Over the years, India’s Armed Forces have inducted numerous niche technologies and weapon and sensor systems.
India and China have had an impasse with regards to the boundary between both countries for many decades. The annexation of Tibet by China only compounded this issue. The perception variance about the land borders has seen both countries go to war once in 1962 and numerous stand-offs over the decades. However, the most reported, and one in which lives were lost after the 1962 war, was the Galwan Valley stand-off. The subsequent flare-ups saw the Indian and PLA Army standing eyeball to eyeball along the icy heights across the Line of Actual Control (LAC) for more than two years now. There have been numerous rounds of discussions, led by the militaries of both countries, to try and break the current impasse to not much avail.
And on December 9, 2022 few hundred PLA Army troops tried the same subterfuge, which they had resorted to in the Galwan Valley; they tried to change the status quo along the LAC. They were, as per sources, given a bloody nose, and much more, by the Indian Army. A few days later a rather interesting fact made an appearance in the media, courtesy the Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) efforts of a few individuals. This was news of the Indian Navy having deployed their P8 I Long Range Maritime Reconnaissance and Anti-Submarine Warfare Aircraft as also the General Atomics MQ-9B Sea Guardian drones along the LAC.
This news supposedly caused much consternation across the LAC. There was a spurt in the number of articles that got published to run down these aircraft in various online and print media as also trying to highlight the superiority of PLA Aircraft, including their latest J-20s. Whilst this is understandable from the Chinese perspective, what is clearly discernible is the integration in play in the Indian Armed Forces.
There has been understandably large amounts of ink and paper expended on ‘Theaterisation of the Indian Armed Forces’, with many having the domain knowledge and many more who may not have a complete understanding writing and speaking and debating about the subject. Whilst that is at a much larger level, what caught my eye was the seamless ‘integration’ of the Indian Navy’s assets into the Indian Army’s operational plans. And this is not the first time.
Over the years, India’s Armed Forces have inducted numerous niche technologies and weapon and sensor systems. Whilst some are imported, there are many that are procured through indigenous sources, contributing to the ‘Atmanirbharta’ ethos of the Indian Government. These have been gainfully employed and continue to be employed to safe-guard India’s National Interests and Security. Two such weapon/ sensor systems are the Boeing P8 I and the General Atomics MQ-9B, bought and leased respectively, from the USA.
India’s Navy is known to be operating around 12 P8 I aircraft, with the first having started operating in 2013 and having apparently undertaken more than 30,000 hours of deployments for various missions, including along the LAC in 2020 and 2021. Now, if the OSINT reports are to be believed, they continue to do so in 2022 too. The MQ-9B General Atomics drones were apparently leased in 2020 during the height of India’s crisis with China by the Indian Navy to keep a track of the vast sea areas that surround India. And they are now supposedly being used along land borders too.
The deployment of niche naval capabilities for operations of the Army highlights two aspects; the ‘plug-in’ of these systems into the Indian Army’s plans and more importantly the ability of India’s Army and Navy to pool their resources and ensure seamless integration. This is one of the aspects the ‘theaterisation’ is expected to achieve. However, if OSINT sources and hyperbole of Chinese IW efforts exhorting the superiority of their weapon systems are anything to go by, India’s Armed Forces are not really encumbered by the ‘if and when’ of ‘theaterisation’. For them integration, the business end of what they do daily, is already in play!
Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article are of the author, and are not associated with DNA English.
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