{"id":209191,"date":"2020-06-23T07:25:09","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T07:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=209191"},"modified":"2020-06-25T06:15:24","modified_gmt":"2020-06-25T06:15:24","slug":"india-has-closed-military-gap-with-china-along-border","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=209191","title":{"rendered":"India has closed military gap with China along border"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pramit Pal Chaudhuri \u2013 Hindustan Times June 22, 2020<\/strong><\/h1>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Indian Army convoy moves along the national Highway leading to the disputed border. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

India has the upper hand in military deployments along its border with China<\/strong><\/span><\/a>, says a recent Harvard University assessment. If the Chinese attacked, co-author Frank O\u2019Donnell of the US Naval War College told HT, \u201cdue to the larger permanent military presence of Indian forces vis-a-vis Chinese forces along the border areas, India would eventually be able to force China back across the LAC, although casualties would be extremely high on both sides.\u201d One unknown in such a conflict would be China\u2019s ability to use cyberattacks to disable Indian communications and logistics.<\/span><\/p>\n

Over the past dozen years India has not only closed the gap with China in this military theatre, it may now have a slender superiority. Indian officials largely concur with this view though prefer to stress India does not enjoy a position of complete dominance. Chinese military assessments began recognizing this problem from the mid-2000s and this may have contributed its border belligerence.<\/span><\/p>\n

India and China have a similar number of soldiers along the border, a little over 200,000 each, but a portion of Chinese troops are reserved for the Russian border and handling insurgents in Tibet and Xinjiang. India holds a slight edge in fighter aircraft numbers but, more importantly, its Su-30s are superior to any Chinese fighters in the area and its base network allows it to better survive the missile exchanges that would follow. \u201cIndia has more and better aircraft along the border, more experienced air crews, as well as a resilient basing position,\u201d says O\u2019Donnell.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cChina is regularly operating with a permanent Indian conventional force advantage along its border areas,\u201d says the report. It notes this is not \u201ctypically acknowledged\u201d in Indian debates and optimists regarding the military balance against China were \u201ca minority\u201d in India.<\/span><\/p>\n

For decades, going by the People\u2019s Liberation Army\u2019s journal, Science of Military Strategy<\/em>, India was rated only as China\u2019s number four external security concern. This has begun to change. The China National Defence Daily by 2013 spoke of India\u2019s \u201csurge of forces\u201d along the border. A 2017 Nanfang Daily survey of Chinese strategic thinkers said some were worrying that \u201cthe defensive strategy of the Indian Army has shifted . . . toward the offensive.\u201d Two Chinese experts on territorial issues warned in 2014 that \u201ckeeping our military\u2019s advantage in the Sino-Indian border area is not only a national defense requirement, but also to prevent China from being disadvantaged in border negotiations.\u201d There is more literature in the Chinese language about India catching up in terms of military infrastructure and force deployment after the Doklam crisis, says General G. L. Narasimhan Rao, head of the Centre for the Study of Contemporary China.<\/span><\/p>\n

India is far from being in a position of military preponderance. Indian defence officials point to the \u201ctouch and go nature\u201d of the mountain environment means a numerical advantage in men and aircraft can be wiped out by inclement weather. China keeps most of its military firepower along its Pacific coast and would almost certainly redeploy to go for a \u201cround two,\u201d warns O\u2019Donnell. M. Taylor Fravel, an MIT professor who has written on China\u2019s border policies, says that \u201cChina has just over 10 percent of its ground forces [in its western theatre], a very large part of the country, and not even all these troops are focused on India.\u201d But because China does not want to deploy a large fraction of its forces in Tibet or Xinjiang, he added, \u201cI think this disparity in the local balance makes China especially sensitive to changes that improves India\u2019s position.\u201d Did India\u2019s steady military improvement trigger Beijing is harder to ascertain. O\u2019Donnell thinks China\u2019s greater border aggression is a general trend evident in its behaviour with all its neighbours and not just about India.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

India may have a slight military advantage over China in the disputed border region, say two Western observers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78,61,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-Commentary","category-Current_Affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=209191"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":209193,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209191\/revisions\/209193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=209191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=209191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=209191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}