On a single day in January this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi commissioned into the Indian Navy three indigenously built capital warships: a destroyer, a frigate, and a submarine. Soon after, another Krivak III-type frigate, built in Russia for India, joined the Indian Navy’s western fleet. While that is a noteworthy force accretion over the time span of just a month, India still has a long way to go before it deploys the 200-ship navy that one New Delhi force planner pithily described as “the minimum fleet size needed for securing a neighborhood where there are fewer neighbors than hoods.”
Warship numbers are vital for the range of missions that India’s navy executes daily. It is required to monitor and protect over 7,500 km of peninsular and island coastline and more than 2 million square km of exclusive economic zone. The navy’s offshore patrol vessels safeguard commercial shipping from being plundered by pirates, criminals, and terrorists operating from lawless waters astride the Horn of Africa. Having willingly taken on the roles and responsibilities of the Indian Ocean’s “gatekeeper,” the Indian Navy is expected to keep open the international shipping lanes, stretching from the Strait of Hormuz and Gulf of Aden to the Malacca Strait, through which over 30 percent of the world’s trade flows.
This requires the navy to create a regional security architecture and to build capacities and capabilities within lightweight regional navies to police these waters. India defines its maritime frontiers, and hence its security responsibilities, expansively — from the African coast in the west; to the Southern Ocean and Antarctica in the south; and to Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia in the east.
Alongside these economic, constabulary and diplomatic responsibilities, Indian warships are constantly preparing for their primary role of warfighting. The navy needs to defend itself against a powerful alliance between an emerging superpower — China — and Pakistan, China’s cat’s paw in India’s neighborhood. Complicating New Delhi’s security matrix is its principled avoidance of alliances. That leaves India’s 160-odd warships and 20 submarines fully stretched against China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), which fields close to 500 surface combatants and 60 submarines. In the event of hostilities with India, the PLAN can expect to be reinforced by the Pakistan Navy, which is steering course toward a fleet size of 70 warships and 13 submarines.
New Delhi would rely on an asymmetric response, such as building its strategic forces and signaling a nuclear threat early. But alongside this, the Indian Navy would also have to pack more conventional firepower into its warships. The former Soviet Union’s navy provided an example, with its Udaloy- and Sovremenny-class destroyers bristling with 16 missiles each.
Lanchester’s Law, a mathematical model for predicting battlefield outcomes and casualties, indicates that if the PLAN is kept at bay and the full strength of the Indian Navy were brought to bear on the Pakistan Navy, the latter would cease to exist within 24-48 hours. Aware of this relative weakness, Pakistan’s Navy will avoid combat on the open sea, where Indian naval firepower would quickly devastate it. Instead, Pakistani warships would most likely withdraw quickly to coastal harbors where they would be protected by shore-based Pakistani air power. Pakistan’s naval strategy can only be to ensure that as few Pakistani warships come into contact with as few Indian warships as possible, for as little time as possible, negating the Indian Navy’s numerical and firepower advantage.
India’s challenge will then be: How can a reluctant Pakistan Navy be forced to battle? If it stubbornly shies away from combat, Indian warships and aircraft would all have to approach and attack Pakistani harbors despite the proximity of Pakistani air bases. To provide air cover for approaching the Pakistani coast, India’s warships would all have to carry the indigenous Indo-Israeli long-range surface-to-air missile (LR-SAM), India’s most potent air defense weapon, which is lethal out to 70 km.
That circumscribes Pakistan’s naval options. Of its long-range maritime patrol (LRMP) aircraft, only the P-3C Orion has the endurance to fly 16-hour missions scouring the ocean for surface targets. Furthermore, the Orion’s location gets compromised with its first anti-ship missile, even when fired from its maximum range of 50 km. Since the LR-SAM’s range is 70 km, the Pakistani Orion is outranged from the start. This scenario assumes no Indian aircraft carrier is present. If there was one, the Orion would most likely be shot down before it could exit the battlespace.
In the absence of viable support from the PLAN, the Pakistan Navy’s only realistic strategy is one of sea denial, centered on the use of submarines and mines. Since conventional submarines move slowly, even with air independent propulsion (AIP), they are deployed in choke points, where target ships will assuredly come, such as the entrances to Mumbai harbor, the Gulf of Kutch, and the Gulf of Cambay. By deliberately sinking a ship at the mouth of a major harbor such as Visakhapatnam or Karwar, or by mining the harbor entrance, it would be possible for a small number of Pakistani ships to bottle up much of India’s warship fleet.
To counter such a possibility, just before the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war began, India’s lone aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant, sailed out from Visakhapatnam with its Alize and Seahawk aircraft on board. Yet, today, on both the eastern and western coasts, India’s navy is short of submarines, anti-mine vessels, and anti-submarine vessels.
India also needs a significantly larger submarine fleet for blocking Chinese submarines and warships from crossing over from their South China Sea bases, through the four straits of Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Ombai Wettar, into the Indian Ocean. Coordinating such an operation across thousands of kilometers requires submarines to communicate with shore-based headquarters using powerful and reliable Very Low Frequency (VLF) links. The Indian Navy commissioned one such link in 2012 at INS Kattabomman, in Tamil Nadu.
On October 15, 2024, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh inaugurated a second communications station in the Damagundam Reserve Forest, Telangana. These VLF links will allow submarines, even while operating far from India’s shores, to exchange information securely. This capability is even more critical for India’s underwater nuclear deterrent. The navy’s two Arihant-class sub-surface ballistic nuclear (SSBN) submarines require clear orders from shore to avoid nuclear disasters.
Although New Delhi knows about the navy’s warship shortfall, it still struggles to maintain a single warship on station at all times for anti-piracy duties in the Gulf of Aden. In contrast, the PLAN sends three task forces each year for anti-piracy patrols. Each task force consists of two destroyers, a Special Forces detachment, at least one submarine, and a “comprehensive supply ship,” which carries 20,000 tons of fuel.
Unlike India, China sends its most contemporary platforms for the world to see. And the world watches with bated breath.
