The PLA at Home and Abroad - Strategic Studies Institute - U.S. Army

solved. Most likely, China’s long-term strategic concerns
will heighten the consequences of the security
dilemma.
South and Central Asia: India.
The suspicions infecting Sino-Indian relations are
impossible to avoid. They are perhaps best illustrated
by a reported March 2009 Indian military exercise at
a time Sino-Indian relations were at a high point. The
Hindustan Times 31 reported that India had conducted a
secret 3-day exercise called “Divine Matrix” designed
on the assumption that a “nuclear-armed China would
attack India by 2017.” Following a 6-month study of
various potential scenarios, the scenario selected had
China employing information warfare to disrupt India
prior to launching a military offensive. It would not be
a nuclear war but a short, quick conventional operation
designed to grant China dominant position in the
region. A week later, China Daily reported the Foreign
Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, at a press conference
expressed surprise at the report because the leaders
of China and India had already agreed that the two
countries did not pose a threat to each other but would
“treat each other as partners.” 32 Even so, in an August
2009 lecture to the National Maritime Foundation in
New Delhi, India’s senior military officer, Chairman
of the Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) and Chief of
the Naval Staff (CNS) Admiral Sureesh Mehta, would
state that “coping with China will certainly be one of
our primary challenges in the years ahead.” He specifically
referred to China’s growing footprint in the
Indian Ocean region. Yet, in the same lecture he also
recommends that cooperation with China rather than
competition or conflict was the better policy because
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