Interview of Professor Toshi Yoshihara

Last month, I interviewed  US Naval War College Professor Toshi Yoshihara for the March issue of the Observer Research Foundation's South China Sea Monitor (link soon to be up). He discussed China's perceptions of India's naval power and presence in the South China sea.

Dr. Toshi Yoshihara is Professor of Strategy and John A. van Beuren Chair of Asia-Pacific Studies at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.  He is an affiliate member of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the war college.   He is co-author of Red Star over the Pacific: China's Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy (Naval Institute Press, 2010), Indian Naval Strategy in the Twenty-first Century (Routledge, 2009), and Chinese Naval Strategy in the Twenty-first Century: The Turn to Mahan (Routledge, 2008).  He is also co-editor of Asia Looks Seaward: Power and Maritime Strategy (Praeger, 2008).  Dr. Yoshihara holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.

You recently penned a highly informative study of Chinese scholarly writings pertaining to India’s role in the Indian Ocean[1]. One of your key conclusions is that the Chinese strategic community has an overwhelming tendency to view India’s naval ambitions in starkly realist terms, and as being permeated by a desire for regional hegemony. Why do you think this is?

The realists I document in my new study represent one of many schools of strategic thought in China.  What we are witnessing in China is the rise of an “intellectual-military complex” composed of academics, senior military officers, and policy analysts who openly debate Beijing’s long-term choices.  Within this complex is an outspoken group of realists and seapower advocates from topflight research and academic institutions across China.  While this semi-official community does not necessarily speak for Beijing, it is clearly vying for a place in the policy-making process.  These realists are grappling with an unprecedented historical phenomenon in maritime Asia: the entry of India and China into the same oceanic spaces at nearly the same time.  It is therefore not surprising that the realists forecast an emerging zero-sum competition in the Indian Ocean.     

2)       How do Chinese analysts view the maritime components of India’s Look East Policy? You notably quote some Chinese scholars as stating that India is increasingly seeking to make forays into the South China Sea as a “diversionary strategy”. Could you explain to our readers the reasoning behind such assertions?

Some Chinese analysts evince the belief that offense is the best form defense.  Chinese views of Indian’s Look East Policy thus conform to China’s strategic and operational traditions that emphasize offensive stratagems.  The logic goes like this: If India reaches into China’s own maritime backyard, Beijing would be compelled to divert its unwelcome attention from the Indian Ocean to a nautical theater much closer to home.  Indian advances in Southeast Asia would, in the words of one Chinese strategist, “generate a southward gravitational pull on China’s maritime strategy, thus preventing China, in its search for diversified strategy pathways, from entering the Indian Ocean.”  In essence, keeping China tied down in the South China Sea would keep China out of the Indian Ocean.    

3)       Indian Chief of Naval Staff Nirmal Verma has stated that the Andaman and Nicobar Islands form one the nation’s foremost “strategic outposts”.  Located at only 45 km from Mynamar’s Coco Islands, and 160 km from the Indonesian province of Aceh, the islands are closer to Southeast Asia than to the Indian mainland. How do Chinese analysts view India’s military presence in these islands?

Intriguingly, Chinese strategists have transposed the Sinocentric concept of the “first island chain”—an archipelago that stretches from the Japanese islands to Indonesia—to the Indian Ocean.  The Chinese perceive the first island chain, home to major U.S. military bases in the western Pacific, as the geographical expression of a sustained American effort to balk Beijing’s maritime ambitions.  They similarly describe the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as an “iron chain” with which India could close off Chinese access to the Indian Ocean.  Sitting astride the sea lanes west of the Malacca Strait, the islands enclose the Andaman Sea as menacingly as the first island chain bounds China’s “near seas.”  This parallel is thus persuasive to many Chinese strategists.  To some, India’s military command in the Andaman-Nicobar Islands could be used to monitor China’s seaborne traffic and, in wartime, to interdict Chinese naval and commercial vessels.  Others even see it as the future staging area for projecting Indian naval power into the South China Sea.   

4)       China’s strategic pessimism appears to be echoed to a certain degree within India’s own chattering classes, with much talk over a hypothetical Chinese “string of pearls” being woven in India’s own maritime backyard. Both rising powers see nefarious designs behind their alter ego’s naval modernization and deployments. Is this a form of complex mirror imaging, or can it be attributed to a simple lack of mutual understanding?  Or, to the contrary, does it adequately reflect an emerging zero-sum game? In your opinion, what does this augur for the future stability of Maritime Asia?

My short answer to your questions about the sources of Chinese and Indian threat perceptions would be “all of the above.”  However, I think it would be a mistake to think that enhanced bilateral engagements and greater mutual understanding would “cure” China’s starkly realist outlook.  Beijing’s sense of energy insecurity, epitomized by the so-called “Malacca dilemma,” is real enough.  My reading of the Chinese literature also suggests that China takes India’s great power ambitions very seriously.  To the Chinese, venerable strategic traditions—evidenced by the writings of Jawaharlal Nehru and K.M. Panikkar—will continue to underwrite India’s long-term aspirations.  In my view, the potential interactions between two ambitious great powers that possess proprietary attitudes about their respective nautical spheres of influence are more likely to generate competitive rather than cooperative dynamics in maritime Asia. 

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[1] The article, entitled “Chinese Views of India in the Indian Ocean: A Geopolitical Perspective”, will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Strategic Analysis.

AirSea Battle's Indo-Pacific Future: India, the US, and the Binding Power of the Anti-Access Threat.

I recently wrote this short opinion piece for the Observer Research Foundation, a private think-tank in Delhi.

Abstract:

Shared values do not always lead to common interests. Shared threats, however, have a way of cementing partnerships beyond rhetorical flourishes. This article argues that both India and the United States face a growing anti-access challenge. By working together to mitigate A2/AD threats, they may come to a better mutual understanding on major security issues in Asia.

Shared values do not always lead to common interests. This harsh truism has been brutally hammered home to all those in Washington, both Republican and Democrat, who have trumpeted the virtues of the Indo-US Strategic Partnership over the past decade. From a “natural alliance based on shared values”, the Indo-Us partnership seems to have slipped into a succession of frustrations and misunderstandings. Refusing to support US-led sanctions against a rapidly nuclearizing Iran and seemingly reluctant to provide any kind of moral leadership at the United Nations Security Council; India has demonstrated that while it may reap the benefits of a democratic system at home, it still tends to behave in the amoralistic tradition of a realist power abroad.

This revelation should not be viewed as a major setback to Indo-US ties, but rather as the perfect opportunity for a shift in tone. Grandiloquent verbiage on shared democratic values has provided a solid ideological bedrock for the Indo-US partnership. In order to cement ties, however, nothing is more effective than the crude language of shared threats. Over past years, successive US administrations have engaged India on issues such as nuclear proliferation, Islamic terrorism, and the uncertainties linked to China’s rise. Looking ahead, one cannot help but notice that both nations’ armed forces, and in particular their navies, face remarkably similar future challenges.   

Indeed, both nations operate blue-water, carrier-centric navies  whose continued ability to project power risks being negated in the face of potential adversaries’ growing anti-access and area denial (A2/AD) capabilities. In the Western Pacific, Beijing is pursuing an aggressively missile-centric strategy, which seeks to vault the PLA’s precision-strike capability from land to sea. The Chinese have developed an anti-ship variant of the DF-21 ballistic missile, which has reportedly reached initial operating capability, and have invested en masse in the acquisition of diesel-electric submarines optimized for missions of sea denial. The threat to American surface vessels is compounded by China’s growing investment in high-speed anti-ship cruise missiles, and continued interest in offensive mine warfare. Lightly defended American forward bases in Japan could find themselves suddenly annihilated under a barrage of China’s numerous conventionally armed ballistic missiles, and US carrier groups could become wasting assets, as their growing vulnerability  gradually renders them operationally irrelevant.

India, for its part, faces strikingly similar threats, albeit on a much smaller scale. Pakistan, since independence, has opted for a strategy of offensive sea denial, heavily dependent on the use of submarines and anti-ship missiles, in order to offset its neighbor’s conventional naval advantage. This asymmetric strategy is currently being pursued through the induction of small, stealthy fast-attack craft armed with anti-ship missiles, and via an ever growing inventory of land-based, Chinese-made, high speed cruise missiles. The Pakistani Navy also hopes to add six more submarines equipped with Air Independent Propulsion and submarine-launched cruise missiles to its fleet. Meanwhile, the growing range and sophistication of China’s anti-access systems risks impacting negatively on the maritime balance of power in the Indian Ocean. If deployed by Second Artillery Brigades stationed in the western reaches of the Tibetan plateau, or from the hills of Yunnan, China’s DF 21D could encompass most of India’s maritime backyard under its extended threat envelop. Judging by the Pentagon’s latest report on Chinese military power, Chinese missile strike range already covers large swathes of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. In the future, this capability could be harnessed by Beijing in order to provide a protective umbrella to its vessels operating in the Indian Ocean, or to shield its Pakistani ally’s assets during an Indo-Pakistani conflict. Employed in a more offensive manner, it could be used to sink Indian destroyers or aircraft carriers, or to target India’s coastal infrastructure.

In the face of this shared threat, how can Delhi and Washington cooperate more effectively? For the time being, the 2006 Indo-US Framework for Maritime Security Cooperation focuses largely on non-traditional security threats, such as piracy, conventional and non-conventional arms proliferation and smuggling.“Hard” maritime challenges, however, such as shared anti-access threats, also need to be placed at the heart of the US-India maritime cooperative agenda. This can be accomplished in various ways.

•        First of all, by jointly working towards an AirSea Battle Concept "with Indian characteristics".

For the past few years, the DOD has been laboring to mitigate the anti-access threat through the crafting of a transformational new concept: AirSea Battle. The latter calls for greater jointness in-between the US Air Force and Navy, and hinges upon the reprioritization of long-range weapon programs such as the new-generation stealth bomber and the X-47B long-range carrier-borne attack drone. Indian naval and airpower strategists could learn a great deal through participating in AirSea Battle wargames with their US counterparts. Indeed, the Indian Navy and Air Force have been historically averse to pursue any kind of meaningful operational synergy. While both services have initiated joint training under the aegis of the TROPEX exercises annually held in the Bay of Bengal, they still prefer to coordinate -rather than to genuinely fuse- their combat exercises. The Indian Air Force and Naval Aviation are provided with distinct, pre-designated “air corridors” in which to operate and respond to the instructions of their own service-specific commanders. Institutionalized joint Navy/Air Force exercises in-between the US and India could go a long way towards helping Indian mindsets change, and eventually give birth to true interoperability. In 2010, US PACOM and the Indian IDS (Integrated Defense Staff) conducted their first joint tabletop exercise, entitled JEI (Joint Exercise India), in Alaska.  This is a promising first step towards bilateral multiservice cooperation, and should be leveraged in order to begin planning for joint US-India AirSea Battle Exercises in the Indian Ocean.

•    Second, both countries should draw on the conclusions of their joint threat assessment.

Defense transfers and sales, by focusing on certain of India’s clearly identified vulnerabilities, would be more targeted and, therefore more successful. The Indian Navy, for example, presents certain  critical weaknesses in terms of modern anti-submarine warfare, and has yet to invest significantly in point-defense systems for its surface fleet.  In the future, it may also wish to opt for US-made long-range carrier drones in order to penetrate highly contested environments with greater ease and minimal loss of life. The Indian Air Force, after having more fully interiorized the logic unraveled by AirSea Battle, may come to privilege strike range over strike density, and aspire to acquire American long-range stealth bombers. With time, these key areas could grow to form the structural pillars of Indo-US defense cooperation. This could prove very lucrative for US defense firms, which would find themselves in the privileged position of almost exclusively catering to India’s growing AirSea Battle needs. New Delhi, for its part, could benefit from state-of-the-art US technology, as well as from the enhanced tactical expertise it would glean from joint warfighting exercises of unprecedented magnitude and complexity.

•   Finally, an Indian military more capable of countering anti-access challenges would not only display a greater degree of interoperability with US armed forces, but also a heightened appreciation for American security concerns in Asia. 

 In the unhappy event of a Sino-US conflict breaking out in the Western Pacific, India could be eventually called upon to provide a stabilizing, flanking presence west of the Malacca Straits, ensuring the safety of sea-lanes of communications while American naval strength is concentrated elsewhere.

It is through such initiatives, which focus on shared concerns and perceived threats, that the Indo-US strategic partnership will reveal its true potential. Until then, the ritualized repetition of the importance of shared values may only lead to false hopes, and thus to perpetual disappointment.

LSE India Report: The Military Dimensions of India's Rise.

The London School of Economic's IDEAS Center recently released their latest report, entitled India: The Next Superpower? The report has been receiving a fair amount of attention in the Indian and international press.
I contributed the section exploring the uneven nature of India's military modernization, which you can read, along with the rest of the report, by following this link:


http://eshop.lse.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?modid=1&prodid=605&deptid=169&compid=1&prodvarid=0&catid=14