The recent Indo-US defence agreement has raised both expectations and opposition in India. The question is as to why should there be an opposition to this apparently win-win formula, capable of catapulting India to a great power status. India has signed many defence agreements with different nations. Why should a defence tie-up with the US raise hackles? It is indeed a sad commentary on the level of debate in our country that we concentrate on asking irrelevant questions rather than focusing on the issues involved.

Majority of the Indian strategists have concentrated on the benefits accruing to India from this military engagement with the US. However, there is no analysis of the costs involved in pursuing this relationship. The basic question which needs to be asked is why is the US so keen on this relationship? What will India have to give them to get its weapons wish list? Will such a relationship have an impact on India's civil-military relations? Such questions demand a peep into past and an impartial analysis of the current history.

The answer to the above questions is rooted in the way the world has shaped after the collapse of Soviet Union. The Cold War's international political equations are no longer relevant. We are in a largely unipolar world, increasingly defined in terms of an American empire. The current Indo-US military relations have to be viewed from a far broader perspective than mere foreign policy initiatives between two nation-states largely based on terms as equals. However, a relationship with an empire would be a different proposition with the inherent demands of the empire basing its needs for protection of its acquired territories and preservation of its basic ideology of expansion. Both these objectives require military power. The US has a surplus of hard military power and is capable of achieving its missions with its abundance of missiles, ships and aircraft, independently. However, it is facing acute shortages of military manpower and this shortage seems to moving the dynamics of the relationship between two unequal powers.

The British Raj exploited the Indian Army to rule the globe. Now, America needs this manpower to fight its wars. Firstly, to overcome its inability to generate its recruitment targets at home, and secondly it would like to have manpower from the peripheries which can be sacrificed without much political backlash. India is perceived to have surplus youth to meet the growing global demand for military manpower, with the number of unemployed queuing up at army recruitment centres across India.

Therefore, this whole engagement with the US should be viewed as an attempt in liberalizing the Indian military manpower market. Whilst, the analysts focus on the boost provided to the nascent private military complex in India with these defence ties, they forget or are ignoring the fact that the current military ties actually involve mortgaging our military manpower and reaping profits for the American military industrial complex.

Those who compare the Indo-Soviet military ties to the current Indo-US military cooperation are overlooking the fact that Indo-Soviet military ties were confined to the transfers of technologies from the Soviet Union, but without its ideology. Our military, despite a close relationship with the Soviet military in the past, remained completely apolitical during that phase. There was never a threat of it turning Red. However, looking at the past American engagements with countries in our neighbourhood and elsewhere in the world, one is forced to view the impact of Indo-American military cooperation on civil-military relations with scepticism. Pakistan, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil, Argentina and many other countries in Latin America are prime examples of civil-military relations deteriorating due to their militaries engaging with the US military. With the deep organizational influence of the American military on the Pakistan Army, there is merit in the argument that it has emerged as an army, only to protect its corporate interests rather than the needs of the state. In all the countries mentioned earlier, the Americans dealt with the respective militaries as entities, separate from the state. This tendency promoted the militaries in these countries to become political actors involving themselves in internal power struggles.

These examples have been shown to prove that strategy cannot be based on short-term calculations and bean counting the number of F-16s. There are far larger issues involved in getting into military ties with an empire. We need to carry out elaborate studies on various facets of the relationship, before plunging ourselves into a quagmire from where it may be difficult to extricate. The level of debate on such matters, in a country aspiring to be a great power, has to be much higher than what exists in India.