Delivering a lecture organized by National Maritime Foundation on 10th August’09, the country’s senior most serving commander Chief of Naval Staff and also the Chairman of Chiefs of Staff Committee of defense forces Admiral Suresh Mehta said “In military terms, both conventional and non-conventional, India neither have the capability nor the intensions to match China force by force. These are indeed sobering thoughts and therefore our strategy to deal with China should be in consonance with these realities.”
Even if Indian military balance is heavily loaded against China, military commanders never publicly acknowledged this in the past. While delivering a reality check towards the end of his career (Commander Mehta would retire from services at the end of this month) Mehta further said, “The traditional approach of matching ‘division for division’ must give way to harnessing modern technology for developing high situational awareness and creating a reliable stand off deterrent. We cannot cope (with China) in terms of numbers, so we must look at technologies and get smarter.”
Elaborating further Mehta said that Indian military weakness vis-a-vis China is nothing but a reflection of our weakness in other spheres. He said that the gap between the two countries, in terms of socio-economic parameters like GDP, defense spending, other social or developmental parameters is just too wide to be bridged.
Pointing to the ‘mistrust’ we have for China and setting an agenda for coming generation Admiral Mehta said, “Our ‘trust deficit’ with China can never be liquidated unless our boundary problems with China are resolved.”
The lecture at India Habitat Center in New Delhi was well attended by Air Chief Marshall P.K.Naik, Ex-navy Chief and Mehta’s predecessor Arun Prakash a number of former chief of armed forces, diplomats from India and abroad, retired armed forces officers and school students.
In fact as per military strength data available on various Internet sites, the conventional Chinese military strength compared to India is higher roughly by 2:1 ratio. However, in the strategic nuclear arsenal China is way and way ahead of India and the maximum yield of a Chinese nuclear bomb is 4 megatons compared to 0.05 megatons of India. The Chinese warhead delivery system ICBM is capable of striking at a distance of 12000km compared to 3500km of Indian missiles.
http://www.abytheliberal.com/internationalism/india-vs-china-military-conventional-nuclear
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