With growing economic resources and newly developed military doctrines, India and China are both acquiring advanced weapons systems and new power projection capabilities. In this chapter, we compare overall trends in force modernization in both countries, including the development of military forces that can be used to project power. China’s developing military capabilities have become a key focus for U.S. defense planners, and American officials have questioned the motivation for China’s acquisition of power projection forces. These developments are seen as a potentially destabilizing factor in Asian military balances and as a possible indicator of an anti–status quo strategic posture. According to the U.S. National Defense Strategy 2008, “China is one ascendant state with the potential for competing with the United States. For the foreseeable future, we will need to hedge against China’s growing military modernization and the impact of its strategic choices upon international security.”

India too has been undertaking significant force modernization programs. In some ways, India’s power projection forces have long been more extensive than China’s. For example, India acquired its first aircraft carrier (the INS Vikrant, formerly HMS Hercules) in 1961 and has significant experience in carrier operations and naval patrolling. The Indian navy currently has one carrier in service and two under construction. For its part, China began sea trials for its first-ever aircraft carrier, a refurbished former Soviet Union ship, in 2011. India is also developing new amphibious warfare and maritime patrol capabilities and is conducting major upgrades to its air force, its missile strike capabilities, and the armor and artillery striking power of its ground forces.

What resources are being dedicated to support Indian and Chinese military modernization programs? Official defense budgets do not provide a complete answer in either case. Neither China nor India is unique in that regard. The official defense budgets published by most states fail to capture the full range of spending on national defense. Yet in China and India, varying degrees of nontransparency persist at the same time that the economies and defense budgets of both countries are growing rapidly.

In the Chinese case, the combination of significant defense spending increases and persistent nontransparency in accounting and reporting has drawn intense scrutiny. According to the 2009 Pentagon report, The Military Power of the People’s Republic of China, “China continues to promulgate incomplete defense expenditure figures and engage in actions that appear inconsistent with its declaratory policies. The limited transparency in China’s military and security affairs poses risks to stability by creating uncertainty and increasing the potential for misunderstanding and miscalculation.”

In contrast to the defense spending trends examined in the preceding chapter, developments in military doctrine do not capture the same level of general public attention. However, military doctrine is an important point of comparison for understanding international strategic behavior for three reasons. First, doctrine represents a vision of how a nation’s military intends to fight. This is important in itself, as some military doctrines have implications for key security issues such as crisis stability. For example, a strong belief among military and political leaders in the efficacy of offensive action compared to defense could exacerbate crisis instability by providing incentives for preemptive attack.

Second, military doctrine alone is not a good predictor of a given state’s strategic intentions, but it offers a guide to the state’s judgment about its security environment and the operational challenges the state expects to face. Hence, doctrine lends some insight into the kind of wars a military believes it will have to fight. States closely observe each other’s military doctrines, so doctrinal changes in other countries can also affect a state’s perceptions of the security environment. Third, in addition to spelling out the operational aspects of how a military intends to fight, doctrine also provides a foundation for many other important defense-related decisions, such as military organization, weapons procurement, and military training. These in turn affect overall military modernization goals.

The growth of Chinese power has inspired alarm in the United States. India, too, is gaining relative power and influence. Yet most assessments of rising Chinese and Indian power and American interests suffer from three limitations. First, they often assume smooth, uninterrupted growth for both China and India despite the many internal challenges these emerging powers face. They also often fail to account for America’s proven track record of revitalization, adaptation, innovation, and growth, especially when faced with new challenges. Second, most recent studies focus on one or the other country in isolation or, less helpfully, as an amalgamated “Chindia.” Examining the rising power of each nation in relation to its own recent past puts the scale and pace of domestic change in sharp relief. It says little, however, about what matters most for international politics: capability and behavior relative to other states. Third, many studies draw conclusions about the potential threats and opportunities China and India may present without careful examination of the empirical track record of their actual strategic behavior. A lack of empirical comparison raises the risk that either country will appear to be an outlier in its international behavior, which in turn could lead the United States to exaggerate its response to that power.

This book has examined Chinese and Indian international strategic behavior, revisiting commonly held assumptions in comparative context. Past behavior does not guarantee that either country will continue along recent policy trajectories. However, international strategic behavior is “sticky” – with powerful bases in the structure of international politics, the long-term challenges faced by the state, the state’s own core interests, and the bureaucratic inertia imposed by domestic political and military traditions and preferences. Broad patterns of strategic behavior can change, but only in response to major (and usually observable) developments.

The West is nervously puzzled by the nature of rising Chinese and Indian economic might. In the space of a few months, pundits seem as likely to produce book titles that proclaim the coming “Indian Century” and the looming prospect of a China that “Rules the World” as they are to produce headlines warning that China and India are “Two Vulnerable Economies” facing a potential “Economic Crash.” How each country negotiates its domestic political-economic vulnerabilities over the near and medium term will largely determine their respective potential for global economic leadership. The way Beijing and New Delhi manage their economies will also influence their relations with trading partners, including the United States.

India and China have each undertaken programs of economic reforms and opening aimed at promoting domestic development and rising national power. Reforms and opening have produced stunning economic results. Perhaps the most important of these are rising household incomes and poverty alleviation in both countries. Greater wealth also provides greater resources that can be devoted to security and other international goals. However, despite their rapidly growing economies, both China and India will likely remain preoccupied powers for decades to come. Entering the second decade of the twenty-first century, they remain poor or at best modestly developed countries on a per-capita basis and face potential social and political turmoil as a result of domestic development imbalances.

Some scholars argue that nations possess distinctive strategic cultures. Strategic culture is an inherited body of political-military concepts based on shared historical and social experience. Strategic culture may shape leaders’ interpretation of international events, thereby producing certain preference orders regarding how and under what circumstances military force should be used. Many policy makers also appear to hold a set of images or perceptions about the behavior patterns of other states. These images amount to an understanding of the strategic cultures that shape the choices of their counterparts in other countries. These images and perceptions are often unexamined, yet they appear to exert a powerful effect in shaping leadership expectations.

Strategic culture is often seen as a product of unique lessons that are internalized by successive generations of leaders. This occurs primarily through their education in classic texts that embody a national political-military literary tradition. In this view, having learned these consistent lessons, leaders then form a set of relatively stable ideas about “how the world works.” They also form stable preferences for strategic and military action. Despite important theoretical and methodological challenges, the strategic culture approach is a potentially valuable complement to realist perspectives. It helps build a better overall understanding of state behavior and foreign policy by drawing attention to cultural factors that may influence the logic of policy makers in other societies.

Most recent studies of India and China put these quite different countries into a single category called “Asia’s rising giants,” followed by descriptions painted in broad-brush strokes. They have large populations – a source of some strength but also a source of terrible pressure on resources at home. Each is primarily a continental power, although each has long coastlines and substantial trade. Each has troubled borders, and each has one seemingly intractable territorial conflict that is bound up in its sense of national self-identify and its regime legitimacy – Taiwan for China and Kashmir for India. Each faces threats to domestic peace and internal stability, including poverty, inequality, and incomplete economic reforms, as well as ethnic, religious, and social conflict. Each has nuclear weapons and is modernizing its military capabilities. And, of course, each has launched a program of domestic reforms and integration with the global economy that has resulted in high rates of growth. This has put both on track to become economies that will – at least in absolute size – rival the U.S. economy within decades. Although they remain great power works-in-progress, Beijing and New Delhi may each harbor grand ambitions for what they will do with their growing power. Certainly, a shifting balance of power between states, such as the shift that appears to be occurring between the United States and the rising powers in Asia, has long been seen as an essential underlying cause of great power conflict.

The subtitle of this book, “Growing Power and Alarm,” echoes a passage in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War. Analyzing the causes of conflict between the great powers Athens and Sparta (Lacedaemon), Thucydides attributed the real cause of conflict to “the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm that this inspired in Lacedaemon.” Yet Thucydides also highlighted difficulties a dominant state faces in accurately evaluating any challenge from rising powers. How does a dominant state judge the relative power balance – itself a complex mix of material, political, and moral capabilities? How does the international behavior of a rising state affect this judgment? In a world with multiple interests and threats, should the dominant state focus on a single potential challenger, or must it also beware potential challenges from other rising states?