Pakistani Military's Conventional Deterrence Against India's Cold Start Doctrine

It is widely assumed that India enjoys substantial conventional military superiority over Pakistan. Many speculate that the difference between the conventional military strengths of the two South Asian rivals is so great that Pakistan would be forced to quickly resort to the use of nuclear weapons in the event of an Indian attack. Are these assumptions and speculations accurate? How has the situation evolved since the nations went nuclear in 1998? Are nukes Pakistan's only deterrence against Indian aggression? Let's examine the answers to these questions based on the recent work of several analysts and authors.

India-Pakistan Standoff 2001-2002:

Soon after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, there was an incident with several gunmen entering the Indian parliament building and killing 14 people on December 13, 2001. India immediately accused Pakistan of involvement in the attack and vowed to respond militarily. Pakistan categorically denied India's accusations.

What followed was a massive mobilization of Indian troops to the Line of Control in Kashmir and the international border with Pakistan.  It was dubbed "Operation Parakram" by the Indian Army.  Pakistan responded with its own major mobilization of troops on its side of the LoC and the international border. Thus began the longest standoff between the two neighbors.

By October 2002, India began to pull back its troops along her border and later Pakistan did the same, and in November 2003 a cease-fire between the two nations was signed. Why did India back off from its explicit threats to attack Pakistan? A recent book "Defeat is an Orphan" by Myra McDonald answers this question as follows:

"Since partition, the Indian Army--with 1.1 million men compared to 550,000 in the Pakistan Army--had the advantage in terms of numbers. But it was a lumbering beast. India's vast size meant the army was spread more thinly across the country than in Pakistan, acting as a brake on mobilization. Its three armoured strike corps, designed to strike deep into Pakistan territory, were based in central India and took nearly three weeks to maneuver into position because of their sheer size. The slowness of the mobilization gave Pakistan enough time to prepare its defenses....Much of the equipment pressed into frontline service, from Vijayanta tanks of 1970s vintage to even older artillery pieces, was barely suited to fighting a modern war. It was only when the Indian Army began to mobilize that its slowness and shortages ---of road vehicles for deployment, missiles, ammunition, and war stores---became apparent. "The very first few days of Operation Parakram exposed the hollowness of our operational preparedness," said General V.K.Singh, who was then with XI Corps in Punjab. Having lost the advantage of surprise because of its slow mobilization, the Indian Army did not have enough superiority in numbers and equipment to guarantee a decisive victory. Nor could it rely on air power to make up for its weakness on the ground. At independence, India had abolished the role of commander-in-chief of all armed forces, replacing it with three weaker, co-equal, service chiefs who each had a tendency to go their own way. Thus though India's air power was superior to that of Pakistan in 2001-2002, the different branches of its armed forces were not integrated enough to consider a ground assault backed by air strikes and close air support. Had India pressed ahead with an attack on Pakistan that January--and in such situation is with the defender--it risked becoming quickly bogged down. "The slender edge that India had could have led to nothing but a stalemate and...a stalemate between a large and much smaller country amounts to victory for the smaller country, " said Brigadier Kanwal in an analysis of India's military preparedness. Nor did India have the capacity to dig in for a long war where its greater size relative to Pakistan could have eventually triumphed. Thanks to cutbacks, it had run down stocks of ammunition to save money. Even without Pakistan's possession of nuclear weapons to deter an Indian invasion, the balance of power in conventional forces was enough to give pause for thought."

India's Cold Start Doctrine:

The Failure of India's Operation Parakram forced some soul searching and a re-evaluation that gave birth to the Indian Army's Cold Start Doctrine (CSD). It is a limited-war strategy designed to quickly seize Pakistani territory without provoking a a nuclear conflict. Supposedly a secret strategy, Indian Army Chief General Rawat confirmed its existence in 2017. Here's an analysis by Indian analyst Meenakshi Sood of India's CSD and Pakistan's expected response:

"While Pakistan’s nuclear response to CSD (Cold Start Doctrine) has dominated the narrative, it is the conventional response that was devised first. In the last few years of General Musharraf’s presidency, especially between 2004 and 2007, India and Pakistan were engaged in backchannel negotiations and came tantalizingly close to finding a solution to the Kashmir issue. Then the 2007 Lawyers’ Movement forced Musharraf out of power and a new leadership took charge. With General Kayani as the new chief of army staff, the threat from India came back into focus, and so did the perceived risk of CSD. Given India’s military capability and its declared Cold Start Doctrine, Kayani believed that Pakistan could not afford to let its guard down as the country prepared according to “adversaries’ capabilities, not intentions.” He went on to give his assessment of the timeline by which India would be able to operationalize CSD — two years for partial implementation and five years for full — betraying the urgency he attached to a counter-response. Between 2009 and 2013, the Pakistan Army conducted military exercises codenamed Azm-e-Nau to formalize and operationalize a conventional response to CSD. At its conclusion, Pakistan adopted a “new concept of war fighting” (NCWF) that aims to improve mobilization time of troops and enhance inter-services coordination, especially between the Army and the Pakistan Air Force (PAF). To this end, Pakistan Air Force’s aerial exercise High Mark was conducted alongside Azm-e-Nau III in 2010, which saw the participation of over 20,000 troops from all services in areas of southern Punjab, Sialkot, and Sindh along Pakistan’s eastern border with India. The 2010 exercises were the largest conducted by the Army since 1989. PAF’s exercise High Mark, conducted every five years, synchronizes the Air Force’s response with Army maneuvers, covering a vast area from Skardu in the north to the Arabian Sea in the south. As per military sources, with the implementation of the NCFW, the Pakistan Army will be able to mobilize even faster than India. This should worry India as CSD’s raison d’etre lies in the short reaction time it requires to launch an offensive. If Pakistan is indeed able to mount a counter-offensive even before India fires the first shot, literally and figuratively, it blunts the effectiveness of the Indian military doctrine."

Source: SIPRI

India's Conventional Superiority:

Professor Walter Ladwig III of the Department of War Studies at London's Kings College  says that India's conventional edge over Pakistan is overblown. In a 2015 paper, Ladwig wrote that Pakistan’s conventional deterrence against India in the near to medium term is "much better than the pessimists allege". Here's an excerpt of Ladwig's paper titled "Indian Military Modernization and Conventional Deterrence in South Asia":

"In recent years, headline grabbing increases in the Indian defense budget have raised concerns that India’s on-going military modernization threatens to upset the delicate conventional military balance vis-à-vis Pakistan. Such an eventuality is taken as justification for Islamabad’s pursuit of tactical nuclear weapons and other actions that have worrisome implications for strategic stability on the subcontinent. This article examines the prospects for Pakistan’s conventional deterrence in the near to medium term, and concludes that it is much better than the pessimists allege. A host of factors, including terrain, the favorable deployment of Pakistani forces, and a lack of strategic surprise in the most likely conflict scenarios, will mitigate whatever advantages India may be gaining through military modernization. Despite a growing technological edge in some areas, Indian policymakers cannot be confident that even a limited resort to military force would achieve a rapid result, which is an essential pre-condition for deterrence failure".

Summary:

Common assumptions about India's insurmountable conventional superiority over Pakistan are not founded in reality, according to military experts.  Professor Walter Ladwig of the War Studies Department at London's Kings College believes that Pakistan’s conventional deterrence against India in the near to medium term is "much better than the pessimists allege".  Pakistan's  NCWF (New Concept of War Fighting) developed in response to India's CSD (Cold Start Doctrine) is designed to "mount a counter-offensive even before India fires the first shot", according to Indian analyst Meenakshi Sood. Ladwig sums it up well: "Despite a growing technological edge (over Pakistan) in some areas, Indian policymakers cannot be confident that even a limited resort to military force would achieve a rapid result, which is an essential pre-condition for deterrence failure".

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India's Israel Envy: What If Modi Attacks Pakistan?

Newly-elected Prime Minister Narendra Modi government's rhetoric about "jaw-breaking" (munh tod) policy toward Pakistan is the latest manifestation of a disease described by Indian diplomat Sashi Tharoor as "India's Israel envy".

India's Israel Envy:

India's Israel envy is reinforced by the Hindu Nationalists over-estimating their country's strength while under-estimating Pakistan's. It's aided by India's western allies' belief that Pakistan can not fight a conventional war with india and its only option to defend itself would be to quickly escalate the conflict into a full scale nuclear war.

Indian MP Mani Shankar Aiyar has summed up India's war rhetoric against Pakistan in a recent Op Ed as follows:

(Indian Defense Minister) Arun Jaitley thumps his chest and proclaims that we have given the Pakis a "jaw-breaking reply" (munh tod jawab). Oh yeah? The Pakistanis are still there - with their jaw quite intact and a nuclear arsenal nestling in their pockets. (Indian Home Minister) Rajnath Singh adds that the Pakis had best understand that "a new era has dawned". How? Is retaliatory fire a BJP innovation? Or is it that we have we ceased being peace-loving and become a war-mongering nation? And (Indian Prime Minister Narendra) Modi thunders that his guns will do the talking (boli nahin, goli). Yes - and for how long?

India's Delusions:

Indians, particularly Hindu Nationalists, have become victims of their own hype as illustrated by Times of India's US correspondent who checked into the veracity of claimed achievements of Indians in America and found such claims to be highly exaggerated: "On Monday, the Indian government itself consecrated the oft-circulated fiction as fact in Parliament, possibly laying itself open to a breach of privilege. By relaying to Rajya Sabha members (as reported in The Times of India) a host of unsubstantiated and inflated figures about Indian professionals in US, the government also made a laughing stock of itself." The Times of India's Chidanand Rajghatta ended up debunking all of the inflated claims about the number of Indian physicians, NASA scientists and Microsoft engineers in America.

Similarly, a US GAO investigation found that India's IT exports to the United States are exaggerated by as much as 20 times. The biggest source of discrepancy that GAO found had to do with India including temporary workers' salaries in the United States. India continuously and cumulatively adds all the earnings of its migrants to US in its software exports. If 50,000 Indians migrate on H1B visas each year, and they each earn $50,000 a year, that's a $2.5 billion addition to their exports each year. Cumulatively over 10 years, this would be $25 billion in exports year after year and growing.

Since the end of the Cold War, the West has been hyping  India's  economic growth to persuade the developing world that democracy and capitalism offer a superior alternative to rapid development through state guided capitalism under an authoritarian regime---a system that has worked well in Asia for countries like the Asian Tigers and China.  This has further fooled Hindu Nationalists into accepting such hype as real. It ignores the basic fact that India is home to the world's largest population of poor, hungry and illiterates. It also discounts the reality that  Indian kids rank near the bottom on international assessment tests like PISA and TIMSS due to the poor quality of education they receive.  The hype has emboldened many Indians, including the BJP leadership, to push neighbors around.

Defense Spending as Percentage of GDP Source: World Indicators

Pakistan's Response:

Pakistan has so far not responded to the Indian rhetoric in kind. It might create an impression that Pakistan is weak and unable to respond to such threats with its conventional force. So let's examine the reality.

Ground War:

In the event of a ground war, Pakistan will most likely follow its "offensive defense" doctrine with its two strike corps pushing deep inside Indian territory. Though Indian military has significant numerical advantage, Pakistan's armor is as strong, if not stronger, than the Indian armor.

Before embarking on further offensive, gains shall be consolidated.  Pakistan is also as strong, if not stronger, in terms of ballistic and cruise missiles inventory and capability, putting all of India within its range.  These missiles are capable of carrying conventional and nuclear warheads.

India-Pakistan Firepower Comparison Source: GlobalFirepower.com

In 1990 the Central Corps of Reserves was created to fight in the desert sectors, where enemy land offensives are expected. These dual capable formations trained for offensive and holding actions are fully mechanized. The Pakistan Army has ten Corps including the newly formed Strategic Corps. The Army has twenty-six divisions (eight less than India). Two more divisions were raised as Corps reserves for V and XXXI Corps. The Army has two armored divisions, and ten independent armored brigades. Presently one hundred thousand troops are stationed on the Pak-Afghan border to fight terror.

The Special Service Group – SSG - comprises two airborne Brigades, i.e. six battalions. Pakistan Army has 360 helicopters, over two thousand heavy guns, and 3000 APC’s. Its main anti-tank weapons are Tow, Tow Mk II, Bakter Shiken and FGM 148 ATGM. The Army Air Defense Command has S.A- 7 Grail, General Dynamics FIM-92 Stinger, GD FIM Red Eye, and ANZA Mk-I, Mk-II, Mk-III and HQ 2 B surface to air missiles. Radar controlled Oerlikon is the standard Ack Ack weapon system.

The ballistic missile inventory of the Army is substantial. It comprises intermediate range Ghauri III and Shaheen III; medium range Ghauri I and II and Shaheen II, and short range tactical Hatf I- B, Abdali, Ghaznavi, Nasr, Shaheen I and M -11 missiles. All the ballistic missiles can carry nuclear warheads....some can carry multiple warheads. Nuclear and conventional weapon capable Babur Cruise missile is the new addition to Pakistan’s strategic weapon inventory.  It has stealth features to evade radar to penetrate India's air air-space to hit targets. The number of ballistic missiles and warheads are almost the same as those of India. So there is a parity in nuclear weapons, which is a deterrent.

Tactical missile which can be tipped with miniaturized nuclear warhead is the latest addition to Pakistan's arsenal. It's a battlefield weapon designed to destroy enemy troop concentrations poised against Pakistan.

Air War:

Pakistan has about 900 aircraft compared to India's 1800, giving India 2:1 numerical advantage over Pakistan. India's biggest advantage is in transport aircraft (700 vs 230) while Pakistan has some numerical advantage in two areas: Airborne radars (9 vs 3) and attack helicopters (48 vs 20).

Pakistan Air Force has  over 100 upgraded F-16s and 200 rebuilt Mirage- 3's (for night air defense) and Mirage-5's for the strike role. They can carry nuclear weapons. They have been upgraded with new weapon systems, radars, and avionics. Additionally, the PAF 150 F-7's including 55 latest F-7 PG’s. Manufacture of 150 JF 17 Thunder fighters (jointly designed) is underway at the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex Kamra. The JF-17 Thunder is a 4th generation fly by wire multi-role fighter aircraft. Eight are already in PAF service. An order has been placed with China for the purchase of 36 JF-10, a Mach 2.3 -5th generation multi-role fighter, comparable in performance to the Su-30 Mk-1 with the Indian Air Force.

In spite of Indian Air Force's numerical superiority since independence in 1947, Pakistan Air Force has performed well against it in several wars. The PAF pilots have always been among the best trained in the world.

Complimenting the Pakistan Air Force pilots, the legendary US Air Force pilot Chuck Yeager who broke the sound barrier, wrote in his biography "The Right Stuff": "This Air Force (the PAF), is second to none". He continued: "The  (1971) air war lasted two weeks and the Pakistanis scored a three-to-one kill ratio, knocking out 102 Russian-made Indian jets and losing thirty-four airplanes of their own. I'm certain about the figures because I went out several times a day in a chopper and counted the wrecks below." "They were really good, aggressive dogfighters and proficient in gunnery and air combat tactics. I was damned impressed. Those guys just lived and breathed flying. "

 In 1965, Roy Meloni of the ABC reported: "Pakistan claims to have destroyed something like 1/3rd the Indian Air Force, and foreign observers, who are in a position to know say that Pakistani pilots have claimed even higher kills than this; but the Pakistani Air Force are being scrupulously honest in evaluating these claims. They are crediting Pakistan Air Force only those killings that can be checked from other sources."


Indian Media Cann't Stop Praising Pakistan Air... by zemtv

Naval War:

Of the three branches of the military, India's advantage over Pakistan is the greatest in naval strength. Pakistan has just 84 sea-going vessels of various kinds versus India's 184.

Pakistan Navy can still inflict substantial damage on the Indian Navy. The Indian Navy has 17 submarines. Pakistan Navy has ten, some are brand new and equipped with AIP. Indian Navy has 28 war ships, Pakistan Navy has eleven.

As seen in the past wars, India will attempt a naval blockade of Pakistan. Here's how MIT's Christopher Clary discusses in his doctoral thesis the Indian Navy's ability to repeat a blockade of Pakistan again:

"Most analyses do not account adequately for how difficult it would be for the (Indian) navy to have a substantial impact in a short period of time. Establishing even a partial blockade takes time, and it takes even more time for that blockade to cause shortages on land that are noticeable. As the British strategist Julian Corbett noted in 1911, "it is almost impossible that a war can be decided by naval action alone. Unaided, naval pressure can only work by a process of exhaustion. Its effects must always be slow…. ". Meanwhile, over the last decade, Pakistan has increased its ability to resist a blockade. In addition to the main commercial port of Karachi, Pakistan has opened up new ports further west in Ormara and Gwadar and built road infrastructure to distribute goods from those ports to Pakistan's heartland. To close off these ports to neutral shipping could prove particularly difficult since Gwadar and the edge of Pakistani waters are very close to the Gulf of Oman, host to the international shipping lanes for vessels exiting the Persian Gulf. A loose blockade far from shore would minimize risks from Pakistan's land-based countermeasures but also increase risks of creating a political incident with neutral vessels."

Summary:

The chances of India prevailing over Pakistan in a conventional war now are very remote at best. Any advantage that India seeks over Pakistan would require it to pay a very heavy price in terms of massive destruction of India's industry, economy and infrastructure that would set India back many decades.

In the event that the India-Pakistan war spirals out of control and escalates into a full-scale nuclear confrontation, the entire region, including China, would suffer irreparable damage. Even a limited nuclear exchange would devastate food production around the world, according to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, as reported in the media. It would set off a global famine that could kill two billion people and effectively end human civilization as we know it.

I hope that better sense will prevail in New Delhi and India's BJP government will desists from any military adventurism against Pakistan. The consequences of any miscalculation by Narendra Modi will be horrible, not just for both the countries, but the entire humanity.

Here's a video discussion on this and other current topics:


India-Pakistan Tensions; End of TUQ Dharna; Honors for Malala; Ebola Threat from WBT TV on Vimeo.

Here's an interview of former President Musharraf on an Indian TV channel:

 
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Haq's Musings

India Teaching Young Students Akhand Bharat 

Pakistan Army at the Gates of Delhi

India's War Myths

India-Pakistan Military Balance

Pakistan Army Capabilities

Modi's Pakistan Policy

India's Israel Envy

Can India Do a Lebanon in Pakistan?