Will India use the Javelin as a limited, high-end capability while rapidly inducting its indigenous MPATGM and thousands of cheap attack drones? Or will it eventually use the Javelin as the basis for replacing its approximately 6,000 legacy second-generation ATGM launchers?The first would be sensible. The second would be an expensive folly.Contours of future conflicts
India’s future wars with Pakistan and China are unlikely to resemble the large-scale wars of the twentieth century. Nuclear deterrence places severe constraints on political objectives and geographical expansion. Neither side can assume that a conventional war can be fought indefinitely without risking escalation.Thus, nuclear weapons limit but do not eliminate conventional war. They can instead produce a paradox: limited wars may become more likely precisely because the objectives are limited. These may take the form of high-end stand-off exchanges with air power, drones, missiles and other PGMs, as in Operation Sindoor. They can also take the form of preemptive operations in the plains or in mountains along the Line of Actual Control/Line of Control to seize critical territory, followed by a prolonged confrontation that puts the onus of escalation on the adversary. The confrontations in Eastern Ladakh from 2020-24 and the earlier Kargil War of 1999 are good examples of this model.These confrontations can lead to kinetic exchanges and small-scale physical attacks to seize territory. A tactically important height, observation post, logistics node or limited piece of territory can acquire disproportionate political and military significance.In a nut shell, territory continues to be a major factor, it still has to be defended or captured and that cannot be done by air power, missiles, drones or PGMs alone, but requires traditional combined arms. Thus, legacy weapon systems based on state of the art technology continue to be the sine qua non of the battlefield.Javelin – the expensive icon of anti-tank warfare
