You want to call me a Jai Hind, that's your choice. My opinion is that you have drunk the Jai Hind koolaid. You are resorting to mental gymnastics to justify why India's use of its navy for gunboat diplomacy on China is going to be a stunning success.
Please read that I am actually writing: any discussion is meaningless when one of the opponents is changing his opponents' words.
I am not claiming any "successes" for
any side. I am simply stating that
it is going to be attempted - and IN is quite consistently building up to be able to do so. To be frank - far more consistently than other branches of Indian armed forces, including much richer air force.
The question shouldn't be whether IN will be able to do so, or is it blue water or green water force(Intercepting SLOCs in the Indian Ocean doesn't require IN to be blue water navy, to begin with), the question is what will happen and how to deal with such contingency.
And if is it worth it to begin with.
While in China its more about: "Look, India is threatening us with their navy. Our PLAN is better, but let's prepare for that".
I don't see it. To be frank - if last summer has revealed anything - it revealed that the level of actual knowledge about each other was surprisingly low. On
both sides.
Since you like Mahan so much. Here is the bigger picture. The Indian Navy is behind the Japanese Navy in size and its growing at a much slower pace relative to the PLAN. India does not and will not have the economy in the foreseeable future to outcompete China in the naval domain. There is no shifting of the balance of power anytime soon. And it is good for everyone that it stays that way.
I don't like Mahan. It's just that his books form the roots of modern naval theory. Agreeing or disagreeing with him comes later - it's just a must-read, core book on the subject.
That IN is smaller than PLAN does not inherently result in its incapability of fighting it. Quite the contrary: geography and fleet composition matters.
Can Indian economy support a sufficient ratio to exploit its inherent geographical+home ground advantage over China?
As of now, the answer ap
pears to be "it will try to the best of its ability". The more Delhi feels threatened - the more it will try to match.
