China and India Keep Investing In Border Infrastructure Amid Fast-Expanding Strike Munition Threat
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The recent improvement of China-India relations notwithstanding, the two countries are engaged in an ongoing standoff along their expansive Himalayan frontiers. Both China and India continue to allocate substantial resources toward improving infrastructure in and along contested sections of the China-India border. Such measures are not only used to bolster each side’s territorial claims by easing access to extremely remote and largely inhospitable terrain, but also to sustain a larger presence of military and paramilitary personnel in the Himalayas. This has resulted in the construction of, among other things, many bridges and tunnels in the Himalayas over the past decade or so. For its part, India recently announced that it will build railway lines in the country’s northeast at an estimated cost of US$3.4 billion.
While improving transportation infrastructure in and near disputed territory is an undertaking that neither China nor India are likely to forgo, it is important to recognize that this rather frenetic construction activity is taking place at a time when it has never been easier to damage, if not destroy, transportation infrastructure. Both countries are well-positioned to employ guided glide bombs to target bridges, tunnel entrances, and tracts of narrow switchback roads that cling to the sides of mountains. Both countries can use longer-range munitions such as land-attack cruise missiles to attack transportation nodes that are located further away from the frontlines. Both countries can also use much smaller, lighter, shorter-range, far less expensive, and more widely available munitions, such as armed multirotor drones, to target nodes of infrastructure big and small along the China-India border. This includes, among other things, the targeting of vehicles inside tunnels, the targeting of railway signalling equipment as well as railway locomotives, the targeting of electrical generators and local electricity transmission infrastructure, the targeting of telecommunications antennas, and the targeting of diesel and propane storage tanks. It is important to recognize that China and India not only face the same fast-expanding strike munition threat in the Himalayas as every other country, but do so in a military-geographical context that greatly increases the challenge of mounting an effective defence against the fast-expanding strike munition threat.
While China and India are likely to deploy both air and ballistic missile defence systems and electronic warfare systems with the aim of neutralizing adversary strike munitions, prevailing military and technological dynamics make this a difficult enough task for militaries that operate in a military-geographical context characterized by open plains and similar terrain. The China-India border on the Himalayas is a very different military-geographical context. Air and ballistic missile defence systems primarily rely on radar, which is, for all practical intents and purposes, a line-of-sight sensor that requires an unobstructed field of view on the object(s) that it is intended to detect. Electronic warfare systems emit radio frequency signals with the aim of, among other things, jamming and spoofing the radio frequency emissions of the adversary. Electronic warfare systems are also, for all practical intents and purposes, line-of-sight systems that require an unobstructed field of view on the object(s) that these are intended to jam or spoof.
Given the above, the Himalayas and other parts of the world characterized by a mountainous topography are a nightmare for military planners tasked with employing line-of-sight sensors, electronic warfare systems, and other types of military equipment more generally. In the Himalayas, a surface-to-air missile system with a nominal maximum range of 250 kilometers may have a practical maximum range of just 50-100 kilometers at best. In the Himalayas, an electronic warfare system capable of jamming signals over a 30 kilometers radius may only be capable of doing so over a radius of 5 kilometers at best. As a result, both China and India have to deploy very large numbers of such quite expensive and, as a result, fairly scarce systems to the Himalayas if they are to defend most, let alone all, possible targets of adversary strike munitions. This increases the number of military personnel that must be deployed to these areas and, in turn, increases the logistical challenge of sustaining such a military presence in remote and largely inhospitable terrain. At some point, the logistical challenge of sustaining an isolated outpost becomes so large that it is better to invest in the infrastructure required to support a more substantial permanent garrison and this, in turn, simply creates yet another lucrative and difficult to defend target for the adversary to attack with strike munitions of one type or another.
To be clear, the Himalayas are characterized by considerable topographical variation, and the terrain is very different in the western sector relative to the eastern sector. More generally, Chinese forces operate from the high elevation Tibetan Plateau—which imposes some quite severe constraints and comes with a great many challenges—while Indian forces must, in most sectors, ascend hundreds, if not thousands, of meters in elevation to reach the Tibetan Plateau and contested terrain therein, a dynamic that often makes lateral measurements of distance that do not take terrain and elevation and the attendant affects of on terrestrial navigation into account wholly misleading. There are also open tracts of land along the China-India Himalayan frontier, albeit at a very high average elevation, such as the Depsang Plains, which is an actively contested area. Even so, both China and India face immense challenges in defending their forces and infrastructure in such relatively open areas and ultimately rely on supply lines that weave through mountains that are very difficult to defend against the fast-expanding strike munition threat.
What are the implications of the fast-expanding strike munition threat experienced by China and India along their contested Himalayan frontiers? There is a case to be made that the country with the qualitatively and quantitatively superior conventional strike capabilities may be able to secure something that amounts to a (conventional) first strike advantage in the Himalayas. That is, one country may be able to severely degrade the logistical network of the other and, in so doing, render the sustainment of military forces along the disputed Himalayan frontiers untenable, especially in winter and the lead-up to winter. While China is presently, in principle, far better positioned to execute a decisive opening blow to India’s logistical networks than India can do the same to China, it is important to recognize that China’s military capabilities are heavily oriented toward the Western Pacific and that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) presence in Tibet—as it concerns the employment of strike munitions, not infantry equipped with small arms—and adjacent areas is fairly limited in size. India can, as such, more readily bring much more of its military capabilities to bear along the China-India border with the important caveats that India’s strike capabilities are presently inferior in qualitative terms and India will always have to make use of highly vulnerable transportation arteries to not only bring a larger military force to bear in the Himalayas but also sustain it.