WORLD NAVAL DEVELOPMENTS by Norman Friedman*
IN AUGUST 2013, the Indian Navy celebrated two major milestones. It launched (in August) the first Indian-built carrier, the 37,500 ton Vikrant, and the reactor of its first native-built nuclear submarine Arihant went critical.
Alongside these achievements are the Indian development of a range of ballistic missiles as well as prototypes of a wide variety of tactical missiles, including some anti-missile weapons. There are also new tactical aircraft and helicopters. The ambitious Indian defense research program has often failed to meet its goals, and its programs have often run very late, but the scope and the ambition are both worth noticing.
Like many navies, the Indian Navy finds itself the poor stepchild of a land-oriented defense establishment. The main current prospective enemy is Pakistan; any war against Pakistan would be fought largely ashore. Many Indians assume that the future enemy is China, at the least because it seems reasonable to assume that at some point the two Asian super-powers will come into collision. China is also Pakistan’s greatest and staunchest ally. Sometimes Indian defense experts talk about the country’s ‘encirclement,’ which means the connection between the two hostile countries. The border dispute with China in the north, which once led to a small war, has never been resolved, and from time to time the Indians complain that the Chinese are enhancing their position by building new roads in the area north of the border. That is of course nothing by comparison with the deep-seated dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, a cancer planted when the two countries were created by the partition of British India in 1947.
The Indian Navy’s approach to the problem of justifying its needs has been to emphasize the country’s dependence on seaborne trade. Like China, India relies on outside sources for its oil — and as the country becomes wealthier, its thirst for oil increases. India also imports many other things. Most of what it takes comes by sea. Anyone (guess who?) who can dominate the Indian Ocean can strangle the country. Sometimes Indian writers look back at the long period of Western domination of the Indian Ocean (and the ruination of many of its countries) to say that everyone in the region would have benefitted from an India strong enough to keep the Europeans out of the area. The construction of the new carrier and of the new nuclear submarine, and also of many new surface combatants, suggests either that the navy is finally winning or that Indian growth can finally finance both the ambitious new weapon development program, the sheer mass of the ground forces, and an expanding navy.
The carrier has been under construction for four and a half years, and at the time of launch it was said to require another nine months for outfitting (probably optimistic). Like the Russian Kuznetzov and the Chinese Liaoyang, it is a ski-jump carrier intended to operate conventional aircraft, which land into arrester gear. The launch photo showed the ship alongside a pier, her hull apparently complete but her island missing. India has been operating carriers for decades, since obtaining a British light fleet carrier as INS Vikrant. Coincidentally, the original Vikrant, which had been preserved as a museum at Mumbai, is now to be scrapped. The new Vikrant is to serve alongside the larger Russian-built ski-jump carrier Vikramaditya (ex-Gorshkov). A third Indian carrier is projected. Both Vikrant and Vikramaditya are to operate Russian aircraft. The great drawback of ski-jump operation is that it much limits the payload of the aircraft. The ski-jump forces the airplane up at an angle, so that its jet thrust adds to the lift generated by the airplane’s wings. The technique was invented to give STOVL aircraft additional payload, and it was first implemented on board the British Invincible class, now retired.
In the early 1980s the US Navy experimented with conventional aircraft on ski-jumps, discovering that with moderate wind over deck (20 kts) they could take off , albeit with reduced payloads. Beside the reduction in payload, the ski-jump takeoff stressed the airframe in unusual ways, so that unless an airplane (and not just its landing gear) was properly redesigned it could not reliably make more than a few such takeoffs. The only major operational US fixed-wing naval airplane which could not take off from a ski-jump was the E-2 Hawkeye. At the time, there was interest in a low-cost ski-jump auxiliary carrier, and the problem with the Hawkeye meant that such a ship had to have at least a simple low-capacity catapult. In the Indian case, the airborne early warning role is taken by the Russian-supplied Ka-31 helicopter. Compared to a Hawkeye, it cannot fly as high (hence lacks inherent range, not to mention the power needed for long range or for sophisticated processing), cannot fly nearly as far in the direction of a threat, and its radar must be far lighter and therefore less capable.
There is every indication that the Soviets were trying to develop an adequate carrier catapult when their economic collapse killed their carrier program (they had to cut up the nuclear carrier Ulyanovsk on the slip when it was about 20% complete), and presumably the Indians are also interested in this technology. Given their warming relationship with the United States (they received their first P-8A maritime patrol plane late in 2013), presumably catapults are on their shopping list.
Meanwhile the Chinese are still interested in new carriers. Recently photos appeared which were said to be of a carrier hull module at a Shanghai shipyard. The photos certainly look like a cross-section of a carrier hull, and for years a Chinese building has sported what looks like a carrier flight deck, with aircraft. It is said to be the system integration facility for future carriers, presumably equivalent to the ‘Aegis in a cornfield’ used for years to test the US Navy’s Aegis software. The Chinese recently conducted successful landings and takeoffs on board their Liaoyang, rebuilt from the Russian Varyag. That is not at all the same thing as US-style high-intensity carrier air operations, but it is a vital early step in developing a carrier force.
In both cases, governments seem to have accepted that carriers are the essential means of providing mobile air power. The most memorable Indian use of a carrier was a strike by Vikrant on a Pakistani port during the 1970-71 Indo-Pakistan War (this war also occasioned an Indian missile strike, using anti-ship Styxes, against Pakistani oil tanks ashore). Chinese naval spokesmen have argued that their country’s prosperity depends on free access to overseas resources. This was much the argument Mahan made in the United States, that prosperity would more and more depend on overseas resources, and that only naval power could assure it. In the Chinese case, energy comes from both Siberia and the Middle East. A Chinese navalist looking at the Middle East would have to wonder whether in future the Indians might wish to interdict that sea route as it crosses the Indian Ocean. It would take a carrier force to deal with such interdiction (the Indians sometimes seem to make the opposite argument, that they need a fleet to ensure that the Chinese do not try to seize control of their vital sea lanes, rather than merely protect shipping using them).
Meanwhile the Japanese are building 22,000 ton ‘helicopter carrying destroyers’ which appear to anyone else to be small STOVL carriers larger than the old British Invincibles. There is no current indication of interest in using conventional aircraft from their ski-jump bows, but the Japanese are clearly interested in the US F-35C STOVL, the same aircraft the British hope to fly from their Queen Elizabeths.
Meanwhile, there is the Indian nuclear submarine, which takes her place alongside one or two nuclear attack submarines leased from the Russians. Arihant is primarily a strategic submarine, armed with 750 km K-15 ballistic missiles. Their range may seem puny in comparison with that of a Trident or even the Chinese JL-2, but it may be quite enough. Range buys two different advantages for a strategic submarine. One is to keep it far enough to sea that the potential target is unlikely to be able to detect and attack it. The other is to provide a single submarine with the flexibility to hit many different targets from one position. In the case of India, it might be argued that the ability to wipe out the enemy’s capital is enough of a deterrent. Neither of India’s potential enemies, China or Pakistan, is reported to have sophisticated enough anti-submarine measures to find a submarine two or three hundred miles out to sea; neither has had any need to develop them.
Arhihant has 16 missiles in four groups. Ultimately each group is to be replaced by a single 3500 km (1780 nm) K-4 missiles (not yet tested). That would make the ultimate K-4 broadly equivalent to an early US Polaris. The Chinese probably have access to the long-range ASW search systems the Russians have been advertising since the end of the Cold War. They use active low-frequency pingers and large receiving arrays, and the quoted range is about 350 nm. The Russians certainly became aware of the passive SOSUS technology developed by the United States, and the towed arrays they developed (which the Chinese have) are to some extent analogous (albeit operating at much higher frequencies). If this technology is developed by the Chinese, and if sufficient effort is devoted to the patrol aircraft which would intercept whatever the system found (two big ifs), then at some point the Indians would probably find themselves in need of a longer-range underwater deterrent.
Arihant may seem to offer Indian defense planners a way to reduce massed ground and tactical air forces, which otherwise require expensive modernization. India already has tactical nuclear missiles and a few strategic missile prototypes, but it can be argued that any such weapons are subject to a pre-emptive strike. That may become easier in an era of widespread commercial-based satellite reconnaissance. A strategic submarine is a very different proposition. It is not clear whether the Indians are aware that US experience has been that nuclear weapons can deter the use of an enemy’s nuclear weapons, but they are an ineffective deterrent against conventional ones.
*Norman Friedman is author, The Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapon Systems
*Norman Friedman’s columns are reproduced by kind permission of the Editor of Proceedings the Journal of the United States Naval Institute.
