India's Warship Boom Is Hiding a Bigger Problem |S3| Ep 55

In Our Defence

Host Dev Goswami and national security expert Sandeep Unnithan examine the paradox of India's current naval shipbuilding boom, which masks a looming

Key takeaways

• India's current wave of ship commissions is based on orders placed decades ago, creating a potential capability vacuum in the next two decades.
• China's shipbuilding supremacy is driven by 'civil-military fusion,' allowing them to control roughly 70% of the global market.

Main topics

• Naval procurement cycles
• Indigenization and Atmanirbhar Bharat

Notable quotes

You're up in an S creek without a paddle, right?

Conclusion

India must move beyond siloed procurement and invest heavily in founda

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This is India Today Podcasts. Speaker 4 (0:05) Welcome to Season 3 of In Our Defence. The podcast that takes you inside the world of conflict. I'm your host, Dev Goswami, and every week I sit down with experts and retired officers from the Army, Navy and Air Force to decode all things to do with India's security and explore what it truly means to serve. Get ready for stories of strategy, sacrifice and strength. Speaker 4 (0:32) This is In Our Defense. Speaker 4 (0:58) Pretty interesting and I think pretty apt actually, Sandeep. Hey, by the way, hi, how are you? Good, good. Pretty apt, Sandeep. It's the service that is, I think, the closest to you. You are a Navy child. Right. It's the closest to you, the Indian Navy. And also, In Our Defense over the three seasons actually has focused a lot on design, development, procurement of new weaponry, of upgradation of existing weaponry. We've, I think, talked a lot about the Air Force and the Air Force's problems, the missing squadrons and the delays in acquisition and stuff like that. We've talked about the Rocket Force. We've talked about Army's tanks. We've talked about different types of Army. We've talked about Army's restructuring in previous seasons, not as much on Season 3. But I've always felt that I haven't spent a lot of time talking about the Navy. Yeah. Which I think, if you think about it, Navy would complain about it in real life as well. You know, that's how it is with us. Right, they're Speaker 1 (1:58) the Speaker 4 (1:58) silent service. Yeah, they're so far Speaker 1 (2:00) away from Delhi. Yeah. That's Speaker 4 (2:01) what I keep saying. Silent, the smallest service. However, they defend a vast coastline. And I think what the most recent war, the US-Iran war, which thankfully is on a pause right now and hopefully going towards a final peace deal. has taught us and has shown us is that perhaps the Indian Navy's role is a lot more important than I think what conventionally was understood. Which is exactly why I think what you had pitched that we discussed this week is very interesting. Because over the course of this season, especially, we've talked about how the Navy is sort of like the torchbearer when it comes to learning from how to develop, design and build equipment within India. on your own terms, at your own time. So our readers and listeners would have, sorry, listeners and viewers would have gotten a sense that everything's hunky-dory with the Navy. However, you have sort of a different, I won't say a different view on that, but you have identified something that you think is a gap that's coming up very soon. Something that we talked about. It may not be an extremely alarming situation, or perhaps it is, but something a different needs discussing, which is the fact that... And we've discussed this once previously, that the Navy... Speaker 4 (3:15) When it comes to the Navy, its equipment takes a long time coming. So orders that you place today, orders that you think of today, designs that you develop today, these will come up only in the next decade or so. It's not as though you thought you need a ship, you ordered it and it came. Speaker 1 (3:30) They're complex machines that take time to build. Speaker 4 (3:33) Years. Speaker 1 (3:34) We Speaker 4 (3:34) are recording this episode just a few days after three ships were commissioned. Just a couple of months before a couple of more ships will be commissioned. In a year, actually in a period of two, three years when you've seen multiple ships submarines being commissioned by the Indian Navy. And this will continue. However, the point that you flagged to me, the point that you wanted to talk about on this episode is what's going to happen maybe two decades from now. Because you haven't really ordered anything now to start designing, building and that will come in two Speaker 1 (4:06) decades. So, you know, Dev, as you said, the last three years you've seen the primacy of India's sea lanes of communication, why they matter. And you realize that we may have a lot of contested land boundaries. Therefore, we are a kind of a continental power. We are army heavy. But at the same time, we are critically dependent on the seas for everything, you know, for our energy, for our sustenance, for commerce, trade, commerce, everything. Something like, you know, the figures are all there. 80 % of trade. by value, 90 % by volume, more than 80 % of our energy supplies, everything flows through the seas. And if you don't have your own, a strong Navy, if you don't have a strong merchant marine, which is your own vessels, commercial cargo vessels, containers, tankers, all of that, you're in, you know, as they say, you're up in an S creek without a paddle, right? So the thing is that if India were to say that, for instance, what we saw in the Straits of Hormuz, like Indian flagged ships will be allowed passage. Yes. Some of them were. But then a lot of our cargo does not come in. Very Speaker 2 (5:19) important. Yeah. Speaker 1 (5:20) They don't come on Indian flagged ships. We have so few of them. The majority of them are foreign flagged vessels. So it could be an American ship. It could be a British ship. It could be a Western-owned ship or something. And the Iranians will say, there's no way we're going to let these go. Speaker 1 (5:33) We may have great relations with Iran, but they will not allow ships of a particular kind of thing. You know, that's one of the scenarios. So you need to have a very strong merchant marine. You need to have a very strong Indian Navy, right? And so these are the two things that we are looking at in the last three years as there's been a kind of revival. And you've seen that when the Houthis began firing the first missiles onto merchant shipping in the Gulf of Aden, that is when we woke up and realized, oh my God. More than 90 % of our vessels, more than 90 % of our cargo is on foreign flagged vessels. So we are acutely vulnerable. We don't have inner ships. Our trade is, you know, growing exponentially, but we don't have Indian vessels to carry those things. So it's really important. So then you see the government then bringing in a shipbuilding policy, you know, rolling out incentives to build, make in India and all of that. And those are beginning to kick in. Now, the naval thing is slightly different. The Indian Navy has, as you mentioned, it has been a torchbearer of indigenization. So when I talk to my friends in the Navy, the retired admirals, and they talk about indigenization, say, we've been doing it for 50 years. We were literally the first people to start this entire thing of make in India, indigenize, design, build your own ships. And it's not just slogans. They've put in all of these structures in place, all the direct rates of design. directorates of engineering, warship, you know, overseeing teams, Vessi, which is your, looks at the electronics and communications and all of that of ships. They've gone into real nuts and bolts, right? They've done the entire thing. They've been doing it for about 50 years. Now comes the point when you mentioned like three ships commissioned in one day by the prime minister. It's only the second time I believe that thing has happened. And this year, we're going to see a lot of more commissionings, right? I think the next frigate also is going to be commissioned. You're going to have the fourth SSBN, the Arisudan being commissioned, many other things. More than a dozen ships are going to be commissioned. So we have something like 50 warships, submarines being built in shipyards and will be commissioned in the next couple of years. But here's the problem. There's an equal number of ships that are stuck in the planning stages, right? You have... proposals that have been doing the rounds for several years. And, you know, I think these are all policy related issues. You've gone after, you know, one particular program, something happens, the whole program gets rebooted and goes to the start line again. So because we are so process driven and you don't fault them because, you know, any deviation from process immediately, you know, people get blacklisted. You know, so everyone wants to play safe. When you're process oriented, when you... when you're so focused on process rather than outcomes, then you see programs going into a, you know, tailspin, like for instance, two big areas of concern, conventional submarines. You've been talking of project 75 India for close to two decades. And the monies that you've allotted to that program is laughable today when you look at it, because in 20 years, the allocations, the inflation has been, it's gone through the roof. So if you're, looking at like a thousand crore or two thousand crore per submarine back then. You're looking at ten thousand crores today, more than ten thousand crores. So that's how things play out. And there is a financial implication to all of these decisions that are not taken in time. So what I was telling you, Dave, is that now for the first time in many years, while it is really impressive, you have many ships coming online, being commissioned into the Indian Navy, there is also a vacuum. That is, for the first time in many years, you do not have an aircraft carrier. You do not have a frigate, a destroyer, and a conventional submarine being built in a yard. I'm not talking of the ships that have already been built, have been launched, that are on sea trials. Several of them are. The SSBN is on trials. The last frigate, that is the Vindhyagiri, is on trials. These will join quickly. But shipbuilding is a... Speaker 1 (9:45) assembly line concept. You know, you've got to have ships coming out at regular intervals. Now, what is going to happen because you haven't taken those decisions in the last couple of years. Decisions for a new generation destroyer. That's a project 18. A new generation frigate, which is the P-17 Bravo. All of these decisions, they've been in the pipeline. They were supposed to have been sanctioned in the late 2018, 19. They've been delayed for various reasons. And because of that, you're going to see a gap. Now, the way of doing that, you know, is to speed up, to reduce the gap, is to speed up your ship's construction. Speaker 4 (10:24) But Speaker 1 (10:25) then you run into a roadblock there as well. Because you have your five private sector shipyards, right? Four under the MOD and one under the Ministry of Surface Transport, which are essentially in another day and age. They're still, you know, many of them are... back in the 80s and in the 90s, in an era when you didn't have a lot of competition, technology, they haven't been upgraded to a certain extent. They still continue to build ships the way they did for all these years. And that's one of the reasons that a lot of people have noted that it takes so long to build ships, especially the capital ships. Anything between seven to eight years for a frontline frigate or a destroyer, the rest of the world does it in half the time. So the Koreans can do it in about four years. four or five years. The Chinese do it in two and a half years. The Chinese are on another planet, literally, when it comes to warship building because they have created this, you know, behemoth of a shipbuilding enterprise, which is they've combined all their shipbuilding organizations. They were essentially only two. Now they're just one, which now accounts for, believe it or not, something like 70 % of the world's shipbuilding. The Chinese are, they are... They control, there's a ship that's been launched in China, I read somewhere that every nine hours, that's the rate of, you know, ship construction. And again, you know, I think we've discussed this in the past as well, Dave, that one of my friends who was looking at satellite imagery of Chinese shipyards was telling me that, you know, the interesting thing about them is. There is no difference between civil and military. Speaker 3 (12:03) There Speaker 1 (12:03) are no walls. In our case, you will have a wall. Say Cochin Shipyard is building an aircraft carrier. There'll be a wall. They'll be building the aircraft carrier on this side. On that side, they'll be building a commercial vessel, right? Whereas in their case, everything is one. It's perfect civil-military fusion. And they've come very late into the party, by the way. They've been doing this for only about post-1999 or so. And the ability to... you know, really pump in resources, human resources, you know, invest in technology and to look at it, to look at shipbuilding in a holistic manner and not just, you know, okay, this is a destroyer yard, this is a frigate yard, this is a merchant shipping line, merchant shipping yard, you know, that kind of thing. They're looking at it as a big picture kind of thing. And that is why they've been able to capture the world market for shipping. In our case, We are non-existent as a commercial shipbuilding nation, right? We've woken up now. When it comes to the military shipbuilding as well, you have five shipyards which have about 50 odd projects under construction, which to my mind is inefficient, right? You should be building far more ships than you are presently. And not just building for India, you should be building for the rest of the world as well. Now, because you are in, you know, a different era. you're not able to compete with the rest of the world. So if you go out with a great frigate design, for instance, a Nilgiri class, if somebody wants a Nilgiri class from you or say one of the Saryu class OPVs from you as a light frigate, the minute you start quoting the time and cost, you're non-competitive. You can't compete with say the Korean yard or even a Chinese yard that can give it in half the time. So people are very mindful of this. And I think there's a lot for us to... wake up and, you know, take remedial measures before it's too late. Speaker 4 (14:01) Yeah. You know, I'm going to circle back to the, maybe the factors or the factor that is the reason for this slowing down of shipbuilding. But before we do that, before I do that, I wanted you to sort of give us a picture of what the Navy looks like right now. Yeah. What the Navy is going to look like in the next decade when you have those 50 odd ships that will be commissioned that are currently under. either trials or are being built. And what should the Navy of maybe 20 years from, 25 years from now look like in terms of what sort of upgrades you would expect or you would think should be there in the ships that we have? And the reason I ask that also is because unlike the topics that we discuss, unlike, let's say, tanks, unlike, let's say, fighter jets, those are really simple, I mean, comparatively speaking, equipment, equipments for our listeners and viewers to picture. Whereas for the Navy, it's sort of a very confusing mess for me, you know, when I was doing my research. First of all, you have frigates and then you have destroyers and then you have aircraft carriers, you have different kinds of submarines. And then you have these inane names that they've given to them. You have the Project 18, the Project 17, Bravo. Yeah, the numbers are... I Speaker 1 (15:11) mean, Speaker 4 (15:12) for me, Speaker 1 (15:13) it Speaker 4 (15:13) was just like, I won't be able to keep track of this. So I think for our listeners and viewers, so that they can understand what we're talking about. What does the Navy have right now? What is it getting in the near future? And what sort of developmental upgrades do you