When he visited India last fall, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed several weapons deals, including a $30 billion agreement to jointly develop a “fifth-generation fighter,” the Sukhoi Su-35. India is already jointly developing a supersonic cruise missile (BrahMos) with the Russians, and it is buying (and building under license) the Su-30. Now that China is relying almost entirely on homegrown (if often largely copied) weapons and airplanes, India is Russia’s single largest customer for arms. Moreover, given the continued problems of Russian internal finances, Indian joint development is probably the single best source of cash for Russian weapon-design organizations.
For Americans, the Su-35 deal, if indeed it has been concluded (Russian deals often collapse over time), has two major implications. The first is that India is providing enough money to keep the Sukhoi design organization alive. The Su-35 has been flying for several years, but clearly there has not been enough money to put it into production. Now there is. The second is that Indian weapons development is still clearly oriented towards the Russians, despite U.S. wooing in the form of a version of the P-8 maritime patrol aircraft and the offer of F/A-18s. This orientation is clear enough that any American imagining license production of U.S. aircraft (or missiles) in India would have to reckon with the possibility that the technology involved might migrate north.
The Indian-Russian deal (and earlier such deals) illustrates the way the world has changed since the Cold War. India has two major national-security problems. One is the open sore represented by Kashmir, which makes it virtually impossible to make peace with Pakistan. Kashmir is just too integral to both countries. When British India was broken up, the Hindu Rajah of Kashmir decided that his Muslim-majority state should join India rather than Pakistan. For years, the Indian government distributed a speech by the first Indian Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru, explaining that Kashmir could never be given up (Nehru had lived there). As a Muslim state created as a refuge for Muslims unwelcome in Hindu-majority India, Pakistan regards Kashmir as naturally part of itself (the “k” in Pakistan stands for Kashmir).
Although active efforts by Pakistan to create insurgency in Kashmir seem to have stopped, the Indian side of the line is now racked by civil unrest fueled in part by police blunders. All of this is in addition to the frequently expressed Pakistani view that Kashmir can and should be turned into a rear area in the event of a future war. For the United States, the desire to make India an ally collides with the need to maintain close ties with Pakistan because Pakistan is in a large measure the key to any sort of success in Afghanistan—and possibly in the wider war against terrorism.
The second Indian security issue is China. Despite a recent Chinese state visit, and widely advertised trade agreements, India sees China as the long-term rival for primacy in Asia. The Indian strategic missile program is justified as a way of deterring the Chinese. Indian determination to pay heavily for a fifth-generation fighter is, again, almost certainly justified by the future evolution of the Chinese air force.
India may see the Russians as a very useful partner against the Chinese, just as during the Cold War we saw the Chinese as a useful partner against the Soviet Union. Despite the continuing problem of an unresolved border in the Himalayas, which caused a brief war (and an embarrassing Indian defeat) in the early 1960s, the main instrument China likely would use against India would be its expanding fleet. Navies are expensive. The Chinese will have to shift investment from their land forces to pay for a fleet capable of fighting in the Indian Ocean (let alone one that can deal with the U.S. Navy). Indian strategists may feel that encouraging the Russians would dissuade the Chinese from reducing investment in land-based forces, and hence help them. It would not be so much that the Russians suddenly would begin growling at the Chinese, as that the Chinese could not be sure that, in a Chinese-Indian crisis, they might have to contend with Russian forces on their border.
From this perspective, the United States offers much less. We are, it seems, the motive for a Chinese naval buildup, including carriers (steam has finally been seen rising from the ex-Varyag, the former Russian carrier the Chinese bought more than a decade ago). If the Chinese ever broker a deal with us, that will release their fleet for operations in the Indian Ocean. The Chinese navy may even be using the U.S. naval threat as a way to gain support for the kind of fleet it will eventually want to use against India. If that seems odd, there is a historical parallel: Between the two world wars both the U.S. Navy and the Royal Navy advertised each other as future adversaries in order to persuade their governments to buy enough naval strength to deal with the real threat, Japan; had they merely advertised Japan as the problem, tight-fisted governments would have bought only as much as the Japanese had, which was not nearly enough to fight far from home.
Chinese Advances?
As if to show that the Indians were right to buy a new fighter, the Chinese have displayed their own next-generation fighter, the J-20. Like the Su-35, it is described as a stealth fighter comparable to the U.S. Air Force’s F-22 Raptor. All of these aircraft have canted air intakes, wings tapered rather than swept back, and chined noses that, in theory, reflect away radar signals. Neither the Su-35 nor the J-20 has, of course, been subjected to radar cross-section tests; their developers have simply made more or less explicit claims for their virtues.
Similarly, neither has demonstrated supercruise performance, which is also a major selling point for both the F-22 and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Nor has either demonstrated the sort of avionics claimed for the F-35. They may or may not be equivalent, or even superior to, current U.S. aircraft, but no one knows. To the extent that the Chinese have penetrated all classified U.S. computer systems, they may know exactly how to duplicate our technology but it is not clear that they have been successful. It seems unlikely that two countries that are not spending much on military research and development have done as well as the United States.
The Chinese certainly have worked hard to convince us that they have leapfrogged our hoary technology to become the world’s leading power. A current news story reports that one of their strategists condescendingly told an American that Mahan was dead: China had indeed benefited from U.S. sea control, which ensured the security of sea lanes (as the Royal Navy benefited the United States at one time), but new cyber-weapons, wielded brilliantly by the world’s only cyber-power, had now outclassed us. He and other cyber-enthusiasts have not, of course, explained how people eat electrons and are clothed and housed in them, not to mention warmed by them. Perhaps the real, boring world outside the cyber-world still exists. It is much more a matter of life and death how well freighters and bulk-carriers can transport the world’s physical goods (not to mention that the cyber-world uses up a lot more energy than many imagine).
One might go further and point out that, although the Chinese are certainly working hard, they are still producing a wide range of fairly ancient weapons and systems. To what extent are they talking a much better game than they are playing? Moreover, it seems likely that the Chinese strategists who talk to Americans are much better informed about U.S. systems than their own. It was striking when, a few months ago, a Chinese publisher bought translation rights to a naval annual—except for the section on the Chinese navy. The Chinese have made little effort to conceal new ships and aircraft, but they have probably worked a lot harder to conceal figures that show how few entirely new weapons they have.
All of this inevitably brings us to the New START treaty between Russia and the United States. The treaty was controversial, and there must be some question as to whether so important an action by a lame-duck Congress is admirable. However, critics of the treaty seem uniformly to have ignored the elephant in this room: China. The treaty was negotiated as though the United States and Russia were the world’s only significant strategic nuclear powers. Surely no one in China would agree.
The rise of China is probably the most important change in global affairs since the Cold War. The world is now a lot more triangular than before but the United States is courting Russia as though it is still the only other major power despite that nation’s effective bankruptcy, at least as far as strategic weapons are concerned. It is still unclear to what extent the Russians have realized that China may expand at their expense, overturning old but unequal treaties forced upon the Chinese Empire by the Tsarists. The Russians have courted the Chinese as partners in an anti-U.S. Shanghai Co-Operative Organization, but they should be uncomfortably aware that the Chinese do not really need them.