Chandigarh: The involvement of India’s two principal materiel providers – Russia and Israel – in their respective wars and conflicts has the potential to impact the inflow of defence equipment supplies into the country, warned a cross-section of service veterans and military analysts.According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), India had imported 45% of its defence equipment from Russia between 2018-22, and while no analogous data was available for Israeli materiel buys, analysts estimated that Tel Aviv had provided around 9-10% of the varied military kits New Delhi received during this period.This equalled a whopping 55% or so of Russian and Israeli military imports for India.Furthermore, SIPRI recently revealed that 37% of all Israeli arms exports between 2018-22 were to India, registering a 175% increase after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government assumed power in 2014.Retired Brigadier Rahul Bhonsle of the Security Risks Asia consultancy in Delhi said that while the BJP-led government had launched the atamnirbhar initiative to indigenise Indian military needs, Delhi still topped the global list of defence equipment importers.Consequently, in light of the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and now in Gaza, Russia and Israel, he warned, could well end up either failing to meet India’s numerous materiel requirements or delaying deliveries interminably.Unlike Russia, Israel does not provide India any major platforms, but supplies critical and innovative force multipliers like unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), assorted missile, guidance and avionics systems, precision-guided munitions, diverse sensors and surveillance and targeting radars, amongst other equipment.Most of this was fitted onto combat aircraft, helicopters, warships, submarines and armoured vehicles.But such equipment and component diversity made it difficult to quantify the exact or even near-precise percentages of Israeli military equipment in service with India’s armed forces.Collaborative Indo-Israeli ventures to locally develop and manufacture missile systems, UAVs and small arms too rendered such an audit challenging, resulting in approximations. Inordinately high levels of secrecy surrounding all India-Israel military and security-related commerce further added to the overall opacity in this regard.Also Read: Rooting for Israel, Not a Good Word About Palestine: Modi Is Upending Indian Foreign PolicyAnd though recent local media reports, quoting defence officials, stated that Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza against Hamas was ‘unlikely’ to impact military hardware and spares supplies to India in the short term, they cautioned that an extended conflict could jeopardise deliveries.“Any limited impact [on Israeli equipment supplies] can only be [adversely] felt if it turns out to be a long-drawn war, much like the one between Russia and Ukraine” reported the Indian Express on Saturday, quoting an unnamed official.In such an eventuality, Israel may end up diverting its weapons and equipment stock towards fighting its own conflict, the official had added.Before Delhi established formal diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv in 1992, Israel had assisted India clandestinely in 1962 by providing it limited military aid during its brief, albeit disastrous war with China.Israel’s Chief of Staff, General David Shaltiel, had visited Delhi surreptitiously soon after in 1963, and thereafter Israel provided similar, albeit paltry assistance during India’s subsequent wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971 by supplying munitions like Finnish-origin M-58 160mm mortars.Clandestine ties continued apace, with senior Indian security officials travelling to Israel via Cyprus – as no direct air links between the two countries existed – to ensure that their passports would have no record of their visit to the Jewish state out of sympathy for and support to the Palestinian cause.But after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, India is believed to have secured Israeli help in upgrading its VIP protection protocol by training and arming its newly raised Special Protection Group and National Security Guard personnel. Israeli specialists also seemingly devised Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s security architecture that broadly continues with minor alterations for his successors, including Modi.Thousands of Israelis and Palestinians have died in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. Photo: X/@UNRWA.But the disintegration in the early 1990s of the Soviet Union, India’s longstanding ally and principal weapons supplier, was a turning point in Delhi’s military ties with Israel. Crucial supplies of arms and spares for military equipment either ceased or were interminably delayed, as overnight numerous suppliers found themselves located in independent neighbouring republics that were inimical to Moscow.Consequently, India was compelled to consider alternate materiel sources at a critical period that coincided with the eruption of Kashmiri insurgency in late 1989, in response to which the army was widely deployed in the troubled Himalayan state.Once diplomatic ties with Israel were instituted under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao in 1992, the two sides fast-tracked their strategic and defence relationship based on mutual security and commercial interests.Israel, for its part, rightly perceived a commercial opportunity, while India looked upon Tel Aviv as a reliable and ‘no-questions-asked’ materiel provider, especially of varied ammunition and missile systems which India’s military badly lacked, and still does.Nonetheless, it still took another six-odd years and the BJP’s ascent to power under Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee for Israel’s defence machinery to definitively establish itself in India. Being a ‘closet’ nuclear weapon state, Israel’s decision not to condemn India’s May 1998 Pokhran nuclear tests also helped considerably, further endearing Tel Aviv to Delhi and vice-versa.However, it was the 11-week long Kargil war with Pakistan in 1999 that catapulted Israel’s defence industry to centre stage domestically.As the seriousness of the deadly conflict unfolded, commercially savvy Israel dug deep into its military reserves to supply India high-end hardware, especially badly-needed 155mm rounds for its FH-77B Bofors howitzers, laser-guided munitions and other ordnance that contributed largely to the Pakistan Army vacating the mountainous region’s siege and ending hostilities.Also Read: Without Israel’s Oppression of Palestinians, Hamas Terrorism Would Have Never ExistedTwo decades later, the Indian Air Force’s (IAF’s) Mirage 2000H fighters in their attack on a Pakistani militant training camp at Balakot in Pakhtunkhwa in February 2019, fired specifically configured Israeli Crystal Maze Mk2 missiles (variants of the Rafael Advanced Defence Systems AGM-142 Raptor Have Nap/Popeye missile). Additionally, they employed Paveway II laser-guided bombs directed by Rafael-designed Smart Precise Impact and Cost Effective (SPICE) guidance kits.Alongside, the Indian military exhibited interest in the Israel Defense Forces’ successful warfare strategies and concepts, particularly with regard to countering armed insurgencies.Intelligence sharing on terrorism issues proliferated, as did Israeli military training assistance to India’s Special Forces. The rationale that Israel and India shared similar, but un-publicised concerns over threats posed by contiguous Islamic states further cemented bilateral security and military ties between Delhi and Tel Aviv.Earlier, in 2008, the Indian Space Research Organisation successfully placed an Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI)-designed TecSAR military satellite into polar orbit in a classified operation that appreciably augmented Tel Aviv’s intelligence-gathering capabilities by providing 24-hour high-resolution imagery in all-weather conditions at an affordable cost.This was later followed up with the launch of RISAT-2, India’s radar imaging satellite fitted with an IAI-provided X-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR), to monitor the country’s disputed border with Pakistan as part of its wider anti-terrorist operations.Israel is also believed to have provided India with counter-terrorism assistance to help it deal with the Kashmiri insurgency in the early 2000s. It made available over a dozen technical teams to assist India in augmenting its border intelligence gathering capabilities, besides providing anti-terrorism counter measures like upgraded border fencing, ground sensors and handheld thermal imagers for use by army and paramilitary border guards.Ironically, some of this type of fencing equipment deployed along the restive Israel-Gaza border had miserably failed in detecting last week’s Hamas assault on Israel, in which some 1,200 Israelis died and which spawning the current hostilities.And as part of proliferating covert security and defence co-operation, Israel had reportedly transferred military-grade Pegasus spyware to India, which deployed it to monitor smartphones belonging to the country’s opposition politicians, journalists, lawyers and civil rights activists amongst others in 2021.Modi was also the first Indian PM to visit Israel in 2017, while Benjamin Netanyahu travelled to Delhi in early 2018 further cementing strategic, political and diplomatic ties between the two states.Meanwhile, much has been detailed over the past 20 months, after Russia declared war on Ukraine in February 2022, on challenges the Indian military faces with regard to sourcing sundry military platforms and spares from Moscow due to the sanctions imposed upon it.India still awaits the delivery of two of five Almaz-Antey S-400 Triumf self-propelled surface-to-air (SAM) missile systems, four Admiral Grigorovich Project 1135.6M frigates and 75,000-80,0000 Kalashnikov AK-203 7.62x39mm assault rifles that were part of a deal signed in late 2021 to locally licence and build 601,427 of them.The fate of leasing one more Project 971 ‘Akula’ (Schuka-B)-class nuclear powered submarine (SSN) by the Indian Navy (IN) too is unknown for now. Additionally, spares and sub-assemblies for the IAF’s large fleet of Russian Su-30MKIs, MiG-29Ms and MiG-21s too are believed to be in short supply.Over 65% of India’s military’s assets are of Soviet and Russian origin, necessitating the continued servicing, maintenance, overhaul and in some instances upgradation of a large proportion of them by their original equipment manufacturers or OEMs, all of which had been sanctioned by the US, its NATO allies, Australia and Japan.And though India had reduced its dependence on Russia for military equipment by some 33% between 2011 and 2020 in an effort to diversify its network of materiel suppliers, switching entirely to alternate sources was not an option military-planners in Delhi desired, as it entailed colossal expenditure, reworked infrastructure, inordinate delays and doctrinal changes.Perhaps the individual wars in Ukraine and Gaza and the constraints these could impose on Russia and Israel’s ability to export defence equipment may end up providing alternative routes to sustain and modernise India’s military through indigenous efforts.
