Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan and Linus Cohen
India strives to render Pakistan strategically irrelevant to better focus its attention on China. But neither Pakistan nor China has an interest in allowing that to happen.
It’s an ongoing saga of which we saw the most recent instalment some weeks ago, following late-April terrorist attacks at Pahalgam in Indian Kashmir. As an indicator of the broader military balance on the subcontinent, the recent confrontation suggests that even though India’s eye is on China for the long term, Pakistan is still a problem it cannot ignore.
A new policy brief by ASPI, released today, outlines the quantitative military balance between India and Pakistan.
By the numbers, the India-Pakistan military balance is fairly favourable to India. In every year since 1956, India has outspent Pakistan on defence (in real terms) by a factor of at least 4.5—even by a factor of 10 in the most recent budget. India’s armed forces field more personnel than Pakistan’s across the board, most prominently the land forces, which field 1.2 million active-duty soldiers against Pakistan’s 560,000.
While India’s army is very large, its equipment is dated. Its fleet of almost 4,000 main battle tanks, largely devoted to the western front against Pakistan, is composed mainly of Russian T-72s and T-90s. These are decades-old and demand costly ongoing modernisation. India’s armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, of various models in the Soviet BMP series, are likewise mainly of Cold War vintage. And he vast majority of India’s artillery is towed rather than self-propelled, though it’s complemented with a few hundred mobile multiple rocket launchers.
While India dwarfs it in some metrics, Pakistan is a considerable military power. However, its half-million-strong army has similar equipment issues. It fields a melange of 2,500 main battle tanks, largely Chinese in origin (bought wholesale or co-developed), that are in various phases of indigenous-led modernisation. The Al-Zarrar—the most common in Pakistan’s fleet, with about 500 in the inventory—is a heavily-upgraded Chinese Type 59, itself derivative of a Soviet design from the mid-1950s.
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