New Reforms Will Keep India’s Russian-Built Arsenal Relevant…For A While

India’s arsenal is in real trouble. Decades of over-reliance on cheap Russian equipment—equipment that is currently failing the battlefield test in Ukraine—risks exposing India’s military as little more than a paper tiger.

It’s a tough problem. Nearly 60 percent of India’s defense equipment is Russian made, but with Moscow struggling to replace weapons lost in Ukraine, India’s era of easy access to cheap military equipment is over. Worse for New Delhi, Ukraine is demonstrating that Russia focused on all the wrong things in weapons development. Designed to support an older way of warfare, Russian gear has struggled to independently integrate into the modern, agile, and unified command-and-control systems necessary to fight and win in the modern battlefield.

Russia’s debacle means New Delhi can no longer hide India’s fundamental military flaws. It is now common knowledge that India’s Russian-sourced battlefield platforms, while numerous, have crippling innate vulnerabilities. For years, New Delhi may have loved buying low-cost, formidable-looking Russian T-90 and T-72 main battle tanks, but there’s now no disguising that New Delhi got exactly what it paid for: modernized iterations of a defective design, as well as intellectual rights to build the bad gear for themselves.

Dependent upon a Russian-built military, India’s situation may seem grim, but there is a route forward. India’s government, spurred on by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is already enacting substantial reforms, reorganizing India’s Armed Forces to support a modern, joint fight. And with Ukraine demonstrating every day that agile command-and-control offers Russia’s flawed weapons a new lease on life, Ukraine’s Army is showing India exactly how it might reinvigorate a military anchored on Russia’s obsolete and underperforming “Potemkin Arsenal,” buying time to replace Russia’s broken platforms.

Today, India has sufficient justification to both accelerate New Delhi’s ongoing military reforms and to quickly bolster its own flawed arsenal with modern situational awareness-boosting capabilities. But India will need to act with dispatch. Modi’s reforms, laid out in 2015, have bogged down. And while India’s ongoing border emergency with China fueled acquisition of many much-needed platforms, growing those initial acquisitions into something more than a science project has proven a challenge.

India’s defense sector risks getting shut out as faster-moving countries rush to conclude deals and extract the last bits of production capacity available in certain critical capabilities.

Staying Russian Means To Continue Choosing To Lose

Despite Russia’s battlefield setbacks, India may still be tempted to continue purchasing cut-rate Russian weaponry. But with Russia already unable to replace battlefield losses, any new Russian-sourced weapon system will be slow to arrive. And with other Russian military clients ripping up their weapons supply contracts, Russia’s military industrial will be starved of foreign military sales it needs fund future modernization efforts.

India, if it continues purchasing Russian arms, risks being left in the unenviable position of struggling on alone to modify already-flawed weapons, while to the North, China and Pakistan are gaining a qualitative—if not quantitative—edge. The energy and money put towards modernizing Russia’s fundamentally broken weapons is far better spent on projects that can orient India’s military towards the future.

Even hardened Russian apologists acknowledge India’s pivot away from Russian arms is inevitable. But the path forward will be tough, requiring patience from both India as well as from prospective new suppliers eager to help modernize India’s military. And while India has reportedly halted several projects, cancelling planned multi-billion-dollar purchases of Mil Mi-17 “Hip” helicopters, Mikoyan Mig-29 “Fulcrum” jets and anti-tank rockets, India is entangled in several long-term collaborative initiatives.

There’s a human element at work here too. Russia has been India’s “supplier of last resort” for decades, always willing to provide “modern” gear at low-cost and on favorable terms. Unless Russian society completely collapses in the aftermath of their Ukraine fiasco, the long-standing, mutually-beneficial personal relationships built during big arms deals are hard to set aside.

Of course, reform of any large and bureaucratic organization is tough. Resistance is inevitable, and only decisive leadership will push the necessary changes forward. But quick procurements of “best-in-breed” Western gear will make India’s military evolution far easier. If India makes the necessary investments required to build situational awareness capabilities, there’s no going back to the old ways, where the military was effectively siloed into separate services that didn’t work well together.

Time Is Running Out

Change is hard. India’s continued interest in Russia’s advanced S-400 “Triumf” air and missile defense systems, despite U.S. threats to sanction India, offers a particularly good example of how New Delhi has boxed itself into a procurement that cannot be easily put aside. Even though China’s prior acquisition and subsequent cyber-exploitation of the “advanced” Russian missile puts S-400 missile performance at risk, the inertia of the long-anticipated deal is hard to resist. India is still pushing ahead, intoxicated by the possibility of making the complex missiles and other critical air defense subcomponents at home.

Already acutely sensitive to embargo-driven perturbations, the impending loss of Russian military supplies will fuel India’s instinctive protectionism. But, at this point, an over-the-top “made-in-India” approach won’t help India advance. Given the complete reputational collapse of the entire Russian arsenal and the urgency of the Chinese threat, it may make better fiscal and operational sense to purchase proven Western systems, learn operational lessons from the new gear, and then funnel that first-hand experience into home-grown subsystem and platform development.

It won’t be easy. Top-tier Western suppliers, already bruised by decades of trying and failing to meet India’s often unrealistic demands for substantial local production, big set asides, or intellectual property, are frustrated by India’s penchant for drawn-out, years-long negotiations—negotiations that would inevitably be undercut as India sought out “better” deals from Russia or other less-reputable vendors. India must demonstrate it is serious and ready to modernize.

Don’t Haggle India Into Irrelevance:

Put bluntly, the demise of India’s Russian-sourced Cold War arsenal is overdue. Only savvy marketing, cut-rate pricing and a large inventory of older weaponry kept Russia’s defense market from collapsing years ago. As Russia’s largest remaining client, India has a lot of work to do as it sorts through what is worth salvaging from several decades of collaboration with a country that is, in essence, a bazar fraud, beguiling the unwary Indian government with the promise that, “if you hear the price, you’ll buy.”

Rebuilding a military built around a demonstrably hollow core of obsolete and underperforming Russian gear is a tough task, but Ukraine has shown the way, emphasizing the value of speeding up India’s ongoing defense reformation. It is time for India to be bold, making the speedy materiel investments necessary to demonstrate the real value of New Delhi’s military transformation—a welcome transition from a slow-moving, easily-confounded behemoth to a smart, modern, and fast-moving defense force.