India’s conventional strategy in a nuclear environment: a neglected link

ABSTRACT

Indian military strategy has tended to neglect the link between the conventional and nuclear domains in a nuclear weapons environment. We argue that this anomaly is evident in two broad areas: the conception of “war,” and the complexity produced by new technologies that span the two domains. First, we show with empirical evidence that “limited war” in a nuclear environment is misnomer: the reality is more appropriately called “marginal conflict” owing to its extremely restricted nature. It follows that strategic planning and posture must be tailored accordingly. We then highlight the risk of escalation produced by conventional technologies that carry potential cross-domain nuclear effects, noteably with respect to cyber, artificial intelligence, missile defence and space. We note that the complex strategic effects produced also complicate military-strategic interactions traversing geographic domains, noteably South, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia. The paper concludes with some reflections on the reasons for these lacunae in Indian strategic thinking and what might be done about them.

Keywords:

• India
• nuclear weapons
• conventional strategy
• China
• Pakistan

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Anit Mukherjee for thoughtful comments on an early draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The Indian government told Parliament that the total number of military fatalities in seven conflicts were some 13,946, but the figures are questionable: they vary with sources, include unknown operations, and count the more than 2,000 non-combat deaths that occurred in the India-Pakistan crisis of 2001–02 (Mukherjee 2014).

2. A commonly used definition of “war” is 1,000 combat facilities, which was indeed true of the Kargil conflict, but this is an arbitrary number and other definitions, equally arbitrary, exist (Bonn International Center for Conversion N.d.). Nehra’s argument is more sensible.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rajesh Basrur

Rajesh Basrur is Senior Fellow, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and Adjunct Professor, Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University.

Shang-Su Wu

Shang-Su Wu is assistant professor, Rabdan Adaemy, Abu Dhabi.