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STRATFOR.com
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THE INTERNET SOURCE FOR GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE
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India's Misplaced Priorities Torpedo Strategic Opportunity
February 20, 2002
Summary
The Indian navy plans to test an indigenously developed, ship-launched Dhanush ballistic missile in the next two months. The surface-to-surface Prithvi missile, upon which the Dhanush design is based, is already deployed with the Indian army. But continued testing of the Dhanush says more about strategic shortsightedness in India's navy and its defense establishment as a whole than about missile proliferation in South Asia.
Image Credit: Stratfor.com.
Analysis
India plans to test its indigenously developed Dhanush ship-to-ship missile system during the next two months, the Press Trust of India reported Feb. 17, citing an unnamed scientist at India's Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO). The Dhanush is a naval variant of the single stage, liquid-fueled, short-range surface-to-surface Prithvi ballistic missile already in service with the Indian army.
According to the DRDO source, the Dhanush has "the necessary design flexibility" to carry nuclear warheads. This is an important feature for the navy, since it competes with India's other services for some of the priority, prestige and budget of India's nuclear arsenal. Although India and Pakistan have been locked in a race to develop and deploy new missile systems -- including those capable of delivering nuclear warheads -- continued testing of the Dhanush says more about problems with India's military as a whole than it does about missile proliferation in the region.
The Dhanush is an ill-conceived weapons system that offers only a marginal contribution at best to India's tactical and strategic effectiveness. The navy continues to pour scarce resources into the Dhanush in hopes that, by becoming a leg of India's strategic nuclear triad, it can increase its currently meager share of the defense budget. Continued inter-service squabbling over the nuclear arsenal is short-changing India's real strategic asset -- the navy -- and is distracting New Delhi from a prime opportunity to secure its influence in the Indian Ocean basin and beyond.
Developed from the land-based Prithvi, the Dhanush is 8.56 meters long, with a launch weight of four tons. In its current form, it can carry a 500-kilogram payload approximately 250 kilometers, though the navy plans to develop a variant with a range of 500 kilometers. The Prithvi has an inertial guidance system but no terminal guidance, and one source dubbed it essentially a reinvented Scud. It is unknown whether the Dhanush incorporates terminal guidance.
(The Rest of the Story)
(c) 2001 Stratfor, Inc.
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India's Misplaced Priorities Torpedo Strategic Opportunity . . .