The EU, lulled by the six decades of peace, security and unprecedented prosperity the continent has enjoyed since the end of World War II, despises the concept of "hard" or military power and is actually more enthusiastic about globalization without strong, clearly defined borders than the United States.

Hard-pressed intelligence, security and police senior officials charged with combating the tidal waves of illegal immigration, soaring personal violence, organized crime and dangerous drugs sweeping their continent do not share these rosy assumptions. But their voices are seldom heard in the policy chambers of the European Commission and European Parliament.

U.S. leaders, Democratic as well as Republican, do not share the prevalent European view that the cultural values of "soft" power and pouring money into miserably run and almost totally unmonitored U.N. and other development programs makes the need to maintain large military forces obsolete.

But they have bought into a different fantasy -- one that swept the U.S. Department of Defense during most of the Bush administration with catastrophic results: that America's high-tech pre-eminence over the rest of the world was so vast, magnificent and unchallengeable that conventional forces could be run down, especially in the U.S. Army and Marines.

The pinnacle of this attitude came with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's conviction that the March-April 2003 invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein could be pulled off with no more than 50,000-60,000 ground troops.

More than three times that number were, in fact, needed. Even then, Rumsfeld's contempt for the need for large numbers of soldiers on the ground prevailed in his catastrophic refusal to flood Iraq afterward with American and allied troops in order to maintain law, order and the basic functions of civilized society.

The gigantic T-90 tank deal with Russia, however, confirms that Indian policymakers and strategists do not buy into this high-tech fantasy world any more than they buy into the EU's force-free one. India faces great dangers from a nuclear-armed Pakistan increasingly threatened by disintegration and civil war.

It is plagued by terrorist threats across the Line of Control in Kashmir and potentially from jihadist groups operating with increasing impunity within democratic Bangladesh in the east, too.

Myanmar, formerly Burma, has long been unfriendly and is run by a ruthless authoritarian dictatorship backed by China to India's east, and while relations with China are improving, the two most populous nations in history remain wary of each other.

It is no wonder, therefore, that India still sticks to the old unfashionable verities of conventional land power expressed through the ownership and use of huge tank forces.

Indeed, India's entire developing grand strategic military structure is archaic by current U.S., European and in some respects even Russian and Chinese fashions. But that does not make it wrong.

Part One of this series

(Next: India's "old-fashioned" weapons procurements)

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