India’s growing warship gap with China and Pakistan

The absence of a coherent national security strategy has contributed to a procurement system in which decisions are postponed until the capability gap is already visible at sea.

Representative image of a Chinese Naval warship | Photo Credit: Reuters

The US-Iran war has dramatically shaken up trade and energy supplies and forced India to confront its maritime dependency. Approximately 95 per cent of India’s trade by volume and about 70 per cent by value moves by sea.

The Modi government has, expectedly, touted recent warship commissionings and the controversial Great Nicobar project as evidence of decisive maritime action. Yet beneath the bluster, it has allowed a widening gap to emerge between India’s naval requirements and its procurement pipeline.

The reality is that orders for the high-end platforms required for sustained combat operations in the Indian Ocean and around the Malacca Strait have stalled. Beyond three frigates now fitting out, the current order book contains no aircraft carrier, destroyer, frigate or attack submarine likely to enter service before 2035.

Lack of political will and focus

There are many reasons for this unfortunate situation, including funding constraints and persistent bureaucratic delays. However, the underlying reason is insufficient political focus — a gap that could extract a heavy price if conflict were to erupt.

It is the civilian leadership’s job to define a national security strategy that identifies threats, priorities and trade-offs. The armed forces then develop force structures and capabilities to implement these goals. Force planning in the absence of strategy is, by definition, ad hoc. Indeed, the Defence Acquisition Procedure 2020 states that the planning process should evolve from a “National Security Strategy/Guidelines (as and when promulgated)”.

Six years later, no such strategy is visible.

The procurement cliff

Between 2004 and 2026, the Indian Navy commissioned two aircraft carriers, seven destroyers, 15 frigates and six Scorpène/Kalvari-class conventional submarines. But these inductions largely reflect decisions taken many years ago. Naval ships take a decade or more to design, approve and build; what enters service today is therefore the product of yesterday’s political choices.

The next set of choices has not been made. The Navy has no third aircraft carrier on order, no follow-on destroyer programme under contract, no new frigate programme finalised, and no conventional attack-submarine contract. Unless this changes quickly, India faces a serious gap in high-end naval inductions for the next decade.

China is operating on an entirely different industrial scale. In 2025 alone, it commissioned one aircraft carrier, seven destroyers, four frigates, two nuclear attack submarines and three conventional submarines. India cannot and need not match China vessel for vessel. But it must sustain a minimum rate of orders if it is to preserve credible power in the Indian Ocean.

Pakistan, meanwhile, is renewing its fleet with Chinese assistance. It commissioned its first Hangor-class submarine in April 2026, while further submarines and frigates are expected to follow.

The submarine gap is especially severe. India’s 1999 30-year plan envisaged 24 new conventional submarines by 2030. Instead, only six Scorpène boats — ordered in 2005 — have been commissioned. No BJP-led government has even signed a contract for a new conventional-submarine construction programme. Every conventional submarine currently in Indian service was ordered under Congress-led governments or, in the case of INS Sindhushastra, under the Congress-supported United Front government.

The long-delayed Project 75(I) negotiations could eventually produce German-designed Type 214 submarines at Mazagon Dock. But even after contract signature, the first boat would still be seven years away. The two indigenous nuclear attack submarines approved in 2024 are important, but even the Navy’s best-case projection puts the first into service only in 2036-37.

The same pattern applies to surface ships. The Navy’s recent destroyers and frigates come from programmes ordered between 2011 and 2019. Three successor programmes — follow-on Project 15C destroyers and Project 17B frigates and the ambitious Project 18A next-generation destroyer — remain proposals rather than signed contracts. Even under optimistic conditions, the first of the evolutionary new ships would enter service only in the second half of the 2030s; Project 18A is unlikely before 2040. Stopgap frigate orders from Russia appear infeasible given US sanctions and supply-chain problems due to the Russia-Ukraine war.

The mining of the Strait of Hormuz has also demonstrated how cheaply mines can impede commercial and naval movement. Yet India has had no dedicated mine-countermeasure vessels in service since the retirement of its last Pondicherry-class ships in 2019; it had seven as recently as 2014. The Defence Ministry approved procurement of 12 new vessels in July 2025, but no contract has followed. Even after one is signed, the first vessel is unlikely to arrive for close to a decade. Sound familiar?

India can mitigate some of the gap by expanding maritime surveillance, long-range anti-ship weapons, seabed sensors, autonomous underwater systems and uncrewed surface vessels. These systems can make the Indian Ocean more difficult for an adversary to operate in. But they complement rather than replace submarines, air-defence destroyers, frigates and carriers.

To build long-run capability you need both planning and associated funding commitments, as Lieutenant General DS Hooda has pointed out. This cannot be done in an informal or ad hoc manner. Naval projects with their long gestation periods especially require planning. If financial planning is focused on annual funds availability, allocations will inevitably be erratic.

India cannot decide what fleet it needs without first deciding what it expects that fleet to do. The absence of a coherent national security strategy has not merely left a conceptual vacuum; it has contributed to a procurement system in which decisions are postponed until the capability gap is already visible at sea.

Amitabh Dubey is a Congress member. He tweets @dubeyamitabh. Views are personal.

(Edited by Asavari Singh)