The last time the perpetual tensions between India and Pakistan escalated into a face-off, Indian officials were forced to confront an uncomfortable reality: The country’s huge military was bloated, antiquated and underprepared for imminent threats at its borders.
The humiliating downing of an Indian jet by Pakistan in 2019 injected new urgency into India’s modernization efforts. Prime Minister Narendra Modi poured billions of dollars into the military, sought new international partners for arms purchases and pushed to expand defense manufacturing capacity at home.
Just how much of a difference those efforts have made may soon be tested.
India and Pakistan appear on the verge of another military conflict, as India promises retaliation for a deadly terrorist attack in Kashmir that it says was linked to Pakistan. Tensions have risen so sharply that India has vowed to disrupt the flow of a major river system into Pakistan, a step it has never taken before, even during the wars the two countries have fought over the decades.
Pakistan, which denies involvement in the Kashmir attack, has called the water decision an “act of war.”
The slaughter on Tuesday of more than two dozen tourists in a scenic valley shocked Indians and put Mr. Modi under tremendous domestic pressure to strike Pakistan. Analysts warn of the prospect of a protracted and dangerous standoff, with diplomatic channels between the two nuclear-armed countries having withered years ago and global powers now distracted by other crises.
But India, the analysts say, may be restrained by the risk of exposing a military that is still under transformation.
In 2018, a parliamentary report categorized 68 percent of the country’s military equipment as “vintage,” 24 percent as current and only 8 percent as state of the art. Five years later, in an update, military officials admitted that there had been insufficient change because of the size of their challenge.
While the share of state-of-the-art equipment had nearly doubled, according to parliamentary testimony in 2023, it still remained far less than what is called for in a modern army. More than half of the equipment remained old.
These constraints, experts say, could lead Mr. Modi to choose a more surgical option — such as limited airstrikes or special forces raids close to the border with Pakistan — that calms public anger, reduces the risk of embarrassing mishaps and avoids escalatory retaliation. The Pakistani government has vowed to respond in kind to any Indian attack.
While public sentiment may help drive Mr. Modi to strike Pakistan, India’s democracy could also put pressure on him to ensure that the situation does not spin out of control.
In Pakistan, where the military establishment has long steered the country from behind the scenes, the leadership has a freer hand and may find more domestic benefits from letting the confrontation grow.
India projects confidence that it can easily thwart Pakistan’s military. If that assertion is put to that test, another of India’s neighbors will be watching closely: China.
In recent years, India has considered China a more urgent border challenge than Pakistan, especially after a deadly brawl between their troops high in the Himalayas in 2020 and repeated Chinese incursions into Indian territory. The country’s military leaders have had to prepare for the prospect of a two-front war, a juggling act that stretches resources.
The 2020 confrontation came a little over a year after Pakistan downed the Indian jet and took its pilot into custody. Dushyant Singh, a retired Indian general who leads the Center for Land Warfare Studies, a New Delhi-based think tank, said that the plane episode had been a wake-up call for the Indian military.
Since then, he said, India has explored “multiple routes” to patch its military holes. It has deployed new missile defense systems acquired from Russia despite American objections, as well as dozens of fighter jets from France and drones, helicopters and missiles from the United States.
With global supply lines increasingly untrustworthy, India has also invested heavily in local production of military equipment, setting up defense industries that, while slow now, will make the military better positioned in the long run.
“Our war stamina has to be of a nature which has to go beyond our existing capabilities,” Mr. Singh said.
“These will not give you results just overnight. They will take some time,” he added about the modernization efforts.
The challenges in modernizing India’s military, analysts said, are manifold: bureaucratic and financial, but also geopolitical.
Mr. Modi has been trying to streamline the defense procurement process, as well as improve coordination among the different forces, which has proved difficult as turf battles continue. It did not help that one of the key generals Mr. Modi had tasked with streamlining the military died in a helicopter crash in 2021.
India’s economy is now the world’s fifth largest, about 10 times the size of Pakistan’s, bringing more resources for the military. But India’s spending on defense still amounts to less than 2 percent of its gross domestic product, which military experts call insufficient, as the government focuses on the immense needs of its huge population.
The modernization efforts were set back by a costly four-year deployment of tens of thousands of troops to India’s border with China after the skirmish in 2020. Another major hurdle has been the Ukraine war, which has affected the delivery of weapons from India’s biggest source: Russia.
Official testimony to Parliament showed that even when money was ready, the military struggled to spend it because orders were tied up by supply chain disruptions caused by the “global geopolitical situation.”
In the face of such constraints, analysts said, India has tried to prioritize filling the biggest gaps.
India kept its place as the world’s second-largest importer of military equipment over the past five years, just after Ukraine. Pakistan was the world’s fifth largest.
Even as Russia remains India’s biggest source of weapons, purchases have fallen nearly 20 percent in the past five years. India has increasingly turned to France and the United States, as well as Israel.
Indian officials have said that three of the five S-400 missile defense systems that the country bought from Russia, despite strong pushback by the United States, have been deployed. All of the 36 Rafale fighter jets purchased from France have become part of the force, and India plans to order 26 more. India has also been commissioning a large number of warships built at home.
“The biggest difference is the induction of Rafale, which is a boost for Indian Air Force capability,” said Ajai Shukla, a defense analyst in New Delhi.
The challenge, Mr. Shukla said, is deploying the various new systems with an expertise that demonstrates “functional deterrence” to adversaries.
“I would want to ensure that we were not just kidding ourselves,” he said. A concern would be if “we have the weapons systems, and then finally, when it’s time to use them, it turns out that we don’t really have them.”
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