While India’s military leadership claims it is ready to defend itself against likely threats, a close look at its battle-readiness reveals multiple capability gaps that need to be filled. This four-part series starts with an analysis of the contemporary battlefield and the advent of autonomous weaponry.

While the first part examined the military’s leadership and combat restructuring, the subsequent three sections examine a crucial aspect of the army, navy, and air force. Part two of the series focused on the army and dealt with its artillery and rocket systems. This article— the third in the series — examines the navy’s underwater capability, mine detection and minesweeping. The final section will look at the air force’s push to develop and manufacture aero engines and indigenous fighter aircraft.

On April 3, the Indian Navy commissioned Indian Naval Ship (INS) Taragiri, the fifth in a line of seven 6,670-ton stealth frigates being built in two Indian shipyards – Mazagon Dock Ltd (MDL) in Mumbai and the Garden Reach Shipbuilders and Engineers (GRSE) in Kolkata.

A year earlier, on January 15, India’s maritime circles had been abuzz over the commissioning, on a single day, of three frontline warships into the navy. They included a multi-role frigate (INS Dunagiri), an anti-submarine warfare – shallow water craft (INS Agrey), and a large survey vessel (INS Sanshodhak).

These sophisticated and highly armed warships are being welcomed into a navy that is endemically short of capital warships. There remains an unaddressed problem of continued slippage in the navy’s Maritime Capability Perspective Plan (MCPP). The MCPP had planned for the Indian Navy to be equipped with about 200 warships by 2027, but now finds itself restricted, by limited financial resources, to a more modest flotilla of just 170 vessels.

Consequently, the navy finds that it has built and commissioned just one to two capital warships in each of the last five years. This is barely sufficient even to replace warships that are being retired, typically after completing more than 30 years of service. In contrast, China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy, or PLAN, has been increasing its numbers each year by a staggering 14-22 capital warships.

Making the Indian Navy’s slow growth doubly worrisome is its ambition to be the gatekeeper and “net security provider” of the Indian Ocean. This involves keeping open the world’s largest and most crucial trade highways, and ensuring no disruptions to the global commons, i.e., freedom of navigation and overflight. Furthermore, strategic planners in New Delhi believe that a capable Indian Navy would offset the combat advantage that China’s PLA would enjoy on the Himalayan land border in the event of war.

Admittedly, the PLAN’s numerical advantage would be reduced in a context where the Indian Navy is operating close to its shores, while the PLAN is fighting far from its bases. Wargaming shows that India’s advantage dissipates when its warship numbers fall below a certain level. After years of joint exercises with the world’s most sophisticated navies, including those of the United States, Japan, and Australia, with whom India takes part in the annual multilateral Malabar exercises, current Indian warships incorporate sophisticated technologies and operate with tactical acumen.

Even so, a sizeable advantage in sheer numbers might carry the day for the PLAN.

Advantage PLAN

Amongst the most pressing reasons for India to acquire capital warships in greater numbers is the need for Indian shipyards to incorporate economies of scale in construction, inducting more warships within the same capital allocation. But orders for new warships continue to be placed in relatively small numbers.

Compare the numerical advantage that the PLAN leverages. China is building the Luyang III-class Type 052D destroyers, and will churn out 25 of these before it moves on to another, even more sophisticated design.

In 2017, China launched the first of its Type 055 destroyers, named the Nanchang. With its displacement of 12,000 tons, the Nanchang is the world’s second-largest destroyer after the U.S. Navy’s Zumwalt-class cruiser. Eight Nanchang-class cruisers will soon be in operational service.

Similarly, while India’s Project 17A for seven frigates is a new record, the PLAN is building 30 Type 054A frigates of the Jiangkai II-class. Such large orders fund better design capability, weaponry, and production lines, and result in cheaper, more technologically sophisticated frigates.

However, instead of creating advantages through robust economic planning, India’s military planners, including the Chief of Defense Staff – who was appointed precisely to leverage such economic advantages – bicker about whether strategic wisdom calls for allocating more funding for the Navy or a greater focus on the land borders. This internal debate loses sight of the fact that designing and building warships require long lead times and big budgets. It is, therefore, essential to ensure that the Navy returns to getting the 17-18 percent budget share it enjoyed five to ten years ago, and that adequate planning attention is switched to this most strategic of services.

Ancillaries for the Navy

Besides its fighting components, which include capital warships, such as aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates, corvettes and submarines, a blue water navy also needs a large ancillary capability to help it deploy effectively for combat. The Indian Navy urgently requires the capability in this realm.

With 2 million tons of displacement, the PLAN is currently the world’s second-largest navy. With over 370 surface ships and submarines, the PLAN is larger than the approximately 292 ships and submarines in the U.S. Navy. U.S. Naval Intelligence projects that China will have 475 battle force ships by 2035, while the U.S. Navy will have 305 to 317.

The PLA has internalized the role of aircraft carrier battle groups for superpower navies to project power globally. In December 2025, the U.S. Pentagon revealed that China was planning on constructing six Type 004 carriers by 2035. That would give them a total fleet size of nine aircraft carriers, outnumbering the six carriers currently deployed by the U.S. Pacific fleet.

Vessels Being Constructed

On November 14, 2024, Hindustan Shipyard Ltd (HSL) in Vishakhapatnam signed a contract with the Ministry of Defense (MoD) for building five fleet support ships (FSSs) for replenishing fleet warships at sea. These floating logistic bases can carry and deliver more than 40,000 tons of fuel, water, ammunition and stores, enhancing the fleet’s strategic reach and mobility, prolonging operations without returning to harbor.

In a secondary role, these FSSs would be equipped for humanitarian aid and disaster relief (HADR) operations. This involves evacuating personnel from emergencies and delivering relief material at the site of natural disasters.

In another competitive scenario, team GRSE was declared the winner of the competitive bid for designing and supplying eight anti-submarine warfare shallow water crafts (ASW-SWCs) for the Indian Navy. The contract, worth 63.11 billion Indian rupees ($729.69 million), was signed in April 2019 between GRSE and the Ministry of Defense. These ASW-SWCs, which are designed for a deep displacement of 750 tons, a speed of 25 knots, and a crew complement of 57, are capable of full-scale sub-surface surveillance of coastal waters.

Defense Minister Rajnath Singh complimented MDL for the shipyard’s positive contribution in boosting India’s security. He noted that this had taken India’s defense exports to an all-time high of 384.24 billion rupees in FY 2025-26. “13-14 years ago, we used to export defense items worth Rs 1,200 crore [12 billion rupees]. Today, it has reached almost Rs 39,000 crore [390 billion rupees]. This is proof that India’s self-reliance is growing steadily, signifying that we are standing on our own feet,” Singh said.

The next article in this series, Part 4, will look at the Indian Air Force’s push for local development and manufacture of aero engines and indigenous fighter aircraft.