Military modernization: India has the upper hand over China at LAC

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<strong>The extensive tunneling work done by the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) has vastly increased the Indian Army’s ability to transport heavy equipment from rear bases up to the Indian-Chinese Line of Actual Control (LAC), giving India an upper hand on the Himalayan frontier.</strong></p>
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In a strategic theater where logistics is everything, China’s infrastructure improvements have been matched by the mountain tunnels and all-weather roads built by India's BRO thus vastly increasing the Indian Army’s ability to transport heavy equipment from rear bases up to the LAC, cited a report in the  Foreign Policy magazine.<br />
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It mentioned that despite China’s massive military modernization, India likely now has the upper hand in the region given that the Indian Army has an extensive experience fighting on glaciers backed by the toughness of India’s Special Frontier Force commandos – many of whom have been recruited from the Tibetan exile community – and India has a winning proposition in high-altitude warfare.<br />
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"The Indian Air Force also has a major technical advantage over China’s PLA: At an altitude of 10,000 feet (3,000 meters), India’s forward air bases are very high, but not nearly as high as China’s. And unlike India, China has no low-altitude bases anywhere in the region. That makes a huge difference, since China’s aircraft must shed up to half of their missiles and fuel in order to take off in the super-thin air of the Tibetan Plateau," wrote Salvatore Babones, a Foreign Policy columnist and an adjunct scholar at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney.<br />
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"Throw in India’s acquisition of top-of-the-line French Rafale jet fighters, the potential modernization of its Russian Sukhoi SU-30 squadrons, and the impending delivery of advanced Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems, and the Indian Air Force may soon possess absolute air superiority across the LAC. India’s indigenously-developed Tejas multirole fighter is just the icing on the cake," he adds.<br />
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Moving further east, Babones says contrary to what is being widely perceived in the West, the military takeover in Myanmar does not favour China and has actually been a setback for the Xi Jinping regime. He stresses that China’s 1,300 mile (2,100 kilometer) border with Myanmar is so insecure that Beijing is building a 10-foot (3-meter) high wall to seal it off.<br />
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"China was especially close to Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy and now sees its position in the country threatened by both the military and the street protesters. China has long been accused of supporting separatist rebels in Myanmar; the military’s overthrow of the civilian government led by Suu Kyi might have been as much an anti-China as an anti-democracy coup," he writes.<br />
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The analyst details how Vietnam, which like India was "once the victim of a Chinese surprise attack" and has been on poor terms with its communist big brother since 1979 invasion, is rumoured to be on the verge of acquiring the joint Russian-Indian BrahMos to bolster its coastal defense.<br />
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"Mirroring China’s early-2000s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy, it (Vietnam) has invested heavily in anti-ship missiles. Thus as China moves forward from A2/AD to force projection strategies in the South China Sea, Vietnam is developing its own A2/AD capacity in order to deny the PLA Navy the ability to operate in the area," wrote Babones in the <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/03/18/china-india-japan-quad-biden-indo-pacific-military-geopolitics/">Foreign Policy</a>.</p>