Experts caution that despite acquiring new weapons and forging defense alliances, India’s troops remain ill-prepared for a potential confrontation in the face of escalating tensions, despite the country’s rapid military upgrade since its 2019 conflict with Pakistan, The News reported.
According to an article by reporters Mujib Mashal and Suhasini Raj for The New York Times, Indian officials faced an uncomfortable truth the last time tensions between India and Pakistan escalated into a standoff. It revealed that India’s massive military was bloated, outdated, and ill-equipped to handle potential threats at its borders.
India’s modernization initiatives gained new urgency in 2019 when Pakistan humiliatingly downed an Indian fighter plane. Prime Minister Narendra Modi invested billions of dollars in the military, pushed to increase domestic defense manufacturing capability, and sought new foreign partners for arms procurement.
The extent to which these initiatives have had an impact could soon be tested.
With India vowing revenge for a deadly terrorist attack in Illegally Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir (IIOJK) that it claims was connected to Pakistan, the two countries appear to be on the brink of another conflict. The level of tension has escalated to the point where India has threatened to cut off the passage of a significant river system into Pakistan, an unprecedented move, even during the decades-long wars between the two nations.
Pakistan, which denies any role in the attack in Kashmir, has referred to the water decision as an “act of war.”
The slaughter on April 22 of more than two dozen tourists in a scenic valley shocked Indians and placed Indian PM Modi under tremendous domestic pressure to strike Pakistan. Analysts warn of the prospect of a protracted and dangerous standoff, with diplomatic channels between the two nuclear-armed countries having withered years ago and global powers currently distracted by other crises.
However, analysts suggest that India may be restrained by the risk of exposing a military that is still undergoing transformation.
In 2018, a parliamentary report categorized 68% of the country’s military equipment as “vintage,” 24% as current, and only 8% as state-of-the-art. Five years later, in an update, military officials admitted that there had been insufficient change due to the scale of their challenge.
While the share of state-of-the-art equipment had nearly doubled, according to parliamentary testimony in 2023, it still remained far less than what is required for a modern army. More than half of the equipment remained outdated.
Experts suggest that these constraints could lead Modi to choose a more surgical option — such as limited airstrikes or special forces raids close to the border with Pakistan — that appeases public anger, reduces the risk of embarrassing mishaps, and avoids escalatory retaliation. The Pakistani government has vowed to respond in kind to any Indian attack.
While public sentiment may drive Modi to strike Pakistan, India’s democracy could also pressure him to ensure that the situation does not spiral out of control.
In Pakistan, where the military establishment has long steered the country from behind the scenes, the leadership has a freer hand and may find more domestic benefits from allowing the confrontation to escalate.
India projects confidence in its ability to easily thwart Pakistan’s military. If this assertion is tested, another of India’s neighbors, China, will be watching closely.
In recent years, India has considered China a more pressing border challenge than Pakistan, especially after a deadly clash between their troops high in the Himalayas in 2020 and repeated Chinese incursions into Indian territory. The country’s military leaders have had to prepare for the prospect of a two-front war, a complex task that strains resources.
The 2020 confrontation occurred a little over a year after Pakistan downed the Indian jet and took its pilot into custody. Dushyant Singh, a retired Indian general who leads the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, a New Delhi-based think tank, said that the plane episode had been a wake-up call for the Indian military.
Since then, he stated, India has explored “multiple routes” to address its military shortcomings. It has deployed new missile defense systems acquired from Russia despite American objections, as well as dozens of fighter jets from France and drones, helicopters, and missiles from the United States.
With global supply lines increasingly unreliable, India has also invested heavily in the local production of military equipment, establishing defense industries that, while currently slow, will improve the military’s long-term readiness.
“Our war stamina has to be of a nature which has to go beyond our existing capabilities,” Singh said.
“These will not give you results just overnight. They will take some time,” he added regarding the modernization efforts.
Analysts noted that the challenges in modernizing India’s military are multifaceted: bureaucratic, financial, and geopolitical.
Modi has been trying to streamline the defense procurement process and improve coordination among the different forces, which has proven difficult due to ongoing turf battles. The death of a key general tasked by Modi with streamlining the military in a helicopter crash in 2021 further complicated these efforts.
India’s economy is now the world’s fifth largest, about 10 times the size of Pakistan’s, providing more resources for the military. However, India’s defense spending still amounts to less than 2% of its gross domestic product, which military experts deem insufficient, as the government prioritizes the immense needs of its large population
