BMD Focus: BrahMos progress -- Part 2

WASHINGTON, March 7 (UPI) -- The rapid development of the BrahMos joint Indian-Russian supersonic cruise missile project documents important and usually overlooked truths about the triangular Russian-U.S.-Indian strategic relationship.

First -- despite all the optimism of the Bush administration and all its efforts over the past seven years -- India remains fundamentally allied to Russia rather than the United States. Russian analysts claim that Washington is currently putting pressure on India to buy the excellent F-18/A Super Hornet combat fighter and abandon its traditional reliance on Russian Sukhoi interceptors.

These reports even claim that the Bush administration has offered to provide the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk free of charge as a sweetener to the deal as Russia has lagged so badly in its work on turning its own old aircraft carrier the Admiral Gorshkov into a modern combat carrier for the Indian navy.

However, it has yet to be seen if those reports will be confirmed or -- even if they are -- whether New Delhi will take the bait. In the meantime, India's overall pattern of arms purchases of old-fashioned but still crucially important advanced weapons systems in the sea, on the land and in the air remains overwhelmingly dependent on Russia. And this pattern has been strengthening rather than weakening.

As we have discussed in our companion Defense Focus columns, in December India confirmed an order for 347 state-of-the-art Russian T-90S Main Battle Tanks -- an order even larger than the 310 MBTs it bought from Moscow in 2001.

In the United States, democratic, English-speaking free market, rule-of-law India is routinely seen as a strong and consistent U.S. ally while China is seen -- correctly -- as an ever closer strategic ally of the Soviet Union. After all, in 2005 and 2007 Russia and China carried out two series of major military exercises together involving their most advanced and well equipped navies, air forces, combat troops and elite formations.

Never at any time during the worst period of the Cold War from 1949 to 1962 and the public Sino-Soviet split did the communist leaders of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China ever agree to any such joint exercises or efforts to ensure full tactical interoperability in war between their combat forces.

Yet when we look at the pattern of Russian arms sales to India and China, the opposite dynamic appears. Russian arms sales to China are stalled and, as we have noted before, that arms trade is in a state of deadlock and has been for at least two years. The Chinese have a long shopping list of excellent Russian land and air warfare combat systems they want to buy, but the Kremlin refuses to sell them any of them. Yet Russia is freely selling several of these jewels in its arms industry crown to India.

In the case of the BrahMos cruise missile, it has even agreed to allow co-production on Indian territory.

The Russians do not appear to be worried that because of India's open society and warm relations with the United States, production secrets of the BrahMos will fall into U.S. hands.

It may be that they have full confidence in India's security precautions in this regard. Or even that they are confident that the U.S. defense sector and the U.S. Department of Defense would not, or could not, take advantage of such sensitive data even if they could lay their hands on it.

Certainly, the Pentagon and major U.S. defense contractors have so far not shown any real sense of interest or urgency in replacing or upgrading their accurate and stealth-capable but still subsonic Tomahawk cruise missile.

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Next: Why co-production may revitalize the Russia-India arms relationship