The Russia-Ukraine war has entered its fourth year of conflict earlier this week throwing the belief that modern day wars would be short, swift and intense, out of the window. The war is ongoing three years later. Even before the war began, the Russians made the cardinal mistake of underrating the opponent who turned out to be smart and innovative even if it did not have even half the military power the Russians possesses.
A belief is growing that the Russians are winning; however, the truth may be quite different. Their military industrial complex has not been able cope up, manpower losses have been staggering, North Koreans are beefing up the depleted Russians, it looks at Iran and China for war like stores. Sevastopol barely has a naval fleet. Ukraine has been able to open up a grain export corridor by sea.
Further, the rate of advance is painfully slow against Ukranians who barely have ammunition to fully exploit their strengths.
This war is a great lesson of influence of gepolitics on military operations. Ukraine had transferred all the Soviet era arsenal of nuclear weapons it had, to Russians. Putin today sabre rattles those nuclear weapons to impose caution on the West.
Speaking to Editor-in-Chief Nitin A. Gokhale, former GoC-in-C of the Army Training Command, Lt Gen Raj Shukla said the biggest lesson that emanates from the conflict is there is no alternative to self-sufficiency in manufacturing military hardware.
He points out that both sides have suffered due to limited industrial capacities. NATO realises its capacities are nowhere near to what the need for facing a conflict.
Given that India is situated in a volatile neighbourhood with two implacable adversaries in China and Pakistan, the urgent need is to strengthen indigenous military industrial capabilities. We have to focus on startups, research and development, try to cover the technology gap with China, increase our ship building capability and make sure all this is done fairly quickly, he said.
The areas requiring focus include stealth, air defence, drones and missiles, to name a few. Strategic ideation by our think tanks need to be qualitatively better and address more issues, quantitatively, Lt Gen Shukla added.
