New Delhi: Chief of Naval Staff Admiral R. Hari Kumar, while advocating for secure seas said that there is a greater need to invest in maritime capabilities and that when maritime power is mentioned, it is not limited to military power alone.
Admiral Kumar, who was speaking at Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi Friday, added that it was evident right from the history of Athens that all those who neglected the seas have had to pay a heavy price, especially if they were a maritime nation.
“We ourselves have faced the onslaught and were subjugated for almost 1,000 years, both from the continental and maritime powers, more so by the colonial powers which came in through the sea.”
Stressing on the need to adopt modern technology, he said a look at the ongoing conflicts such as Ukraine-Russia or Israel-Hamas showed that the character of warfare was changing.
“We need to therefore adopt the use of modern and niche technologies which are becoming more affordable,” he said, adding that the same was being adopted by non-state actors or state-funded actors to carry out asymmetric warfare. “What we see is an alignment of asymmetric forces against nation-states,” he said.
Furthermore, he said that there was increasing asymmetry between the “cost of attack” and “cost of defence”. “You just have to see the cost of a drone which runs into a few thousand dollars [but] when you fire a missile, it costs a few million dollars.”
The commander at sea, he said, should have the ability to deal with kinetic and non-kinetic, lethal and non-lethal as well as manned and unmanned nature of warfare. “We are trying to provide options to the commander to see that even if the threat is below the threshold of conflict, he is able to take it on,” he said.
Admiral Kumar said the need for a navy rises with peaceful shipping and disappears with it. “So, if you have a large merchant fleet or trade, you require a navy. Today we are the fifth-largest economy and before 2030, we will be the third-largest economy.”
He added that suitably, India’s imports and exports will go up and the sea will play a major role when it comes to transportation, “therefore, [given] the risk at sea, the need to maintain maritime security [which] is going to become more challenging, we need to invest more in assets required for that”.
“While people say budgets are a challenge, I would say that even if it is just under 2 percent of the GDP, as the GDP grows, there [will] definitely [be] adequate budget to meet the challenges,” he said.
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)
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