Drone Warfare, And Why India Must Move Fast
Aditya Ramanathan tells us a story in his latest piece for Moneycontrol.com.
“In 1898, the Polish-Russian banker Ivan Bloch published a prophetic six-volume study on the future of war. His work not only predicted the profound political and economic effects of a war involving European powers but also the horrific battlefield stalemate that would ensue because of machine guns and long range artillery.
It would take two years of carnage in the First World War’s Western Front to painfully birth new technologies and tactics that could break the deadlock. By the end of that war, the victorious armies had learnt to employ tanks, artillery, and heavily armed infantry in a carefully orchestrated symphony that would bloodily restore movement to land warfare.”
Why is this story significant in 2024? Because it is “a lesson in the transformation of warfare that would echo well into the twenty first century.”
Writes Aditya:
“If analysts of the First World War turned their attention to tanks and submarines, we must consider the impact of that broad category of systems we call drones.”
There are three lessons to learn for India. First, small, cheap, low-altitude drones operating in the ‘air-littoral’ — usually defined as an altitude below 10,000 feet — are transforming land warfare. Two, uninhabited platforms are slowly changing traditional air power as well.
“In the right circumstances,” Aditya says, “long-endurance drones can effectively hit enemy bases and infrastructure, suppress air defences, and provide real-time intelligence from deep behind enemy lines.”
Finally, drones will make existing naval platforms more vulnerable. While Ukraine’s naval successes have been limited to coastal combat, in the near future we could see aerial, surface, and underwater drones swarming fleets of warships in the deep seas.
What must India do, then? Aditya recommends three actions. But we will keep that a suspense here, and ask you to head to this link instead.
The Problem With Higher Education Is… Higher Education
Much has been written about the ongoing public outcry over the National Testing Agency’s mismanagement of NEET-UG, NEET-PG and UGC-NET. India has more than 700 million people under the age of 28. If the very portals of creating economic opportunities are suspect, then how are we, as a nation, supposed to meet the career aspirations of all those tens of millions?
In his latest column for Mint, Takshashila co-founder Nitin Pai writes:
“Just as in creating jobs, we need dramatically different thinking in higher education. The current model — where millions of candidates compete for a few thousand seats — has run its course. Yet political compulsions and policy realism continues to try to make incremental adjustments to the system. To be fair, increasing the number of seats by 10% every year — as India has done for medical education since 2019 — would be an admirable feat in any country. But India is not any country — we need to scale up at an altogether different scale…”
Once he’s laid down the fundamental problem, Nitin then explores the various ways we can try to resolve this. Admittedly, some of those recommendations are radical, but for a system that has failed millions of students, perhaps you need a radical outlook.
Read Nitin’s column here, and tell us what you feel.
Why China Is Going Nuclear 'Faster Than Ever'
In his 1987 collection of short stories on nuclear weapons titled ‘Einstein’s Monsters’, Martin Amis has an evocative paragraph that encapsulates the rational person’s — some would say even the evil person’s — thinking on nuclear weapons.
He wrote then:
“What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening the use of nuclear weapons. And we can't get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons. The intransigence, it seems, is a function of the weapons themselves.”
How does it relate to Xi Jinping and China? Manoj Kewalramani, head of Takshashila’s Indo-Pacific Programme, writes,
“Recent data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that the world's nuclear powers are continuing to expand investment in strengthening their arsenals. While the total number of warheads around the world is declining, the number of operational nuclear warheads is increasing. SIPRI’s researchers estimated the Chinese arsenal to be around 500 warheads, as of January 2024.”
He adds,
“As per the US Defense Department's estimate, China will likely have over 1,000 operational warheads by 2030. More importantly, the SIPRI report argues that for the first time, China is believed to have some warheads on high operational alert. In addition, over the past few years, there have been increasing reports on Chinese efforts to expand the number of its land-, sea-, and air-based delivery platforms and infrastructure, such as Intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) silos.”
Why is China doing this? Manoj explains in detail in his piece for NDTV, and explains the Indian perspective as well.
“From an Indian perspective, therefore, it is important to not view China's nuclear force modernisation simply from the prism of parity and asymmetry. There are broader issues, such as great power conflagrations leading to a nuclear exchange, which must be taken into account. Some of these issues, such as the threat of increased proliferation and support for Pakistan, are a matter of deeper concern. Others, meanwhile, such as the call for a no-first-use treaty, can provide opportunities for making common cause.”
Read his full column here.
AI, Big Data, And Impending Environmental Crisis
Takshashila’s Arindam Goswami begins his new column on the climate emergency painting a dystopian picture of the future. He writes:
“Imagine this: Skies tinged orange, air thick with a burnt odour, and trees resembling extras in a zombie movie, their skeletal branches stretching out. Cities that once bustled now echo as ghost towns, with only occasional tumbleweeds drifting through. It might seem like a scene from a post-apocalyptic film, but it could become our reality if we fail to address carbon emissions.”
It sounds dramatic, but is it really? We’d do well to remember that what he writes can actually become reality. And this is where artificial intelligence (AI) comes in. He writes:
“According to recent research from Nature, AI systems like GPT-3 and BLOOM might be our secret weapon against carbon emissions.”
How?
Training GPT-3, one of the most advanced AI systems, generates an astonishing 552 metric tons of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent). Alarming, right? However, when spread across the millions of tasks it performs, each query only emits about 2.2 grams of CO2e. BLOOM, another AI system, is even more efficient, with emissions of around 1.6 grams of CO2e per query. Now, compare this to a human writer. A writer in the US produces approximately 1400 grams of CO2e per page, while an Indian writer, working in a less energy-intensive environment, generates about 180 grams of CO2e per page. This comparison is akin to contrasting a Prius with a gas-guzzling SUV—the AI is far more eco-friendly.
Read this really interesting and evocative column here.
And What About Climate Finance
Which brings us to the important topic of climate finance. Talking about the climate emergency is important, but equally important — perhaps more — is how do we finance climate mitigation measures.
In his latest blog post for Takshashila, research analyst Rakshith Shetty maps the flow of climate finance. First, though, some context.
Rakshith explains:
“Climate finance refers to local, national, or transnational financing—drawn from public, private, and alternative sources—that seeks to support mitigation and adaptation actions to address climate change. In 2009, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP15), developed countries committed to jointly mobilise $100 billion by 2020 and then each year through to 2025. This pledge, which was formalised the following year at COP16 in Cancun, aimed to help vulnerable countries mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change. The money largely comes from the country’s foreign aid budgets, which finance climate-related development projects and a smaller proportion is also raised by the private sector.”
Read his exhaustive report here
Why Minilaterals Are Important For India
In his post for Nikkei Asia, Takshashila’s Bharat Sharma argues that because India values its foreign policy autonomy over all else, New Delhi would consider a minilateral approach to be far more suitable. The reason is not hard to find. Such groupings are generally characterised by a lack of formal structures like secretariats or dedicated bureaucracy and a limited number of participants. Engagement of this kind enables India to pool its resources flexibly with others with respect to specific concerns.
India should look at making more use of the minilateral format closer to home in the Indian Ocean region (IOR), says Bharat.
“Today, there is a lack of robust institutions to govern multilateral cooperation in the IOR but regional cooperation on maritime security, terrorism, climate change and adaptation is urgently needed. This is a gap that minilaterals could fill as suppliers of critical public goods, especially to meet nontraditional security challenges like illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.”
To understand more about where Bharat is coming from, head to this link.
Is Quad Losing Its Footing?
Noted foreign policy expert Brahma Chellaney recently wrote in his piece for Project Syndicate that the Quad can be described as a Potemkin Alliance, thereby equating it to the ghost Russian villages that were created to impress officials. To make a long argument short, Chellaney says the coalition appears to have been losing momentum.
Vanshika Saraf, in her latest Takshashila blog post, looks at both the promises and perils of the Quad.
“It is important to note,” she writes, “that Quad’s primary focus is strategic cooperation, and not necessarily collective defence. It emphasises on the provision of public goods (like the Open Radio Access Network), along with the broader security concerns of the four members. The Quad countries conduct joint naval exercises together in the form of the Malabar drills and also at the bilateral level.”
She adds,
“The Quad’s loose structure allows it to work with other mini-laterals like IPEF (Indo Pacific Economic Framework) and the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Prosperity (IP3) that was launched earlier this year. The IPEF has been called a “Quad-plus entity” which is a display of the diplomatic maturity of Quad members, inviting more countries and living up to the notion of a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific.”
Read her full piece here.
ATP Of The Week
Our favourite All Things Policy episode of the week is where Takshashila colleagues Dr Y Nithiyanandanam and Sridhar Krishna discuss nuclear fusion and whether it is really 20 years away as claimed by many. They go into the developments in science and technology, the international collaborations and private investments which has brought nuclear fusion again into mainstream conversations about alternate energy. Listen in to see whether this can be science's response to global warming.
Wait! There’s more…
In the previous episode of Dispatch, we wrote in detail about Rakshith Shetty’s excellent paper on China’s 1+N policy framework. Last Friday, Rakshith took to OpenTakshashila to discuss just that. If you want to participate in our Friday discussions on OpenTakshashila, you must head on to the site and register. We promise it will be worth your time.
Takshashila's Short Credit Courses are back! Dive into niche topics over 4-10 weeks. For more details, visit this page. If you are interested in Space Power as a short course, get more details here. The application deadline is July 31, and the course begins on August 3. There is also the Lunar Governance short course with the same deadlines. You can get all the details here.
That’s all, folks! See you next week.