INDIA’S DEFENCE Research and Development Organization (DRDO) is making good work, but that does not mean things can’t be even better. I have said that India should set up ten parallel DRDOs, each the size of the present DRDO and let three of them compete for a successful tank design, three for a successful fighter plane and so on and let the best design win. The former Soviet Union had a system of internal competition between government-owned design and production organisations of this type and it can work for India also (though I don’t think DRDO’s work has suffered due to a lack of competition; having 10 times as many people work on defence research and development (R&D) may easily enable ten times as many things to be done).

Another vital point is that weapons like tanks and fighter planes, which carry human beings are a lot more difficult to design and manufacture than, say, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which give a million times or more returns for the same investment of time and effort (’bang for the buck’) so far as raising a country’s military power is concerned. Since India’s principal target should be nuclear supremacy (see my article ‘In defence of India‘s nuclear supremacy‘ on merinews), it should concentrate on designing and producing intercontinental ballistic missiles more than tanks and fighter planes; if you have nuclear supremacy over the United States, most other defence-related issues will take care of themselves. And, as I said, designing and building ICBMs that will do the job can be done a lot quicker and need some resources, though India has the resources to build both ICBMs and tanks and fighter planes.

The chief benefit of focusing on ICBMs is time; it will get India military supremacy a lot sooner than giving a lot of attention to tanks and fighter planes (which will never bring India military supremacy over the United States). one more point is that although India must build nuclear-propelled, nuclear-armed submarines carrying intercontinental ballistic missiles (SSBNs), like the ATV it is building, building these weapons platforms (SSBNs) is a lot more time and resource-consuming than building ICBMs that can be launched from road and rail-mobile vehicles. It is a error to make India’s nuclear arsenal primarily a second strike resource (which is what SSBNs are good at); India’s nuclear arsenal should primarily be for a first strike (for an explanation of first and second strike, see my article ‘What is nuclear supremacy‘ on merinews) — that is how you gain nuclear supremacy, by being able to carry out a successful first strike — and a sufficiently large arsenal of road and rail-mobile ICBMs can be produced a lot faster than an arsenal based on SSBNs. Again, time is significant.

This does not mean India should not produce SSBNs, just that the emphasis should be on producing a large number of road and rail-mobile ICBMs. I also believe that India’s ballistic missile defence (BMD) systems will be considerably better than those of the United States — as DRDO has correctly said, its systems to defend against short and medium range missiles are already better than those of the United States — if India can avoid sabotage by politicians and RAW on the C.I.A.’s payroll who try to shove American ’help’ down India’s throat.