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As showcased in August 2015 (during the 70th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War 2), China rolled out missiles (Dongfeng DF-21D 'carrier-killer') which can take out an entire modern aircraft carrier with just a single strike - even the NATO allies have taken note and commented. According to Harsh V Pant (Professor of Intl. Relations at King's College, London), 'the US military is increasingly concerned about the DF-21D as its speed makes it difficult for vessels to defend against it. The DF-26C, with a range of nearly 5,000 km - which allows it to target the South China Sea as well as the US naval base in Guam - was also on display' (Ref. article by Harsh V Pant in 'The Telegraph', Calcutta, Saturday, 19 Sep.,'15). By corollary, India's naval base at Andaman Is. also fall in this range.In any case, although we in India also have several types of missiles to match, we have to also look at the economic muscle and indigenous Electronics and Information Technology, including Quantum Communications (which is so secure that it can NEVER be tapped), and Artificial Intelligent devices and drones. China’s economy is 10 times stronger than India's, with forex reserves of US$ 3.5 trillion, compared to India's US $ 400 billion (approx figures), as well as per capita GDP. Regarding China's oil supply from middle east and central asia, in case the sea route via the Malacca Straits is blocked, there is always oil available across the alternate overland route from China's new strategic ally Russia and also Iran (which has close ties to China for geo-political reasons), as well as a host of Central Asian countries like Kazakhsthan, etc. who are all members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Also, what we ignore, at our peril, is the fact that the ASEAN countries adjacent to the Malacca Straits - like Singapore (80% population is ethnic Chinese and immensely wealthy) and Malaysia (35% population is ethnic Chinese and who also have immense financial clout, and a Muslim-majority Malay population) are not exactly eagerly welcoming towards India either! In a scenario where Pakistan also simultaneously turns hostile, then, in addition to the influence of the financially powerful Chinese trading communities in ASEAN, both Malaysia and Indonesia may potentially take anti-Indian position, given their Muslim majority populations. So will the middle-east Arab countries, and Iran and Turkey! In a war scenario in today's world, in addition to the actual battles with weapons and tactics, strategy and logistics are of crucial importance. India's technological backwardness (R&D and indigenous technological innovation and development, besides progress in space satellites) and also failure to understand geo-politics and geo-strategy have been its greatest weaknesses since Alexander the Great and all subsequent invaders, right upto the Europeans and the British East India Company!As a matter of fact, the modern Indian Army takes as its origins the mercenary army of sepoys guarding the godowns of the British East India Company - which subsequently fought against assorted 'native' Indian rajas, peshwas, sultans and nawabs and ultimately the Moghul Emperor himself and made short shrift of them all, under exclusive British officers in command and control, who were basically employees of the world's first multinational company - the British East India Company and not any government! This was inspite of the fact that the opposing armies on both sides - the British East India Company's and the native rulers' armies - were equally placed in terms of weapons technology and manpower resources - and some of the native rulers even had French officers to command their 'native' armies against the British officered 'native' sepoys! India is the only major Asian country to have been colonised totally by a European power (besides small South East Asian countries, who are all in ASEAN now, like Burma & Malaya by British, Indonesia by the Dutch, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia by the French and the Phillippines by Spain first and then by USA). Other than these countries, the Europeans colonised totally most of the countries in Africa, South America and Australia-New Zealand.. None of the major Asian powers - like Japan, China, Iran (Persia), Turkey or even tiny Thailand were at any time colonised by the Europeans - except for some 'concessions' to the Western Powers (USA, Europe) and Japan (who wanted to also compete with the Europeans in colonising and captured the whole of Manchuria and renamed it 'Manchukuo' in the 1930s) at various 'treaty ports' of China, like Tsingtao (German), Shanghai (British) and Hongkong (British). When Mahatma Gandhi gave the call for 'Quit India' to the British, a few million Indians instead joined the British Indian army to get gainful employment, and to fight and die for British interests in North Africa (against Field Marshal Rommel of the German 'Afrika Korps'), in the Middle East, Europe (in Flanders) and also South East Asia (against the Japanese and the INA)! During the opening stages of World War Two, the Germans gave the British and the French a sound whipping despite the fact that the majority of German equipment was inferior to what the allies possessed at the time. Superior strategy and tactics, coupled with impeccable planning and logistics management by the German General Staff prevailed over material disadvantages. A British commander is said to have ruefully remarked-”you haven’t fought, until you have fought the Germans”.European arrogance and racism led the allies to seriously underestimate Japanese fighting capability and motivation, leading to Pearl Harbor and the Malayan debacle for the British colonisers. This has been proven by the Greeks against the Persians, culminating in Alexander the Great’s destruction of the once mighty Persian empire, the Afghans against the British and the Soviets, among countless others and in recent times, the Yemenites against the Saudis. During the Arab Israeli wars, especially the first three, Israeli equipment was at either a qualitative or quantitative disadvantage compared to the amply provisioned Arabs, but execrable leadership by Arab line officers and flag commanders ensured that a lot of that equipment ended up in Israeli stores and museums at the end of these conflicts.Now, digressing to a bit of history - artillery was not widely employed in Central Asia prior to the 16th century, despite Chinese mortars having been known to the Mongols hundreds of years earlier. Even some limited use of cannon at Hisar by the Timurid Sultan Husayn Mirza in 1496 did not lead to a substantial military role for artillery in India, nor did the presence of Portuguese ships’ cannon at the 1509 Battle of Diu. However, following the decisive Ottoman Turkish victory over the Persian Safavid Empire at the 1514 Battle of Chaldiran, Babur incorporated artillery and Ottoman Turkish artillery tactics into his military. Although authorities disagree about how many cannons he brought to India, Babur's artillery played a "key role" in the establishment of the Mughal Empire. In 1526, the First Battle of Panipat saw the introduction of massed artillery tactics, till then unknown in Indian warfare. Under the guidance of the Ottoman Turkish gun master Ustad Ali Quli, Babur deployed cannons behind a screening row of carts. Enemy commander Ibrahim Lodi, the then ruler of Delhi, was provoked into a frontal attack against Babur's position, allowing him to make ideal use of his firepower. This tactic also panicked Delhi’s ruler Lodi's elephant cavalry, beginning the end of elephant warfare as a dominant offensive strategy in India. These new weapons and tactics were even more important against the more formidable army faced in the Battle of Khanwa the following year. Artillery remained an important part of the Mughal military, in both field deployment and incorporation into defensive forts. However, transportation of the extremely heavy guns remained problematic, even as weapon technology improved during the reign of Akbar. Later Mughal emperors paid less attention to the technical aspects of artillery, allowing the Mughal Empire to gradually fall behind in weapons technology, although the degree to which this decline affected military operations is debated. Under Aurangzeb, the Mughal technology remained superior to that of the breakaway Maratha, but traditional Mughal artillery tactics were difficult to employ against Maratha guerilla raids. In 1652 and 1653, during the Mughal–Safavid War, prince Dara Shikoh was able to move light artillery through the Bolan Pass to assist in the siege of Qandahar.But problems with the accuracy and reliability of the weapons, as well as the inherent defensive strengths of the fort, failed to produce a victory. By the 18th century, the bronze guns of the declining Mughal empire were unable to compete with the standardized production of European cast-iron weapons and performed poorly against colonial forces, such as Jean Law de Lauriston's French troops.If we reflect on the history of the Indian subcontinent, we would observe that, since the days of invasion by Babur, foreigners have exploited their superior technology and at times, superior strategy and tactics (from the time of Alexander the Macedonian Greek general) to subjugate India, with its fragmented heirarchical societies. The present age which is being referred to as post-modern age or knowledge age, is unfolding an unprecedented revolution in technologies. These technologies have not only touched myriad activities in the civil field but have also initiated a revolution in military affairs. As we enter the information age, there is no doubt that information warfare technologies, precision fire technologies and fusion of a host of other technologies are going to transform the way we conduct warfare. Yet our intellectual thought processes need to be tempered by the limitations and possible vulnerabilities of these technologies. During a training exercise of the American "Army After Next" project in 1997, in which the United States faced a peer competitor, the results of the war games were surprising. A laser attack on the US space-based satellite reconnaissance, Global Positioning System, and communication capabilities was followed closely by a nuclear electro-magnetic pulse burst in space. The combined effects of these two actions of the exercise adversary, reduced by 50 per cent the military information structure on which most of the new American weapon systems are dependent!China's economy is today 5 times the size of India’s economy, with almost equal population levels, and its economy and stock markets are vastly integrated into the economies of the developed world, although facing pushback from USA - signalling the decline of global free trade and reverting back to isolated markets and lack of competition. India has to raise its PER CAPITA GDP, HEALTH and LITERACY LEVELS from its current dismal levels - in all these parameters India is almost at sub-Saharan Africa levels. India has more than 70% of its households with a daily income of $2 or less - the minimum basic security and health facilities are not available to a majority of Indians and farmers commit suicide regularly. In this scenario, public accountability of the defense budget is crucial, considering the string of 'corruption' as seen several times in the Bofors, Scorpene submarines, Augusta Westland helicopters, etc,. cases - ONLY AFTER such cases have been first exposed by Western journalists through the Western media! India, claims to be a 'democracy' with freedom of speech and opinion, but the domestic media is does not question the corresponding lack of sufficient allocation to education and health for the masses! Therefore, ultimately its a hard economic question - a trade-off between GUNS versus BREAD & BUTTER (or in Indian context - guns versus - dal & chawal/roti!) Our spending on education and health is amongst the lowest in the world compared to the major economies, including our Asian neighbors (including China, ASEAN, Korea, Japan, Iran, Turkey, etc.) outside the Indian sub-continent.The most crucual components in today's technology - be it defense, industrial or consumer - are electronics components - made of VLSI chips containing billions of transistors in a single chip, each transistor having dimensions of 50 nano meters or less. India does not have a single fabrication plant (called fab foundry) for such nano-scale VLSI (also called ULSI) chips. These electronic chips go into all modern telecommunications systems and power systems instrumentation controls, and also the control systems for missiles/radar systems/satellites/aircrafts as well as in our mobile phones, digital cameras, laptops, PCs, servers, routers and modems, MP3 devices, as well as CT Scan, MRI, ECG, EEG, Digital X_Ray, ultra-sonographs, etc. and are mostly imported into India! In another 5 years time, it has been estimated that India will be spending an amount of forex to import electronic chips exceeding our total annual forex expenditure on our imports of petroleum and petroleum products! Therefore, it is imperative for India to start planning and implementing production of global quality VLSI elctronic chips in India, to meet domestic demand - both from civilian and military markets. That requires huge investments (in order of tens of billions of US $) and most critically technological knowhow - which no other country or company will part easily. For that we need to develop our own science & technology manpower and infrastructure to global levels, to take on such challenges. In today's knowledge economy, unless we spend more on education and R&D, we will be confined to the role of 'cyber-coolies' to the world and not much else of value addition on our exports. None of India's universities, including IITs/IISc are in top 100, unlike the fact that several universities in China, Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc. are in top 50 (Japanese, Singaporean and Korean universities are even in top 20 !) Without world-class scientists and technologists, India can never develop to a truly world-class power, either economically or militarily. We need to open our top institutes to 'foreign talent' - professors who are at the top of their disciplines from around the globe - that is how countries in East Asia developed their universities to world class levels - either on permanent tenure or as visiting faculty, to IITs/IISc, etc. The real way to defend a country in today's world is by embracing the knowledge economy - through applications of science & technology and trade & commerce globally and giving a high status to education and to scientists and professionals as in developed countries in the West, instead of to generalist bureaucrats ('babus'), which is a hangover from the colonial era, designed by the colonial rulers to keep the country under their thumb and not let it progress. Lord Curzon sat on Tata's proposal for setting up the IISc for 13 years! The first science research institute in India, the ‘Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science’ at Kolkata, was founded on July 29, 1876 by a private Indian philanthropist Dr Mahendra Lal Sircar and a Belgian Jesuit, Father Eugene Lafont (then a professor of Physics at St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, who imported the scientific apparatuses for the institute from Europe), without any British government help! This institute is the oldest institute in India devoted to the pursuit of fundamental research in the frontier areas of basic sciences. Professor C V Raman worked here during 1907 to 1933, and it is here that he discovered the celebrated Effect that bears his name and for which he was awarded Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930.If a country is economically strong and on sound economic foundations, no one will bully such a country - it will have a large purchasing power and a major player in the global economy. It can also afford to have a large defense budget and consequently have strong defense forces, for exampple, look at USA - although several of its states, such as, California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, etc. were annexed by the USA from Mexico in the mid-1800s, Mexico has duly recognized the new realities and accepts the current US border as legitimate, and those staes as legitimate constituents of USA - it does not dispute their status at all! Similarly, Russia has lot of regions in Asia, including Siberia which the previous Imperial Tsars had annexed from independent rulers or captured from neighboring countries - but no one disputes those regions now! As Bill Clinton used to say during his first election campaign - ‘It’s the ECONOMY, stupid’! Real patriotism means looking at the real issues confronting our country's people, realistically and objectively (instead of just speaking through our hats) and trying to address them.In short, if India becomes an ECONOMIC & TECHNOLOGICAL SUPERPOWER, with a strong scientific base, it will automatically be a strong political and military pwer, drawing respect and admiration from around the globe, because culturally we are respected already! The world’s oldest literature is the Rig Veda, the world’s oldest grammar is by Patanjali, and the world’s oldest printed book is also from India, the Mahayana Buddhist text Diamond Sutra and dates back to 868 AD (but printed in China because printing technology was first invented there!). Also, the decimal number system, concept of arithmetic and also algebra (unknown to the ancient Greeks, who excelled in Geometry) and the idea and usage of ZERO (0) in the decimal number system! Without these, modern Science and Technology would have been impossible!!!As patriotic Indians, let’s focus on these!