq War, 2003–08	Falklands War, 1982 US raid on Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan, 2011
	Shorter Range	Shorter Range
	Indian intervention in Sri Lanka, 1987–90 Israeli intervention in Lebanon, 1982	Israeli strike on Iraq, 1981
Low Threat	Longer Range	Longer Range
	NATO-led intervention in Libya, 2011	US strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan, 1998
	Shorter Range	Shorter Range
	Australian-led intervention in East Timor, 1999–2000	US intervention in Grenada, 1983

The remainder of this study proceeds as follows. Chapter I places India's defence posture in historical and regional context. Chapter II then assesses India's air-power projection, including air strikes, while Chapter III turns to land-power projection, including amphibious operations. Chapter IV examines the role of enablers – such as inter-service jointness and intelligence – in turning platforms into a capability. Chapter V concludes the study by asking why, where, and how India might use its power-projection capabilities in the future – and how other states might view this.

Notes

1 Roy Kaushik (ed.), The Indian Army in the Two World Wars (Boston: Brill, 2011).

2 Sumit Ganguly, Conflict Unending: India-Pakistan Tensions Since 1947 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2002); Pradeep P Barua, The State at War in South Asia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), parts 4–6; Daniel P Marston and Chandar S Sundaram (eds), A Military History of India and South Asia: From the East India Company to the Nuclear Era (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), chs. 10–11.

3 George K Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought: An Interpretive Essay (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1992), p. vii.

4 Sunil Khilnani et al., ‘Non-Alignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century’, Centre for Policy Research (CPR), 2012, p. 38.

5 Vinod Anand, ‘Review of the Indian Army Doctrine: Dealing with Two Fronts’, CLAWS Journal (Summer 2010).

6 Walter C Ladwig III, ‘Indian Military Modernization and Conventional Deterrence in South Asia’, Journal of Strategic Studies (Vol. 38, No. 4, May 2015); Christopher Clary, ‘Deterrence Stability and the Conventional Balance of Forces in South Asia’, Stimson Center, October 2013.

7 Ashok Malik, ‘Modi and the World Wars: India Hasn't Yet Understood Its Own Role as International Security Provider’, Times of India, 2 May 2015.

8 Calculated from World Bank, ‘GDP per Capita (Current US$)’, <http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?order=wbapi_data_value_2013+wbapi_data_value+wbapi_data_value-last&sort=asc>, accessed 18 June 2015.

9 Indian Ministry of Finance, ‘Chapter 14: India and the Global Economy’, Economic Survey 2011–12 (New Delhi: Ministry of Finance, 2012), p. 340.

10 World Bank, ‘GDP per Capita (Current US$)’.

11 Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), ch. 3.

12 International Institute for Strategic Studies, Military Balance 1989–1990 (London: IISS/Brassey's, 1989).

13 Tanham, Indian Strategic Thought, p. 66, footnote 22.

14 P A Ghosh, Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka and Role of Indian Peace Keeping Force (I.P.K.F.) (New Delhi: APH Publishing, 1999), chs. 6–7.

15 Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India's Growing Crisis of Governability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 3–9.

16 Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, 1^st ed. (New York, NY: Ecco, 2007), p. 665.

17 Kanti P Bajpai et al., Brasstacks and Beyond: Perception and Management of Crisis in South Asia (New Delhi: Manohar, 1995); P R Chari, Pervaiz Iqbal Cheema, and Stephen P Cohen, Four Crises and a Peace Process: American Engagement in South Asia (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007).

18 For a survey, see Stephen P Cohen, India: Emerging Power (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001).

19 Vijay Joshi and I M D Little, India's Economic Reforms, 1991–2001 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 1–2, 14–15, 44–45.

20 Surjit S Bhalla, ‘The How and Why of Economic Growth in India, 1950–2012’, in Robert E Looney (ed.), Handbook of Emerging Economies (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 61.

21 Ibid., p. 75.

22 Ashley J Tellis, ‘Making Waves: Aiding India's Next-Generation Aircraft Carrier’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 2015, p. 5.

23 Fareed Zakaria, From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America's World Role (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

24 Ibid., p. 11.

25 C Raja Mohan, ‘Looking beyond Malacca’, Indian Express, 11 October 2011.

26 Extracts from Prime Minister's Address, Combined Commanders Conference 2004', Press Information Bureau, Government of India, 26 October 2004, <http://bit.ly/1RYtqZ2>; quoted in Walter C Ladwig III, ‘India and Military Power Projection: Will the Land of Gandhi Become a Conventional Great Power?’, Asian Survey (Vol. 50, No. 6, November 2010), p. 1170.

27 PM India, ‘PM's Address at the Combined Commanders Conference’, news updates, 17 October 2014, <http://pmindia.gov.in/en/news_updates/pms-address-at-the-combined-commanders-conference/>, accessed 19 October 2015.

28 These categories are distilled from studies including Atul Kohli and Prerna Singh (eds), Routledge Handbook of Indian Politics (Oxford: Routledge, 2013), chs. 27–28, 31–32; David Scott (ed.), Handbook of India's International Relations (London: Routledge, 2011), chs. 12–18, 23–25; Kanti Bajpai, Saira Basit and V Krishnappa (eds), India's Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), part III.

29 Graham Allison, ‘The Thucydides Trap: Are the U.S. and China Headed for War?’, The Atlantic, 24 September 2015.

30 Shashank Joshi, ‘Can India Blockade China?’, The Diplomat, 12 August 2013.

31 Headquarters Army Training Command, ‘Indian Army Doctrine’, October 2004, pp. 6, 9–10; Anand, ‘Review of the Indian Army Doctrine’, p. 259.

32 Integrated Headquarters, Ministry of Defence (Navy), ‘Freedom to Use the Seas: India's Maritime Military Strategy’, May 2007; Integrated Headquarters, Ministry of Defence (Navy), ‘Indian Maritime Doctrine’, 2009, p. 68.

33 Indian Air Force, ‘Basic Doctrine of the Indian Air Force: 2012’, 2012, p. 1.

34 Indian Ministry of Defence, ‘Demands for Grants (2012–2013)’, fifteenth report to the Standing Committee on Defence, April 2012, p. 70.

35 Rudra Chaudhuri, Forged in Crisis: India and the United States since 1947 (Noida, Uttar Pradesh: HarperCollins Publishers India, 2014), part III; Evan A Feigenbaum, ‘India's Rise, America's Interest: The Fate of the U.S.–Indian Partnership’, Foreign Affairs (Vol. 89, No. 2, March/April 2010); C Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's New Foreign Policy (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

36 Teresita C Schaffer, India and the United States in the 21st Century: Reinventing Partnership (Washington, DC: CSIS Press, 2009), pp. 65–88.

37 Committee on Foreign Relations, ‘Nomination of Colin L. Powell to Be Secretary of State’, Hearing before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, S HRG 107–114, January 2001, p. 34.

38 White House, ‘The National Security Strategy of the United States of America’, March 2006, p. 39.

39 Anit Mukherjee, ‘India as a Net Security Provider: Concept and Impediments’, Policy Brief, S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, August 2014, p. 1.

40 White House, ‘National Security Strategy’, February 2015), p. 25.

41 Ashley J Tellis, ‘Kick-Starting the U.S.-Indian Strategic Partnership’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 2014.

42 Vinay Kumar, ‘India Well Positioned to Become a Net Provider of Security: Manmohan Singh’, The Hindu, 23 May 2013.

43 Sushma Swaraj, ‘Speech by External Affairs Minister at the General Assembly of the United Nations – The UN at 70: A Time for Action’, Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, 1 October 2015, <http://www.mea.gov.in/Speeches-Statements.htm?dtl/25878/English_rendering_of_Speech_by_External_Affairs_Minister_at_the_General_Assembly_of_the_United_Nations__The_UN_at_70_A_Time_for_Action>, accessed 19 October 2015.

44 Chaudhuri, Forged in Crisis, pp. 255–65.

45 Shishir Gupta, ‘US Offers India State-of-the-Art Gear for New Aircraft Carrier’, Hindustan Times, 6 June 2015.

46 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, revised edition, edited and translated by Peter Paret and Michael Eliot Howard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 345–47.

47 John J Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York, NY: WW Norton, 2003), ch. 4.

48 Patrick Porter, The Global Village Myth: Distance, War, and the Limits of Power (London: Hurst, 2015), p. 10.

49 Jack S Levy, War in the Modern Great Power System: 1495–1975 (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), p. 14.

50 Ibid.

51 Christopher Layne, ‘The Unipolar Illusion: Why New Great Powers Will Rise’, International Security (Vol. 17, No. 4, Spring 1993), pp. 5, 35–39.

52 Barry Leonard (ed.), ‘Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms’, amended through April 2010, Joint Publication 1-02, January 2011, p. 367.

53 For a similar definition, see Dennis C Blair, ‘Military Power Projection in Asia’, in Ashley J Tellis, Mercy Kuo and Andrew Marble (eds), Strategic Asia 2008–09: Challenges and Choices (Washington, DC: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2008), pp. 398–403.

54 Robert Fry, ‘Expeditionary Operations in the Modern Era’, RUSI Journal (Vol. 150, No. 6, December 2005), p. 60.

55 Ladane Nasseri, Nafeesa Syeed, and Deema Almashabi, ‘Iranian Aid Ship Nears Yemen, Raising Risk of Saudi Showdown’, Bloomberg, 17 May 2015.

56 See, respectively, Ivanka Barzashka, ‘Are Cyber-Weapons Effective? Assessing Stuxnet's Impact on the Iranian Enrichment Programme’, RUSI Journal (Vol. 158, No. 2, March/April 2013); Sam Jones, ‘Ukraine: Russia's New Art of War’, Financial Times, 28 August 2014. See also Stephen D Biddle, ‘Allies, Airpower, and Modern Warfare: The Afghan Model in Afghanistan and Iraq’, International Security (Vol. 30, No. 3, Winter 2005/06).

57 Ladwig, ‘India and Military Power Projection’.

58 One exception would be shore bombardment by sea-based guns.