Parallel to this economic take-off is a consensus India is taking its place among the world’s major military powers It is a counter, many Washington strategists hope, to China’s growing war machine – excessive beyond any identifiable enemy. India, soon to have the world’s largest population, it’s argued, could provide an alternative development model to China’s Communist leftovers, a civil society but with the great tradition of the British Indian army, military clout.

In pursuit of that goal, New Delhi is splurging on big military toys. With Pakistan’s Chinese and North Korea missile borrowing always in mind -- and Islamabad’s own nuclear matching New Delhi’s -- that means expensive hi tech. India’s annual defense budget has grown by 9.2 percent to more than $20 billion in 2006, up 40 percent since 2002. With more than 1.3 million active personnel, India’s has the world’s third-largest military [after China and the United States).

This buying spree is partly explained as simply catch-up for 20 years dawdling. There are problems: procurement corruption in high places never satisfactorily resolved over several decades but continuing; a current impasse with Russia, still India’s largest military provider, over pricing of a refitted aircraft carrier and its complement New Delhi probably should not have bought; a brewing scandal over a deal with Israel, now India’s almost equally large supplier; technological scandals in almost all indigenous major weaponry production [two crashes at India’s major air-sales show earlier this year], including a decades-long scandal of MIG crashes and poor pilot training, etc., etc.

But a still larger question begs: granted New Delhi’s primary strategic problem must continue to be its unresolved feud with its neighbor Pakistan [at the moment quiescent] requiring increasingly state-of-the-art gadgetry, is Indian strategy pointed in the right direction?

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, an economist after a career-long romance with planning, is mesmerized by the problems of undoing 35 years of autarky. And he’s up against continued hypocritical backbiting by his two Communist Party allies, crucial to his parliamentary majority, and his major political opposition, purported proponents of capitalism but now out of power turning on their own ethos.

But any casual glance around India’s periphery and at her internal law and order indicates a far more burdensome problem may not be grappled: strengthening India’s ability to deal with low-intensity conflict inside and outside the country and on its borders.

These are some of the problems the Indian military face in the months and years ahead. And as the Americans have found to their dismay in Iraq, the best high tech inventory is not necessarily an answer to asymmetrical warfare waged by a skilful opponent.

Acknowledging the problem of quality rather than quantity of its conventional military, the Indian Army has announced it will begin to downsize to become more fighting fit, initially by 27,000 over a period of 18 months, retiring "low medical category" soldiers. [Some 60 percent of the military budget is spent on personnel and – by Indian standards – generous retirement pensions.] But that is a small beginning for an overhaul long since belated.