Strategic culture shapes a country’s military response

For Indian national security and foreign policy planners, China and Pakistan are two countries of critical concern. While China uses its army to engage India on the border dispute, Pakistan on the other hand, prefers to employ clandestine, violent non-state actors like jihadis against India to ensure plausible deniability of state involvement. Therefore, these adversaries have different styles of State behaviour to use force against India which are linked to their respective strategic cultures.

Strategic culture is a lens to enable us to understand how a nation-state chooses to employ force in inter-state relations. It attempts to explain how and why a nation-state would respond to a security threat -- either the outbreak of conventional war, terror threat or threat of application of force like a naval blockade. Strategic culture is derived from political culture. It enables one to understand and interpret state and military action, how to locate particular manoeuvres in a wider historical context, and consequently, how to better predict state behaviour.

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In 1977, during the Cold War, US academic Jack Snyder coined the expression “strategic culture” in a report titled “The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Options”. He defined strategic culture as the sum total of ideals, conditional emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behaviour that members of the national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other with regard to strategy.”

Consider the US, geographically distant from Pakistan, but managed to kill Osama Bin Laden after years of tracking him down. What stops India from abducting Dawood Ibrahim from Karachi, located next door? In 1960, Israel kidnapped the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann from Argentina and flew him to Tel Aviv for execution there. While Pakistan uses terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy with impunity, India remains hesitant to undertake a covert operation to apprehend Dawood Ibrahim, the mastermind of the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai. Is Delhi worried that it will break international law?

Similarly, when the 26/11 terrorist attack struck India’s commercial capital, Mumbai, there was no overt Indian military response. How would Israel have responded to such an attack? Very differently. Why do different nation-states respond differently to threats to national security? Their geography, history, economy, military experience consciously and unconsciously shape their national responses.

For instance, after the infamous terror attack on its Parliament building in December 2001, India responded with coercive diplomacy that involved a prolonged military mobilisation for 10 months along the India-Pakistan border. Imagine a similar situation in the US and assume terrorists had attacked Capitol Hill. How do you think the US government would have responded? The aerial bombardment of Afghanistan following the 9/11 terrorist attacks is the closest parallel. Different countries approach key issues of war, peace and strategy from perspectives which are both distinctive and deeply rooted to reflect their unique geo-strategic situations, economic resources, history, military experience, and political beliefs.

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Political leaders who do not believe that war could serve any useful political purpose are not likely to assign it a policy objective. The more one believes in the role of force in international politics the more one is inclined to use the military as a foreign policy instrument. In the 1962 India-China war, the political-military leadership did not use the Indian Air Force in aerial combat operations, its role was limited to transporting troops and logistics supply.

Even today, when China sends a submarine to Sri Lanka, India only makes diplomatic protests but refrains from sending one of its own submarines to the island nation. India confidently conducts shallow penetration trans-border commando raids into Pakistan and has even launched an aerial strike to violate Pakistan’s airspace to target Balakot in 2019. However, India deals differently with the territorial transgressions by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) -- with kid gloves.

The Indian response to China has invariably been diplomatic in nature without a military element -- except for military diplomacy. Too much diplomacy indicates an aversion to reliance on the military instrument. For an adversary to take its rival seriously, it is important to demonstrate a degree of military adventurism. Why is India not prepared to fight a defensive war with China? Otherwise, Beijing will continue to repeatedly bully New Delhi along the LAC.

As a regional power, India needs to undertake covert or overt military operations against hostile neighbours whenever the situation demands. Otherwise, these adversaries will not hesitate to punch above their weight to hit India.

(The writer is member-secretary, Institute of Contemporary Studies Bengaluru, a Security Studies think tank)