Ladakh Flash Point

Status
Not open for further replies.

Mohsin77

Senior Member
Registered Member
Do you still disagree or that was never your point of contention?

My point of contention was the part which I highlighted in red. The point you made requires context, otherwise it would just confuse people. I provided said context using Shukla's June 20 article, which sheds light on the PLA's gameplan.

If you acknowledge that you are squatting on someone's else property and that isn't a problem then you and I have a very different view of the world.

The last time I checked Chou En Lai was China's Premier. If his official position doesn't represent anything why would China's statement made in 2010 have any value? Why would you present a map with boundaries to make an argument but then by the same token argue that those boundaries are meaningless? You need to make up your mind.

India inherited the borders from the British through an international legal convention known as "uti possidetis juris" which is based on customary international law. Obviously China doesn't agree because it makes up its own version whenever it suits its own position.

This is a bad tactical move for you Brumby. Since I respect your knowledgeable contributions, I will politely advise you against trying to take the 'moral high ground' here. I assume you're into "democracy", so follow your own principles and go take a vote in Kashmir. Go ask Kashmiris if they think Kashmir is India's property.

I'm not the one who needs to make up his mind here. You either stick to a moral position and tell India to get the hell out of Kashmir and stop oppressing its people (who hate India and don't want to be part of it) OR you take the realpolitik position and support India based on pure national security interests. What you can't do is take a moral high ground AND support India. That makes no logical sense. You're talking about a literal Nazi-inspired lunatic regime, in the form of Modi and the RSS, which is holding territory which belongs to Pakistan.
 
Last edited:

plawolf

Lieutenant General

Some good points were made in those posts.

Just to expand on a few points and add some context.

India’s entire foreign policy is dominated by its one-sided obsession with China, and a toxic mixture of Hindu ultranationalism and deflective popularism.

India doesn’t need more nukes to ‘deter’ China because quite frankly, China doesn’t care enough about India to want to waste the time or effort to screw with it in the first place.

While India might see itself as the rising star destined to surpass China, China just doesn’t seem any evidence to be unduly worried about India to the point of feeling the need to try to curtail its development like America is trying to do to China.

All India needs to do to not be threatened by China is literally nothing. It does not even need to sort out the boarder dispute because China is not actively looking to change the status quo or even apply any pressure to resolve the dispute. Remember that these boarder disputes have existed since they birth of the two nations, but it’s only flared up under the reigns of specific Indian leaders. When Indian leaders didn’t go out of their way to stir up trouble with China along the boarder, the boarder was quiet and peaceful. Fancy that!

However, India cannot help but actively provoke China with petty and meaningless boarder clashes because of a number of factors, all of which are entirely of India’s own making.

Firstly, the Indian ultranationalism that is so central to Modi’s domestic political success demands results that they can be nationalistic about.

When India fails to deliver anything even their fanboys could cheer about through normal development (again, largely due to China’s fault in the eyes of Hindu ultras. If only China didn’t ‘fake’ its GDP growth figures to always outshine India!), Modi’s political instincts are to create big splashy events to divert attention and shore up his own flagging support.

I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that Doklam happened not long after the spectacular Indian own goal of abolishing two of India’s most widely used banknotes almost overnight; and Ladakh happened soon after the abolition of Kashmir’s special statics and Indians bungled initial COVID19 response and growing crisis.

Modi’s political instincts are to use deflective populism by creating foreign crisis that he can present as ‘wins’ domestically to divert attention when he wets the bed through his own incompetence and is facing a growing public backlash.

This dovetails with India’s general deflective populism of blaming everything wrong under the sun on China (Chinese trained locusts anyone?), which while great at absolving Indian governments of all responsibility for their own failures, does create pressure to ‘respond’ to all those made up slights and ‘attacks’ by China over time.

To compound the problem, India also have a weird congestive dissonance when it comes to how it sees the boarder dispute with China, and China’s strategic intentions towards India.

On the one hand, Indian pride would not let them see the truth of just how lowly they are on both the Chinese government and general populous’ threat and priority list, and they always seem to assume that China frets about India as much as India worries about China.

But at the same time, they seem to think that Chinese boarder conflicts are an issue over resources and greed for China, and that if they can raise the cost of maintaining the boarder conflict beyond some magical number, that China will just say, ‘nah, this just isn’t profitable enough to be worth my while anyone’ and somehow just quit.

That is a major reason as to why India is so irrationally sensitive towards Chinese infrastructure building near the boarder (I mean, when China has high speed rail linking boarder regions to the Chinese heartland, how much difference would a few miles of tarmac over existing dirt roads really make?). It makes no rational sense from a strategic or tactical point of view, because those infrastructure improvements doesn’t really change things much in war time. What it would do is help to greatly reduce peacetime troop maintenance costs for supplying troops garrisoning boarder regions, which is the real reason India objects, because it feels that moving the cost dial the other way and further for their magical target cost.

Again, this explains why India keeps seeking to provoke petty and meaningless boarder clashes with China. Because every time they do, it costs China a lot of money to redeploy all those combat forces to the Indian boarder, and to maintain new garrisons.

In a sense, you can see that at some level Indians realise how stacked the odds are against them, that is why they are so desperate to exploit any and all perceived moments of weakness with China, as deep down, the know that the only way they can gain an edge is through outside factors, and even then only temporarily, which explains their tendency to dive head first into trouble at the first opportunity.

Modi thought he had a historic chance with COVID19 and Trump’s open hostility towards China. That was the reason for the Indian incursions plain and simple.

The plan was to simply probe and pull back if they encountered more push back from China and/or less support from the US than expected.

To be fair to Modi, it would have been a rather forgettable and even routine clash had the dead colonel not gone rouge on him after both sides agreed a mutual withdrawal.

But the dead colonel did demonstrate just how easily and quickly things could get out of hand when you play stupid games with opposing armies and:
-don’t have ultimate escalation advantage;
-didn’t do the necessary prep work to get forces deployed and ready at the boarder as tensions rose;
-didn’t have anything like the international support you thought you might enjoy.
-and don’t have the means (including bare basics like Ammo and sleeping bags apparently) to actually put up a fight, never mind expect to win it.

Where it not for China actually going out of its way to allow Modi to get out his ladder to climb down with, we might have already had a repeat of 62, only with an even more one-sided victory for China and much more damage Don’t to India.
 

ZeEa5KPul

Colonel
Registered Member
Where it not for China actually going out of its way to allow Modi to get out his ladder to climb down with, we might have already had a repeat of 62, only with an even more one-sided victory for China and much more damage Don’t to India.
The Chinese forbearance you describe is ultimately the reason India doesn't jump into the US camp with both feet. They know that if they do that, the days of mild border clash and then pullback are over. In that scenario, China will just straight up dismember India.
 

Gatekeeper

Brigadier
Registered Member
Some good points were made in those posts.

Just to expand on a few points and add some context.

India’s entire foreign policy is dominated by its one-sided obsession with China, and a toxic mixture of Hindu ultranationalism and deflective popularism.

India doesn’t need more nukes to ‘deter’ China because quite frankly, China doesn’t care enough about India to want to waste the time or effort to screw with it in the first place.

While India might see itself as the rising star destined to surpass China, China just doesn’t seem any evidence to be unduly worried about India to the point of feeling the need to try to curtail its development like America is trying to do to China.

All India needs to do to not be threatened by China is literally nothing. It does not even need to sort out the boarder dispute because China is not actively looking to change the status quo or even apply any pressure to resolve the dispute. Remember that these boarder disputes have existed since they birth of the two nations, but it’s only flared up under the reigns of specific Indian leaders. When Indian leaders didn’t go out of their way to stir up trouble with China along the boarder, the boarder was quiet and peaceful. Fancy that!

However, India cannot help but actively provoke China with petty and meaningless boarder clashes because of a number of factors, all of which are entirely of India’s own making.

Firstly, the Indian ultranationalism that is so central to Modi’s domestic political success demands results that they can be nationalistic about.

When India fails to deliver anything even their fanboys could cheer about through normal development (again, largely due to China’s fault in the eyes of Hindu ultras. If only China didn’t ‘fake’ its GDP growth figures to always outshine India!), Modi’s political instincts are to create big splashy events to divert attention and shore up his own flagging support.

I don’t think it’s a co-incidence that Doklam happened not long after the spectacular Indian own goal of abolishing two of India’s most widely used banknotes almost overnight; and Ladakh happened soon after the abolition of Kashmir’s special statics and Indians bungled initial COVID19 response and growing crisis.

Modi’s political instincts are to use deflective populism by creating foreign crisis that he can present as ‘wins’ domestically to divert attention when he wets the bed through his own incompetence and is facing a growing public backlash.

This dovetails with India’s general deflective populism of blaming everything wrong under the sun on China (Chinese trained locusts anyone?), which while great at absolving Indian governments of all responsibility for their own failures, does create pressure to ‘respond’ to all those made up slights and ‘attacks’ by China over time.

To compound the problem, India also have a weird congestive dissonance when it comes to how it sees the boarder dispute with China, and China’s strategic intentions towards India.

On the one hand, Indian pride would not let them see the truth of just how lowly they are on both the Chinese government and general populous’ threat and priority list, and they always seem to assume that China frets about India as much as India worries about China.

But at the same time, they seem to think that Chinese boarder conflicts are an issue over resources and greed for China, and that if they can raise the cost of maintaining the boarder conflict beyond some magical number, that China will just say, ‘nah, this just isn’t profitable enough to be worth my while anyone’ and somehow just quit.

That is a major reason as to why India is so irrationally sensitive towards Chinese infrastructure building near the boarder (I mean, when China has high speed rail linking boarder regions to the Chinese heartland, how much difference would a few miles of tarmac over existing dirt roads really make?). It makes no rational sense from a strategic or tactical point of view, because those infrastructure improvements doesn’t really change things much in war time. What it would do is help to greatly reduce peacetime troop maintenance costs for supplying troops garrisoning boarder regions, which is the real reason India objects, because it feels that moving the cost dial the other way and further for their magical target cost.

Again, this explains why India keeps seeking to provoke petty and meaningless boarder clashes with China. Because every time they do, it costs China a lot of money to redeploy all those combat forces to the Indian boarder, and to maintain new garrisons.

In a sense, you can see that at some level Indians realise how stacked the odds are against them, that is why they are so desperate to exploit any and all perceived moments of weakness with China, as deep down, the know that the only way they can gain an edge is through outside factors, and even then only temporarily, which explains their tendency to dive head first into trouble at the first opportunity.

Modi thought he had a historic chance with COVID19 and Trump’s open hostility towards China. That was the reason for the Indian incursions plain and simple.

The plan was to simply probe and pull back if they encountered more push back from China and/or less support from the US than expected.

To be fair to Modi, it would have been a rather forgettable and even routine clash had the dead colonel not gone rouge on him after both sides agreed a mutual withdrawal.

But the dead colonel did demonstrate just how easily and quickly things could get out of hand when you play stupid games with opposing armies and:
-don’t have ultimate escalation advantage;
-didn’t do the necessary prep work to get forces deployed and ready at the boarder as tensions rose;
-didn’t have anything like the international support you thought you might enjoy.
-and don’t have the means (including bare basics like Ammo and sleeping bags apparently) to actually put up a fight, never mind expect to win it.

Where it not for China actually going out of its way to allow Modi to get out his ladder to climb down with, we might have already had a repeat of 62, only with an even more one-sided victory for China and much more damage Don’t to India.

What are you on, Wolfe. Lol It is an uncomfortable fact for the Indians that China is way ahead of it in economic and military term.

The Indians are butt hurt that dispite having a head start, (with infrastructure that's not war damaged, a rail network that's 4 times the lengths of China's left to them by the british). And countless helping hands from the west and Soviet union. Plus it is, after all, the world's biggest "democracy". They still find itself 4 times smaller in economic terms. With the implication this has for its military. Unable to make anything worthy of note domestically. The jealousy from India is off the scale.
 
Last edited:

Gatekeeper

Brigadier
Registered Member
This is a bad tactical move for you Brumby. Since I respect your knowledgeable contributions, I will politely advise you against trying to take the 'moral high ground' here. I assume you're into "democracy", so follow your own principles and go take a vote in Kashmir. Go ask Kashmiris if they think Kashmir is India's property.

That's our Brumby, he's knowledge of all things military is to be respected. Whereas knowledge on China, and other countries history and politics less so.
 

Inst

Captain
Yeah, I changed my mind on the strategic calculus.

Right now, India is getting roughly 6% of its active cases in new cases per day (that's ignoring depreciation, as people get well or die, of course), the United States could potentially go through 25 million cases within the next 90 days, or otherwise go into lockdown again, Japan is about to get an out of control coronavirus problem, and well, Hong Kong has lost control.

Beijing actually can get away with acting so aggressively. It's quite likely that the world could enter a prolonged recession, a form of stagflation, or hyperinflation in the next few years based on the impact of coronavirus, deglobalization, and coronavirus stimulus. The only point of concern is that they keep the Hong Kong border crossing locked, because HK is getting 10% new cases per day; China can't afford for COVID-19 to get loose in Guangzhou.

Jesus, fucking, christ. All you had to do was to properly monitor the coronavirus. We're in the bizarre situation where the Taiwanese are laughing at the rest of us because we have coronavirus and they don't.
 

Inst

Captain
Sorry mate. Rafale will not change the equation for India due to a variety of reasons.
(1) Fundamentally the IAF is not buying enough Rafale and so its direct impact will be limited
(2) It takes years to build tactics and to integrate effectively with the other systems within the IAF. French and Russian systems don't talk to each other besides the hybrid of Indian indigenous system mixed with Israeli systems in between. It is highly problematic to operate coherently which unfortunately modern warfare demands. It is equally likely that the Indians will shoot its own assets rather than at the Chinese. We have evidence of fratricide from the Feb incident last year. What the IAF is facing is simply a bad by product of the IAF acquisition process driven by its historical non alignment policy i.e. a mixture of everything.
3)Long range missiles like Meteor or PL-15 don't win wars. It might impact tactics but long range kills do come with it a variety of problems and that include fratricide. In a F-15 vs F-14 debate I read, the reason why the F-15 was never inducted with the Phoenix missile is because of the risk of fratricide. The F-14 in the middle of the ocean has a lesser issue with it.
4)The Indian armed services still operate with a silo mentality. The Chinese understand the importance of joint services and in 2018 reorganised themselves. The Chinese is one up on this.
5)The IAF is sadly deficient on important assets like AWACs which is an important force multiplier. The PAF is better resourced in this area even when operating with a smaller budget. The Indians understand the problem but refused to put money behind it. The IAF lack leadership to do the right thing.
6)Like it or not, the back bone of the IAF is the SU-30 MKI. If it cannot take on the Chinese air force (whether J-10 or others) then the IAF will have a hard time winning any conflict. There are some obvious problems that the IAF is having which I have not seen any tangible solutions.
(a)The RCS of the SU-30 by design is high and so is more susceptible to radar lock The counter is a capable SPJ suite but is stuck with the Russian wingtip ECM pods that are known to degrade kinematic performance. I suspect during the Feb 2019 incident the SU-30 MKI was not protected by any ECM system and was able to be locked on by the PAF F-16. Development of an indigenous is stuck because of lack of Russian cooperation.
(b)The IAF lacks an upgrade path to install AESA radar on its fleet of SU-30 MKI. That puts the IAF in a disadvantage position viz-a-viz the Chinese.
(c)The induction of a Brahmos capable fleet of SU-30 MKI is moving very slowly. As of the beginning of this year only 2 have been modified against a goal of 40. The problem is the electronics have to be hardened against EMP which is not standard on Russian planes unlike the US. Should the IAF need to take out all the 6 Chinese airbases there are simply not enough such assets to conduct such a strike. I estimate it will require at least 130 SU-30 MKIs assuming 1.5 munition is needed for every aim point.

The question is less whether the Rafale does well--I'd consider the Rafale doing well as shooting down some J-20s before getting obliterated--but rather whether or not the Indians are emboldened by the Rafale.

As for general Rafale vs J-20; there's a lot of wild-cards there. The J-20 could be poorly piloted, i.e, they behave overly aggressively and ignore the fact that the Rafale has IRST (i.e, do not go supersonic) and that the Meteor can be data-linked. The J-20, likewise, could be a less capable system than we expect, or the Rafale more capable (the J-20 wants to kill the Rafale BVR since WVR it'll likely be outmatched with its current engines).

And yeah, minus the Rafale, the entire InAF is fodder for a combination of J-10s, J-11s, PL-10s, and PL-15s, provided the Chinese 4th gens have AESA.

You have to remember, that the PLAAF vs the InAF in the area is bases vs technology; the InAF can bring almost all their force to bear vs China, while China has very few military airbases in the area with full stocks of munitions, spares, and so on.

It's literally the reverse of the typical PLAAF set-up where the PLAAF has to consider opponent qualitative advantages except in rare cases (Su-30MKKs vs F-15Js for instance, there's no BVR superiority and the Su-30MKKs perform better WVR). The only thing for the InAF that could possibly even the scales would be the Rafale+Meteor combo, and the loss of a 5th generation aircraft vs a 4.5++ generation aircraft would be quite a blow to Chinese prestige and credibility.
 

siegecrossbow

General
Staff member
Super Moderator
I just realized one thing. Although India has conducted many drills/deployments/fly overs, they don’t seem to have done many live fire exercises in the region or otherwise. Are they conserving the ammunition for border skirmishes with Pakistan and/or eventual showdown with China?
 

PiSigma

"the engineer"
I just realized one thing. Although India has conducted many drills/deployments/fly overs, they don’t seem to have done many live fire exercises in the region or otherwise. Are they conserving the ammunition for border skirmishes with Pakistan and/or eventual showdown with China?
It is possible. A single day of drills will reduce their ammo from 14 days to 13.. for China it's order more from factory. For India it's wait for next year's budget and buy more from Russia.
 

nugroho

Junior Member
The question is less whether the Rafale does well--I'd consider the Rafale doing well as shooting down some J-20s before getting obliterated--but rather whether or not the Indians are emboldened by the Rafale.

As for general Rafale vs J-20; there's a lot of wild-cards there. The J-20 could be poorly piloted, i.e, they behave overly aggressively and ignore the fact that the Rafale has IRST (i.e, do not go supersonic) and that the Meteor can be data-linked. The J-20, likewise, could be a less capable system than we expect, or the Rafale more capable (the J-20 wants to kill the Rafale BVR since WVR it'll likely be outmatched with its current engines).

And yeah, minus the Rafale, the entire InAF is fodder for a combination of J-10s, J-11s, PL-10s, and PL-15s, provided the Chinese 4th gens have AESA.

You have to remember, that the PLAAF vs the InAF in the area is bases vs technology; the InAF can bring almost all their force to bear vs China, while China has very few military airbases in the area with full stocks of munitions, spares, and so on.

It's literally the reverse of the typical PLAAF set-up where the PLAAF has to consider opponent qualitative advantages except in rare cases (Su-30MKKs vs F-15Js for instance, there's no BVR superiority and the Su-30MKKs perform better WVR). The only thing for the InAF that could possibly even the scales would be the Rafale+Meteor combo, and the loss of a 5th generation aircraft vs a 4.5++ generation aircraft would be quite a blow to Chinese prestige and credibility.
J-20 poorly piloted????????
Are you thinking entering J-20 cockpit like entering elementary class?
Please argue in more logic way
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top