The Misshapen Pivot

Posted on by
1

By

Vice Admiral (retd) Vijay Shankar 

(This article was first published in the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies web site on 21 October 2016 and may be accessed at  http://www.ipcs.org/article/china/the-misshapen-pivot-5158.html )

We note, with some, anxiety an unmistakable parallel to the current situation in the Western Pacific with what obtained in the run-up to the 20th Century. An impending face-off between a rising and revisionist China against a loose entente of status-quo powers led by a deflected USA that has set itself the task to pivot into the region and rebalance the strategic situation. All this at a time of convulsions in West Asia and global uncertainty. For the pivot to flounder is to legitimize Chinese illegal actions.

Lessons of History

The world of empires of the 18th and 19th centuries were remarkably well connected, willing to strike compromises that did not upend the status-quo and in turn enjoyed slanted stability. Imperialism of the 19th century thrust political, financial, economic, scientific and religious institutions that we see as underpinning the world system to this day. But beneath this global order run widespread fault lines that can invariably be linked to the nature of the expansionist impulse.

In 1894 China and Japan went to war. The conflict was significant for it marked the first time that a host of imperial powers would become directly involved in a struggle between two sovereign nations far from their own shores. Regardless of how these powers felt about each other, they had strong mercantile interests based solely on open access to China. Victorious Japan sought exclusive hold over China’s Liaotung peninsula as part of the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki. Russia, Germany and France all felt that conditions imposed by the Treaty placed in jeopardy their own commercial interests and consequently threatened war unless Japan backed down. In the event Japan surrendered its claim to Liaotung in return for a free hand in Korea and increased war reparations from China. Within two years Great Britain, Germany and France sensing the weakness of The Qing Empire capitalised on the political and economic opportunities and took control of vast local regions. China thereafter rapidly began to fall apart; it suffered two more imperial wars: suppression of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 and war between Russia and Japan in 1904-05 over ambitions in Korea and Manchuria. Battles were fought on Chinese soil and in the waters of the East and South China Sea. Imperial competition and ‘cozy arrangements’ in the region, as James Joll has pointed out, provided one more enticement for the coming First World War.

The Tearing Tectonic

In coming to grips with that tumultuous period in East Asia a convergence of three geopolitical fault lines may be discerned beneath the larger rift that had been caused by the decay and degeneration of the Qing Empire. The end of Empire generated in China political stresses which pulled apart the state almost in terms of a geological ‘Tearing Tectonic’. While three fault lines: an emerging imperial power in the form of Japan, intervention of existing rival colonial powers sensing large commercial and magistracy interests and the decline of an existing centre of power in Russia simultaneously fractured to release energies that catalysed the speedy collapse of the ‘middle kingdom’.

A French political cartoon from 1898 is most illustrative of the situation. A pastry “Chine” is being divided between Queen Victoria, the German Kaiser, Nicholas II of Russia, the French Marianne cozying-up to the Czar and a Samurai Japan. A powerless Qing official throws up his hands.

571px-china_imperialism_cartoon

“En Chine Le gâteau des Rois et… des Empereurs” “Le Petit Journal”, 16th January 1898

The Unmistakable Parallel

As we examine contemporary geopolitics of the East Asian region we note with some anxiety an unmistakable parallel to the situation that obtained in the run-up to the Twentieth Century with a switch in the main protagonists. The fault lines against a backdrop of a global rift of uncertainty are all discernable.  A rising and revisionist China sensing opportunity for hegemony in the region confronted by a potential entente of status-quo powers, more than likely to include Japan, Australia and India; led by a deflected and hesitant USA, all to the exclusion of a declining and sulking Russia.  This at a time of great convulsions in West Asia when the strategic paradigm of the day (if there is one) is the tensions of the multi polar; the tyranny of a techno-economic combine in conflict with politics of the state; the anarchy of expectations; and polarization of peoples along religio-cultural lines all compacted in the cauldron of globalization. An uncertain geo-political brew, as the world had never seen before, has come to pass under the shadow of the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The Strategic Pivot

The “strategic pivot” or rebalancing, launched in 2009 by the Obama government, is premised on the recognition that a disproportionate share of political tensions and economic history of the 21st century will be written in the Asia-Pacific region. The key tenet of this strategic reorientation is the need to cultivate a stable and predictable political, economic, and security environment across a region spanning the Indian Ocean to the West Pacific. Unsaid is the central dynamic to build an Entente to contain and balance the rise of China. The military component of the pivot cannot be overemphasized and remains the abiding driver of policy in the region. The strategic importance of the pivot derives from the increased collective concern about China’s military modernization and its larger revisionist objectives.

Theoretically the Asia-Pacific pivot makes strategic sense. However, there is sloth in implementation influenced to some extent, by the situation in West Asia and the unfinished business of Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet allowing these distractions to dilute the strategic priority of the Asia-Pacific could well run the hazard of accelerating a return to an ‘atavistic actuation’ that threatens global stability. As events have unfolded, sloth has granted China a fortuitous time-window to prepare for the impending encounter. It also explains China’s impious haste in development of military infrastructure and artificial islands in the South and East China Sea, operationalizing “Access Denial” strategies, declaring proprietary sea lanes of communication and Air Defence Identification Zones and a cavalier attitude towards The Hague’s verdict on claims in these seas.

Conclusion

The absence of a direct challenge to China’s provocative moves on the East and South China Seas, despite the fact that fundamental principles of international order have been defied, is to allow the idea of the strategic pivot to flounder. This will provide space to China to progress with its own unhinged scheme of a “New Model on Great Power Relations” that creates a de-facto G2 and works to marginalizing of other major stake holders in regional security. Besides such a scheme legitimises China’s claims in the South and East China Sea and in a manners anoints it as the recognised regional hegemon and a ‘system shaper’; suggesting a return to a situation analogous to the pre-20th Century context.

“The Blind Men of Hindostan”

Posted on by
5

By

Vice Admiral (retd.) Vijay Shankar

Valedictory Address Christ University, Bengaluru

Conference on Non-Traditional Security Threats 03 September 2016

Let me first declare what a singular honour it is for me to be here at the Christ University to deliver the valedictory address as the curtains come down on this conference on non-traditional security threats. I would be failing in my duty if I did not congratulate the galaxy of scholars and students who participated in the very lively debates, addresses and exchanges. Indeed the experience was stirring as it was humbling. Enriching for the wealth of knowledge that we so heartily partook of and humbling for the Odysseusian voyage that we undertake with the launch of this conference. I also want to give a hearty ‘shabash’ to the organizers who have done such an outstanding job in putting it all together with so much grace. I particularly want to congratulate students of the department of International Relations who have conducted the event with great verve, a hearty cheer to you, your vitality and your contagious effervescence.

In coming to grips with threats and challenges that confront a nation, the lines that demarcate traditional threats; by which I suppose is meant those that demand a military response, from non-traditional security threats is blurred. The confusion renders discernment problematic as one security threat morphs to the other. It also places leadership in a quandary as to what combination of tools from the State’s armoury of Comprehensive National Power would be most appropriate to confront it. The dilemma is analogous to a story in primary English text of my days titled “The Six Blind Men of Hindostan”. The tale is told of six blind men who visited a zoo. Coming upon an elephant each felt and sensed different parts of the pachyderm; the first wrapping his arms around a leg swore it was as the trunk of a tree; the second ran his fingers along the torso exclaimed, no it is like a wall; while the third holding the tail vouched it was more like a rope; the fourth stroking its head and feeling the swish of the elephants ear deposed, forsooth it’s like a fan; while the fifth and sixth grasped the tusk and the trunk and vowed it must be akin to a spear or related to a snake. But, as we know, the truth in its entirety is composed of the six vital elements that made the elephant. The same may be said of the various threats and challenges that speakers thus far addressed; each one’s subjective experience and indeed narrative is true, but it is inherently limited by the inability to account for the totality of truth, that is the elephant-of-state is an integrated whole of all those elements and the State can be destabilised by trauma to any one of them.

Contemporary history of the Anglo sphere has had disproportionate influence on structuring a world order and defining economic and societal values. Driven by the philosophic motivation of free will and a belief of liberal laws delivering what is best for mankind; it does not make an attempt to explain or seek a transformation to the dangerous inequities amongst nations, tyranny of the carbon economy, domination of military power or indeed the ‘emperor’ of challenges: Climate Change. The last, links and is intertwined with all other threats, traditional or non-traditional whether in the political, economic, demographic or military dimension. And therefore it is to Climate change that I shall focus your attention.

Amongst Mahatma Gandhi’s many pronouncements on the ills of mercantilism and industrial capitalism the one that was prophetic in its sweep and profundity were his lines written in December 1928 for Young India: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism in the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 million (sic) took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.” Gandhi intuitively came to the conclusion that Industrialization was designed for inequity and an anarchic consumerist style of existence was untenable as we quickly emptied the innards of the planet. There is today no doubt that the climate predicament has been accelerated by the manner in which the lure of the carbon economy has evolved and its impious upshots has the world’s peoples finger prints on it. Its impact has broadened and intensified while its sway on politics and society comes at a time when politically the global perspective is more diffused and society blinkered in its uni-dimensional view of development. The November 1970 Bhola cyclone that hit the entire coast of erstwhile East Pakistan is one of the deadliest natural disasters of living memory; the official death toll was estimated at 500,000 but the number is likely to have been higher. Damages included destruction of approximately 20,000 fishing boats, property and crops. Total loss of cattle reached in excess of one million and more than 400,000 houses were destroyed. Maximum wind speed reached about 222 km/h while the storm surge was about 10.6 metres (never heard of before in recorded history of that region) which partially inundated the Sundarban island of Bhola, displacing millions setting into motion mass migrations the effects of which were political, military as well as demographic. The consequences are apparent even today. One of the chief causes of the disaster was global warming, melting ice-caps and rising sea levels; these are manifest in the increased periodicity of calamitous climate events and the scale of disasters.

There is another foundational problem that is linked to the system that we live and labour in; the Westphalian scheme of nation states (touched on by one of the speakers) is structured to channelize political energies towards nationality, sovereignty and the urge for domination rather than concentrating on new ideas to relieve and reconstitute the relationship between States such that uncertainty and turmoil that currently obtains is replaced by the larger reality of common destiny. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) established the precedent of a new system of political order in central Europe, based upon the concept of co-existing sovereign nations. Inter-state aggression was to be held in check by a balance of power. A norm was established against interference in another state’s domestic affairs. As European influence spread through imperial conquests and colonial domains, these Westphalian principles, especially the concept of sovereign states, became central to the prevailing world order. However the awkward irony is that these principles came into acceptance among and within what was essentially a cohesive religious entity “the holy Roman Empire.” We note today that these principles are at odds with the globalized world that we live in and perhaps the time has come when the Westphalian model itself requires a critical review for the ‘emperor-of-challenges’ is provoking man to think of an alternate way to exist. Here communications which can serve as the vehicle that catalysis the spread of new ideas of the larger reality has, unfortunately, found satiation in egocentric intrusiveness.

In this belligerent milieu of individual rights in a self-righteous state of confrontational flux against the nation and nations feeling the heat of relations within and without; illusions of a new world order emerging out of the ashes of the Cold War were quickly dispelled and found little use in understanding the realities. Some of the symptoms that have emerged are an increased and vicious securing of spheres of power and economic influence as exemplified by China in Africa and her claims to the South China Sea; the competition between autocracy and liberalism; an older religious struggle between radical Islam and secular cultures; and the inability to regulate the anarchic flow of technologies and information. As these struggles are played out the first casualty of the era is the still born hope of a benign and enlightened world order that comes together to face its common destiny. Sovereign democratic processes have feeble impact on the challenges ahead be it the carbon economy, climate events or in restructuring the system we live in. The reasons are amply clear for it is the spiritual nature of the quest for development to the exclusion of all else but the nation that blinkers political philosophy to things as they are rather than what they could be. So why has the political domain remained unaffected by the many crises that antagonize man? Is it myopia or a self-destruct lemming-like impulse?

Let me now yield the podium on an optimistic note; idealism is the exclusive right of youth; and it is to you that I commend the future. A future more benevolent, less bigoted, more tolerant and clear eyed about man’s common destiny and the philosophical passage from the individual to kinship.

The Scorpene’s Sting

Posted on by
Reply

by

Vice Admiral (retd.) Vijay Shankar

(This article was first published in The Wire, http://thewire.in/64410/the-scorpenes-sting/)

Submarines are anomic platforms of stealth, concealment and lethality. Each of these mortal attributes is integrated in the body of the weapon to form a very efficient and secretive marauder from the deep. The early years of deployment gave vent to some unsavoury remarks about the use of this weapon; most uncharitable was Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson’s outburst on the submarine: “…underhand…and damned un-English…treat all submarines as pirates…and hang all the crews.” But this perhaps echoed a visceral fear of the unknown rather than any sense of morality. A century later, the submarine’s tactical advantage remains its capability to use the medium to hide, to strike and then to hide again in waters that firstly complicates and then frustrates detection. To a target within its strike radius it continues to generate the same primeval anxiety that made Sir Arthur quiver.

To appreciate fully the impact of the more than 22,000 page leak of design parameters of the French Direction des Constructions Navales Services’  (DCNS, French naval defence company) Scorpene submarine being built in India for the Navy, one must first come to grips with the problem associated with combating modern conventional submarines such as the Scorpene. The aim of anti-submarine warfare (ASW) is to deny the enemy effective use of his submarines. This can be achieved by adopting tactical as well as material measures. The former is achieved through intelligence gathering, surveillance, detection and localising the submarine before destroying it with stand-off weapons that permit the hunter to remain out of the kill range of the submarine. It involves adopting doctrines for co-ordinated operations, setting up dispositions that inhibit freedom of submarine manoeuvre, and tactics that trap it into a ‘destruction-zone.’ Material undertakings, on the other hand, are largely driven by advances in technology that keep platform design, sensors and weapons in a progressive state of change that enhance effectiveness in ASW operations. Marriage of intelligence, efficient tactics and resourceful doctrines with capabilities of contemporary sensors and weapons lies at the core of successful anti-submarine operations. Within this framework, for intuitive foreknowledge to be confirmed by information leakage boosts both probabilities of submarine detection as well as kill.

Anti-submarine operations begin with establishing a submarine probability area. This area is based on intelligence or on inputs from wide area surveillance networks which include remote sensing satellites and sea-bed sensors; and indeed it may be based on electronic or capability indiscretions (surfacing, use of active sensors, communications etc.) of the target submarine. The search phase which involves a systematic and continuing investigation of the area then commences. The area may be demarcated to confirm the absence of a submarine or the search may be launched to locate and destroy it; in the latter instance it is centered on a datum that is based on the last or best known position of the target submarine. Choice of scouts is determined by search rate and degree of vulnerability to submarine counteraction; for obvious reasons ‘time-late’ at datum is a critical factor that can enlarge the search area to an extent when probability of detection diminishes geometrically as it follows an ‘inverse cube law.’ For this reason the preferred scouts for ASW are anti-submarine aircrafts using sensors such as sonars, sonobuoys, magnetic anomaly detectors, radar and infra-red sensors. Inherent in the detection concept is sensor ‘sweep width’ which uses a definite detection law—no probability of detection outside specified range capability, while targets within the specified range are detected with increasing probability. Clearly, successful operations are critically founded on knowledge of enemy capabilities, the specification of adversary weapons and sensors, combat systems, acoustic signature, magnetic profile, and infra-red characteristics. Thoroughness of search, technically termed as the ‘coverage factor,’ is heightened if operating parameters along with design features of the submarine are known.

 Planning an anti-submarine search is a complex craft. It is based on the search theory and the discipline of operations research, both of which were born at the same time and indeed share a common lineage: the necessity of securing the survival of allied naval shipping against submarine attacks during World War II. Passage of time has not changed the need, though ASW is conducted differently today than in World War II, search techniques used in ASW have potentially remained unchanged in concept, structure, and application. Where changes are apparent is in the use of advanced analysis methods and data processing systems using computers, wide area networks and data bases with provision for processing, identification and cueing located ashore. Target characteristics form an important consideration in modelling, for simulation and combat preparation. The first determination in planning and deploying ASW searchers is the probability of contact necessary for accomplishment of the mission from which is obtained the coverage factor. Armed with this and knowing the sweep width of the sensor to be used, scouts are disposed at mathematically determined spacing and move along computed tracks such that early detection is rapidly followed by localization and destruction. This theoretically is how ASW works, but in the real hydrosphere many factors remain unknown. ASW is a complicated warfare discipline, and proficiency can only develop through extensive simulation and training. Destroying a submarine is the hardest task in naval warfare; it can never be the submariners’ case to make this task easier.

Somewhere nestled in those 22k compromised pages, there is certainty of a small section that outlines the Scorpene’s operating “Tactical and Technical Parameters” which is the distillate of all those many thousand folios. And herein lies the rub. We have noted in previous paragraphs (at some length) the various considerations that go into an adversary mounting a search, localizing and then prosecuting a submarine and how ready availability of specifications that answer these considerations largely increases the efficiency of the search-and-destroy operations. They in addition provide critical inputs required for computer modeling and simulating the manoeuvring and operating characteristics of the Scorpene. All this simplifies classification and confirmation of a detected contact. Even to the uninitiated reader it must now be substantially clear that what has been provided on a platter is the ability to generate a computer based virtual reconstruction of the vessel. This ‘cybernetic Scorpene’ can be played with over and over again on a simulator in a variety of hydrological and meteorological scenarios till sensor operators and tacticians gain a very high degree of proficiency in recognizing and fingerprinting the noise, magnetic, electromagnetic and infra-red signatures under all conditions of machinery loading across the entire spectrum of speeds and operating depths. So now the question that begs to be answered is: has the Scorpene lost its sting?

 Investigations are currently in progress to establish just how the leak occurred and to what ends the information found its way to the public domain. There is no clarity why the leak took the tortuous route of passing from the hand of a “disgruntled” DCNS employee through two unknown South East Asian agencies where a fourth hand is alleged prior to falling into the disc drive of the associate editor of The Australian from where it cascaded into the public domain. While reasons for the leak may be many ranging from incompetence at DCNS, cyber hacking by mala fide parties to cut-throat antagonism and resentment between competitors (Japan, Germany) at the loss of the $ 50 billion new design Short fin Barracuda submarine contract for the Australian Navy to DCNS; clearly the strategic beneficiaries of this significant disclosure are the Chinese and Pakistan Navies.

In the meantime, understandably, the Indian Navy have gone into damage control mode. Besides the enquiry that has been launched, it would be in the fitness of things that they also constitute a Special Operations Research Group that begins with two premises: firstly, that compromise has occurred and secondly, that major design changes to the ‘Scorpene’ are not practicable (at least not for the first block if at all there is to be a second). The Special Operations Research Group may then be mandated as follows:-

  • Establish what specific tactical capabilities have been compromised.
  • Device signature masking and spoofing techniques through material and tactical measures.
  • Adopt innovative manoeuvring and operating profiles that stretches and provides permutations to its operating envelope.
  • Ensure that crew turn around is such that expertise aggregates.
  • Identify clauses in the Scorpene contract that have been violated by the leak and replace them with instruments that oblige DCNS to accommodate material alterations that may be warranted to fulfil the mandate of the Special Operations Research Group without prejudice to contractual liabilities of DCNS.

Some portions of the Scorpene’s invisibility cloak may indeed have fallen off in the recent episode, but its brain and sting-lethality remains as potent as was. To regenerate its combat effectiveness may well mean to re-invent operating profiles and devising astute masking techniques. This no doubt is a tough ask, yet by no means beyond the capabilities of the professional savvy of the Indian Navy; there is only one caveat, keep DCNS in a response-only mode.