India, in sharp contrast to U.S. ground strategy in Iraq in 2003 and thereafter, maintains very large numbers of ground forces that can be used to flood territories such as Jammu & Kashmir, or states threatened by Maoist rebels, with troops to provide on-the-ground security. This Indian emphasis on maintaining a very large ground army conflicts with the prevailing U.S. and even Russian doctrines on smaller, excellent equipped forces. But as the U.S. experience in Iraq showed, relying on such forces, however superb their training and equipment, can rapidly lead to strategic over-extension and the exhaustion of repeatedly deployed combat units.

Nor do the Indians buy into the idea that the combination of precision-guided munitions and space-based targeting, reconnaissance and communications assets make any large land force obsolete and exceptionally vulnerable. That might be the case if they were ever caught up in a land war with the United States, which currently seems very unlikely. But against other potential enemies and threats on the Asian continent, New Delhi strategists believe large numbers of tanks will do just fine.

The purchase of 347 Russian-made T-90 Main Battle Tanks concluded in December is also significant because it defies the long-prevailing wisdom that nations can only be global or regional superpowers if they make all their own primary weapons systems indigenously.

If that were the case, Britain would have lost World War II and the Soviet Union would have had even greater difficulty in winning it: For Britain and the Soviet Union both depended on vast floods of American munitions: Tens of thousands of U.S. trucks, largely ferried across Iran, were crucial for the Soviet offensive drive on Berlin.

India still lacks the heavy engineering capabilities in its growing domestic automotive industry to significant numbers of tanks, let alone Main Battle Tanks of the quality of the T-90. But purchasing them from other countries still looks good to them.

China, for all its far vaster industrial production capability, still can only produce land weapons systems far inferior in quality to those of the United States and Russia, and has to buy them from Russia, though Moscow remains far more reluctant to sell its most up-to-date systems to China, in contrast to India, which it is eager to sell them to.

Nor is India's rapidly strengthening military merely an exercise in nostalgia, investing solely in so-called cold fashioned weapons systems like aircraft carriers, large standing troop forces and aircraft carriers. New Delhi has also just signed a co-production deal with the Kremlin to make supersonic cruise missiles capable of flying at close to ground level three times faster than the U.S. Tomahawk.

Indian leaders are also betting that they can make their ambitious endo-atmospheric and exo-atmospheric anti-ballistic missile interceptors and new Agni III intercontinental ballistic missile operational and produce them domestically in significant quantities in the next few years.

But the T-90 purchase decision shows that even while the Indians share the American high-tech vision on BMD and high-tech systems, they are also keeping their feet -- and tank treads -- firmly on the ground to be able to defend themselves and project power in very traditional, but far from obsolete, ways.

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