In addition to absolute deficits in available resources, the IN has traditionally
been the most sparsely funded of the three armed services. India has traditionally
seen itself as a continental power, and its primary security threats throughout its
modern history have been land-based:China and Pakistan. The Indian Army
andAirForcehaveeachgenerallyreceivedmorethantwicethepercentageof
the aggregate defense budget that has gone to the IN, and it is unlikely that this
will change significantly in the near to medium term. The 2007 Indian
government defense budget, for instance, allocated 16,500 crore rupees for the
air force, 11,374 crore rupees for the army, and 10,000 crore rupees for the
Navy.^18 While at times the navy’s procurement budget has been augmented,
the plus-up compared with the other services has remained in force for too
short a time to allow the IN to reach its goals in terms of numbers and types
of platforms. As will be discussed below, the IN competes not just with its
sister services but also with the DRDO (Defence Research and Development
Organization) and, at least in government-wide budgetary terms, with
the Department of Atomic Energy and other agencies which support India’s
now-overt nuclear-weapons capabilities. Depending on the IN’s choice of
roles and missions, the resources of these other defense-related organizations
may either add to or subtract from navy capabilities. By way of example,
the 2007 DRDO budget is slated to consume just over one-third of the entire
IN budget.
In addition to resource constraints, the IN—like the other armed services—
has struggled with slow, inconsistent,and cumbersome availability of defense
technology. Even when relying on Indian-derived technology, the defense
establishment has learned over the decades that delays and underperformance
are routine. One reason is, again, India’s postcolonial legacy. New Delhi had to
spend considerable time and resources developing its own, indigenous technol-
ogy base capable of supporting advanced defense platforms and systems. Second,
India’s decision to follow a strongly nonaligned path meant that it was unwilling
—fortunately, at times—to become dependent on a single foreign supplier of
military technology. Each superpower used arms sales and other forms of security
assistance to help bring countries into its camp during the Cold War. While India
eventually decided to rely most heavily on the Soviet Union for military supplies,
it never made the political decision to join the Soviet camp or become wholly
reliant on Moscow. India learned firsthand about the fickleness of foreign suppli-
ers during the 1965 war, when the United States and the United Kingdom
slapped an arms embargo on both India and Pakistan in an effort to pressure
them into halting hostilities. U.S. embargoes came and went after India’s nuclear
tests in 1974 and again in 1998. Finally, India suffered greatly from the breakup
of the Soviet Union, when its main supplier of weapons systems, parts, and spares
essentially disappeared for several years. In part because of steady Indian demand,
supply chains were reassembled in the former Soviet Union in the mid-1990s.
India as a Maritime Power? 135