The Chinese are on track to dominate the security architecture of the Asia-Pacific. This is not to suggest that the People’s Liberation Army will set out to conquer the region. But it is to acknowledge the foreseeable outcome of the growing gap between China’s ability to project military power in Asia and the defence capabilities of other regional militaries. Obscuring this gap, and matching it in some sense, is the growing distance between political rhetoric and reality.

Erudite and experienced diplomats have cheered the rise of India as a great power in the midst of a “multipolar world”. Indian versions of this narrative tended to expound on the arrival of India’s time in the spotlight with the receding of America’s “unipolar moment”. Such speakers point to the 2008 financial crisis, or, alternatively, America’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership as great turning points when its dominant influence in Asia came to an end and gave India space to make its presence felt. American officials tend to speak of the arrival of India’s great power status without linkage to any American withdrawal. They focus on the increasing convergence of US and Indian security interests and the imperative for increased defence cooperation. “The world’s biggest and oldest democracies defending a rules-based international security order in the Indo-Pacific,” or something to this effect.

Such analysis may get the politics right, but, unfortunately, it gets the math wrong. The 2018 Indian defence budget is no more than 1.5% of gross domestic product, which barely keeps pace with inflation, and, when combined with large increases in pay, keeps the capital budget for weapons acquisitions flat. India’s military pensions are now greater than its entire defence capital budget. This in the midst of a military readiness situation that notable Indian observers describe as a “crisis” caused by significant shortfalls in major weapons systems like fighter aircraft, helicopters, tanks, rifles and submarines. India’s economy can grow at a phenomenal rate, Indian diplomats can play a larger role on the global stage, and India’s military officers can be top notch, but all this will be of limited geopolitical consequence if India’s military capabilities are declining—possibly in absolute, but certainly in relative, terms.

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