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Reviewing the Naval exercises of the Western Fleet, the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, "All great powers have also been great trading nations, and we cannot be a great trading nation without a strong maritime capability." He stressed the need for improving the proportion of indigenous ships and called to upgrade shipyards. Singh highlighted rapidly changing geo-political scenarios, the growing importance of the Indian Ocean, and India's interest in it. Singh also announced that India's second aircraft carrier bought from Russia would be called INS
Vikramaditya.
A Conference of Naval Commanders also explored the question of how the Navy can influence a land war. The Indian Navy is studying the role of the US Navy's role in the war in land-locked
Afghanistan and emerging trends in technology and communications. The Conference also studied the introduction of technology to improve operations, force levels, and combat capabilities.
The most important question is whether India has a long-term plan for its Navy. Unlike the Army or even the Air Force, it takes several decades to build global Navy that is capable of deep water, gray water, and coastal operations. Besides, it needs to be prepared for multiple roles:
-- Fight simultaneous wars in different parts of India or even the world to protect Indian interests
-- Destroy missiles, rockets, aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles carrying conventional and nuclear payloads
-- Perform reconnaissance to monitor air bases, missile batteries, troop movements, sensitive locations, and high value targets
-- Preserve secondary and tertiary strike capability to cripple or eliminate an enemy in case of a nuclear attack on India
-- Patrolling of coastal areas and sensitive trade choke points to check smuggling of arms and drugs, piracy, trafficking in dangerous, banned, toxic wastes, trafficking of humans
-- Adopt offensive technology methods to jam radio and television broadcasts, microwave relays, cell phone usage, and electronically disable communication equipment
-- Deploy defensive technology such as monitor communication channels, tap into enemy spectrums and microwave communication, observe and destroy destructive entities on the network, and protect communication during times of crisis
The Government must decide which of the above operations that the Navy should be capable of, to what extent, and in which order. The most important of these and in which India can easily establish dominance is the Network Centric Warfare
(NCW) scenario.
Most people reduce NCW to mechanisms that will only track defense assets in times of crisis. However, it could be more than that:
-- Intelligence on enemy networks to gain information on force and resource deployment, decisions, private conversations; etc can be collected discretely and without risk to human lives
-- Communication systems can be modified to make their operations less effective in subversive actions or crippled in hostile action
-- Information, weapons, and acquired target information can be destroyed, altered, or rendered ineffective
-- Enemy formations, deployments, or mobilization can be tracked on real time basis
These are areas where there has not been much research or development but requires considerable human investment. With the second largest community of scientists in the world, this is one area where India can easily gain expertise.
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