India's Military Deficit - Part 3 (Navy)
In the previous article , the strength of Indian AirForce has been discussed. Let us analyze the Indian Navy strength in this article: 1. Ships : At a high level, we need to have sufficient number of ships to patrol our coastline, not considering the numerous islands like Andaman & Nicobar. This puts required number of ships to 467. Here it is assumed that each ship has speed of 30 km/h and 2 ships patrol together over the 7,000 km coastline. The available ships are only 90 as others are just small patrol boats. So the ratio between required vs available is 467 vs 90 i.e. 5. 2. Attack helicopters: Assuming 3 attack helicopters are required for every 2 ships, this comes to a need for 751 attack helicopters. We have only 110 attack helicopters available in 2020. So the ratio between required vs available is 751 vs 55 i.e. 14. This is a critical shortcoming of Indian Navy. 3. Destroyers: Assuming each destroyer operates 12 hours at a speed of 30 km/h, patrolling the maritime bord...