It's a showdown that seemed impossible just a decade ago,
but now is more probable than ever before. The US and India, the world's two largest democracies,
vs Russia and China, authoritarian states hellbent on turning the clock back on the
liberal-led world order. Who would win this hypothetical World War III.
The US and India may seem an unlikely paring at first glance. Historically,
India has been the leader of the unaligned movement, a small coalition of nations
seeking to keep themselves out of the power struggles between the US and the
Soviet Union. After the end of the Cold War and with the ascension of China to the world stage,
India once more attempted to remain neutral- and quickly found that it couldn't afford to do so.
China outclasses India militarily on every level. Chinese technology is better,
its combat platforms more numerous, and its defense budget is many times
larger than India's. China also has the advantage of a mediocre,
but robust domestic arms industry- China may not be pumping out the world's best weapons,
but it’s capable of creating very advanced weapons domestically- and even has a few items in its
arsenal that are global number ones such as the PL15 air to air missile. India by comparison is
still struggling to kick start a domestic arms industry, with its plan to build a domestic
main battle tank being seen largely as a disaster across its very long development cycle. Originally
meant to enter service in 1985, the Arjun was still in development twenty six years later. It
remains the only main battle tank in the world who's development spans two separate centuries.
Given its inability to confront China in a major peer-on-peer conflict, India has been looking to
warm relations between itself and Washington. For its part, the US is happy to cooperate with India,
and has in fact been looking to do so for decades now. This cooperation could even open
the door to solving India's biggest problem today: a lack of modern combat equipment.
India has purchased most of its equipment from Russia, but it's never truly received the best
stuff. Now India is having serious doubts about the effectiveness of its Russian equipment,
given how catastrophically Russian tanks, planes, and helicopters have fared in Ukraine. This has
India looking increasingly west for more advanced equipment, and even before the war in Ukraine,
India had already significantly slowed its imports of weapons from Russia, dropping from 64% of all
purchases in 2018 to 45% by 2022. Famously, India backed out of joint development on the Su-57 as
it became increasingly apparent that the jet was more vaporware than a serious competitor to
American 5th generation fighters. This basically bankrupt Russia's Su-57 efforts, and to this day
the jet only exists in tiny numbers meant more for demonstrative purposes than actual combat
missions. Now Prime Minister Modi and US President Biden are looking to expand arm sales to India.
While India may not be able to face China independently in a full-scale conflict though,
India has two significant advantages going for it.
First is geography. India is immune to invasion from China, and likewise so is China from India.
This means that any military ground action will be limited to skirmishes along the
mountainous border, and these are skirmishes that unfortunately India is set to lose. However, the
loss of border territory in the mountains won't in any way threaten Indian national security. But
India's biggest geographic advantage is the fact that it sits directly on China's trade jugular.
China relies on exports for a significant part of its economy,
and for approximately 60% of all energy supplies. While most of its
exports go to regional neighbors such as Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam,
its energy imports from the middle east travel straight through the Indian Ocean and ultimately,
the Malacca Straits. India, with its ability to project naval power deep into the Indian ocean,
is well suited for cutting off Chinese energy imports, and thus crippling its economy.
India is preparing for just such a scenario. It currently operates the INS Vikrant aircraft
carrier, and has a second carrier in construction. Carriers are vitally important for conducting blue
water naval operations, or operations far from friendly shores. Nations attempting to project
power at sea without carrier support risk being destroyed by nations who do operate carriers,
or simply by long-range attack aircraft using stand-off weapons.
India is also building military bases in islands near the Malacca Straits themselves.
A new naval base at Grand Nicobar Island sits directly at the mouth of the Malacca Straits,
and caused a diplomatic uproar in China when construction began. For their part,
India began construction not just to secure this strategically important waterway,
but to be taken more seriously by a Beijing growing increasingly belligerent. The Grand
Nicobar facility has been likened to a guillotine placed directly over China's
exposed, and very long neck, stretching from its southern shores all the way to the Middle East.
India's second strength is its combat experience. India and Pakistan have had a number of wars,
with them typically going very poorly for Pakistan. Even now, combat against
Pakistan-backed groups continues along the border regions across west and northwest India,
and that has helped hone the Indian military into a competent force. Pakistan may pose a
significantly less capable threat than China, but that still means that the Indian military
has had multiple opportunities to cut its teeth in war, and learn from the lessons real combat
teaches. This isn't just about tactics and doctrine though, it's everything from
experience with combat resupply and logistics, and all one needs to do is look at the Russian
offensive on Kyiv to realize just how important having a good combat logistics force really is.
China on the other hand has waged no war since its failed invasion of Vietnam in the seventies.
Even after being weakened by the war against the US-backed South Vietnam and its American allies,
Vietnam managed to soundly defeat the Chinese offensive, grinding it to a halt. Weeks later
it was forced to retreat, while claiming it had achieved all strategic objectives
and had thus won the war. If China's strategic objective was to send a considerable military
force into a brief camping trip deep into the rain forest, then it had indeed won the war,
but by all international accounts Vietnam soundly defeated China.
The Chinese military of today is not the one of the 1970s though,
and China has invested heavily into modernizing. That does not mean however
that China will perform well in a real combat situation. Until only recently,
its military conducted almost exclusively highly choreographed and rehearsed exercises for the
benefit of watching dignitaries. In once specific incident in the 2010s, entertainers had to be
flown in to lift the morale of troops undertaking one of China's first realistic training exercises.
In 2014, the Chinese military increased its budget to be spent on entertainment for its troops in
an effort to boost morale. This including the purchasing of jukeboxes and musical instruments,
Now boosting the morale of your troops is never a bad idea, but compare this with
similar programs in the US military which focus on building entertainment facilities,
family recreation centers, and social programs for service members. Juke boxes and guitars will
only get you so far, and even more telling is where the funds for this morale boost
was coming from- funds typically used by high ranking military and political
officials to do everything from going on lavish vacations to visiting high-end luxury clubs.
Fundamentally, this is one of China's own biggest weaknesses- corruption.
Russia is famously corrupt by design. Rather than have a political and military culture
that is corrupt, its political and military culture is corruption. Corruption is a means
to an end in Russia, with it serving as leverage over officials lower ranking than yourself. It
ensure the loyalty of subordinates up and down the chain of command, who could have their
well-documented corruption used against them to remove them from their positions. This culture of
corruption extends to the lowest levels of the Russian military, where unit commanders skim
their soldier's pay checks and those soldiers in turn take it out on fresh conscripts or recruits.
China too has a corruption problem, but it would be more fair to call it 'efficient'
corruption- at least in the political sector. Kickbacks and pay outs serve to
lubricate the wheels of China's meteoric modernization, even if they fundamentally
undermine Chinese society itself. In China, only efficient corruption is tolerated,
unlike in Russia where there's little regard for the effects of corruption and its cost
is actually baked into the purchasing price of things like military equipment. The reason it
was cheaper for Russia to buy drones abroad rather than build its own at home before the
Ukraine war was because the various kickbacks expected by officials down the acquisitions chain
made it three to four times more expensive to buy the product from domestic sources.
But there's a limit to how efficient corruption can be, and Chinese society is rife with it-
simply because like Russia, corruption was how the game was played for decades. Recently, the
head of China's largest military ship builder was charged with multiple corruption charges. In 2020
Hu Wenming was arrested on a number of charges, but this was merely the tip of an iceberg that
persists to this day. In 2015 Chinese Communist Party anti-corruption investigators visited the
China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, or CSIC, and discovered a laundry list of
offenses including lack of oversight by party and discipline inspection organizations, violation
of regulations among research institutes, incomplete financial records, exchanging of
bribes for research funding, redirecting research projects to private companies,
sale of company resources and technology for personal gain, using one's position to benefit
businesses of family and friends, violation of party rules, and incomplete regulations on
personnel selection and appointment. Two years later they returned but not much had changed.
Cronyism and favoritism was rampant, and company officials used their position for personal gain.
Inspectors returned a third time in 2019, to find that yet again not much had changed. The
investigations did produce arrests- ironically the first arrest would be Liu Changhong,
the CSIC's anti-corruption czar. A deputy of CSIC Chairman Hu Wenming was found guilty of accepting
bribes and abuse of power that led to quote- very serious damage to China's national interests.
This type of corruption is cancerous to the military that industries like this directly
support. The quality of equipment received by the People's Liberation Army Navy was affected
by the syphoning of funds intended for R&D or manufacture to personal bank accounts. Further,
this hurt the CSIC's ability to keep the PLAN competitive by directly affecting company
culture. Cronyism meant that less qualified individuals were put in positions of power,
directly affecting the company's efficiency and resulting in a significant drop in morale
amongst subordinates. Reviews of CSIC on Chinese job sites frequently mention disappointment over
mismanagement and cronyism across the spectrum of CSIC subsidiaries and research institutes.
It also doesn't help when some of your most senior officials
are directly selling secrets to foreign intelligence agents.
But this culture of mismanagement and cronyism is endemic to Chinese military culture as well. For
decades military appointments largely came about as a result of China's gift culture- wherein a
subordinate seeking a promotion or favor would provide a superior lavish gifts or favors. This
culture was endemic well into the 21st century, and despite efforts by Xi Jinping to root out
corruption remains to this day. This means that a significant number of senior Chinese military
leaders are unlikely to be the best qualified for their positions, and that's a problem when
facing off against a professional and highly competitive force like the US military.
In 2021, 70 serving and retired senior People's Liberation Army officers were
demoted for pay-for-promotion schemes, including a full general and two lieutenant generals. Most
of these officers were directly connected to PLA chief of joint staff Fang Fenghui, who was himself
convicted of taking bribes and sentence to life in Prison. But the chain of corruption doesn't stop
there, because Fenghui was directly connected to Guo Boxiong and Xu Caihou, former vice-chairmen
of the Central Military Commission, and who were both punished- but not removed- for corruption.
And like Russia, the corruption extends to the lowest levels of the Chinese military,
though perhaps not as brutally. New recruits, especially those from rural areas,
will pay bribes to enlistment officers who will then boost their entrance exams
or overlook physical and mental issues that would normally bar one from military service.
This means that a significant number of Chinese recruits may themselves not
be fully qualified for the positions they hold- but even more importantly,
means that the culture of corruption is alive and well inside the Chinese armed forces.
And one need only look at Ukraine to see how corruption destroys a
military's ability to fight a high intensity conflict against a serious
adversary motivated to kick your teeth in- which is exactly the scenario that China
faces in any showdown in the Pacific against Taiwan, Japan, and the US.
As China's partner, Russia likely presents more of a liability than a boon at this point. The
nation has proven to be incapable of fighting a modern combined arms conflict, and most telling
of all is the incredible outsized impact that a miniscule amount of advanced western equipment
has had on the war. In the summer of 2022, the US sent a handful of HIMARS batteries to Ukraine,
and absolutely turned the war on its head for the Russians. HIMARS was instrumental in shaping the
coming fall counter offensive, and the addition of just a dozen long-range precision strike platforms
to the conflict completely disrupted Russian operations across the front. For comparison,
the US has over 400 of its own HIMARS batteries still in its inventory, a threat that it's safe
to say Russia would absolutely crumble under if the two sides ever came to blows.
With its military hopelessly bogged down in Ukraine, there's little that
Russia could offer China in terms of a shared conflict against a US-Indian
alliance. Such a conflict would play out largely over the air-sea domains,
and Russia's navy would be able to offer at best modest assistance- while leaving its own coasts
vulnerable to US attack. The effectiveness of its aerospace forces is also dubious- Russia'
air force has been largely absent from the fight in Ukraine, with the nation using only a portion
of its air force for combat operations. The mystery would be revealed when data leaked to
the west that Russia was having a serious problem fielding qualified pilots, and was being forced
to send senior instructors to the conflict- compounding its inability to field more pilots
by taking away experienced training personnel and more often than not, getting them killed.
Russian pilots are believed to be receiving only between 70-120 hours of flight time a year,
and their training program fares even worse. At the Krasnodar Higher Military
Aviation School for Pilots, graduates average only 140 hours of beginner flight training,
with another 60 hours in an advanced flight training program for a total of about 200
hours before joining a combat-ready squadron. This pales in comparison to the training that
American pilots receive, who fly even more hours before climbing into a training fighter jet.
In the US Air Force, pilots attend initial flight screening where they'll accumulate 25 hours of
flight time in prop-driven aircraft. Then a pilot will undergo Specialized
Undergraduate Pilot Training, which couples classroom instruction with 90 flight hours
in yet another prop-driven aircraft. Then, after about 115 flight hours in training,
air force pilots are assigned the aircraft they'll be flying while in active service.
Fighter and bomber pilots, who make up only the top students of a class,
fly 100+ hours in a jet training aircraft in their next phase of training. By now
American trainee pilots have already flown more hours than their Russian counterparts,
and won't even be combat ready until they fly an additional 20 hours in their Introduction to
Fighter Fundamentals course, and then between six months and a year with their dedicated air frame.
By the time a US pilot reaches their combat-ready
squadron they already have as many flight hours as a Russian veteran.
And it's not just a pilot crisis on Russia's hand, it's the inability to conduct joint operations
alongside air defenses. In the Ukraine conflict, Russia has shot down nearly as many of its own
aircraft as Ukraine has, all due to its inability to deconflict the airspace over the battlefield.
To better put this in perspective, in Desert Storm the US successfully deconflicted Iraqi air space,
suffering only a handful of friendly on friendly incidents despite 4,000 coalition aircraft
operating over the country. By comparison, Russia is operating a few hundred platforms
in airspace half the size, and scoring nearly as many kills as Ukraine is on its own air
frames. This puts the possibility of Russian and Chinese air forces working together at near zero.
Assuming the conflict remained conventional, it would be on China to do the lion's share of the
fighting against a joint Indian and American force. The US is well accustomed to operating
alongside partner nations, and is much better suited at deconfliction and cooperation than
China or Russia, allowing India to use significant amounts of air power in the Pacific theater where
it would play a more meaningful role than over the mountainous northern border which
is heavily defended by Chinese ground defenses and lacks truly strategically important targets.
Under cover of American carrier battle groups, Indian ships could provide a significant boost
to US capabilities- especially after accounting for the loss of multiple platforms due to very
dense Chinese anti-ship defenses. It's safe to say that without India's navy shoring up its numbers,
the US Navy's own entry into the Pacific theater would be significantly delayed as it weathered the
storm of People's Liberation Army Rocket Force's ballistic and conventional anti-ship missiles.
Ultimately though, it's Indian's strategic position at the mouth of the Straits of Malacca,
and the US' ability to project power into the Gulf of Oman that would spell China's
defeat. From these two choke points the two allies could effectively cut off Chinese energy imports,
and with crippling strikes against pipelines from Russia using submarine-launched cruise missiles
and America's fleet of stealth bombers, China's energy imports would slow to a trickle, paralyzing
its economy. Forced to severely ration energy in order to supply the war effort, China would face a
domestic crisis as its massive population chafes under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party.
In the end, a US-Indian alliance is simply too powerful for a Sino-Russian alliance to overcome,
and their growing partnership could ensure that China's ambitions to dominate Asia
and upset the liberal world order remains nothing but a pipe dream.
Now go watch UK's World War III Plan, or click this other video instead!