In the first of the
three part article the author points to the directionless growth of India’s
military. He questions do we know where our military is heading?
If India is forced to go to war with
one of its neighbours today, which of the three service chiefs is expected to
conceive the war strategy, plan the operations, be in charge of the conduct of
war and exercise command and control over the proceedings? What happens if
there is no consensus on the war plan? What ensues if one of them wishes to
execute the plan differently or has totally different priorities and
objectives? In the present state, is the Ministry of Defence (MOD) or the defence
secretary in a position to professionally analyse the plan and come out with an
integrated blueprint? In an incorporated digitised war scenario would we have
the luxury of time to work out a consensus or would the execution be based on
the results of voting by the service chiefs? Do we have a combined tri-service
structure trained to handle an integrated war? Or are we going to ask each of
the chiefs to do what they wish to in accordance with their own plans and hope
for the best?
Defence
Ever since India attained independence
in 1947, the political class egged on by the bureaucracy favoured a weak,
fractured and a restrained military, kept out of the decision making loop.
Enhancing the operational capability of the military by altering the existing
structures was unacceptable to the status conscious Indian bureaucracy which
assumed that losing turf will result in losing control over the military
amounting to its degradation. In consequence, the political leadership was made
to believe, that keeping the military voiceless, subjecting military’s
considered opinion and judgment to bureaucratic scrutiny and controls were the
best option to avoid a military coup. The implications of maintaining a weak
military to national security were of no concern to the officialdom. As for the
country, organisational issues pertaining to the military or for that matter
conceptual issues relating military strategy and war fighting seldom evoked any
interest amongst the people or the ruling class primarily because of the disconnect
between the military and the people that has been created over a period of
time.
The unnecessary secrecy attached to every issue connected with military,
though suited some to discard transparency on purpose, helped in further compounding
the issue. This has led to India developing a society which is very nearly ignorant
of the defence services or its need in relation to its war fighting
capabilities. As a result debates in the media as also in the Parliament rarely
extend beyond the defence budget, issues relating to pay and perks of the
soldiers or some misconduct by some individual of one service or the other.
The present state
of the Indian defence forces
There is an anecdote about a conversation
in the mid-1930 between the French Prime Minister, Leon Blum, and Charles de Gaulle,
then a French Army colonel. The future leader of France reproached Blum about
the state of the country’s defenses. Blum was offended. ”But we are spending
more for defense than the previous Government!” ”It is what you are spending it
on,” de Gaulle said, ”that I want to
discuss.” What they were spending it on was bigness. The French had the largest
– and, by most accounts, finest -army in the world. They underwrote huge
military budgets. They constructed the most massive defense installation since
the Great Wall of China – the Maginot line.
And when World War II came, all of it
collapsed. Hit by the German blitzkrieg of 1940, the French would try to seal
off a Panzer breakthrough by forming a new defense line 10 miles to the rear –
only to find that the Germans had bypassed it already. Twenty, 30, 50 miles
back – it made no difference; the Germans were always beyond the new defenses
before the
French were ready. The situation
continued to deteriorate at an ever-increasing pace, until the French, recognizing
their inability to react in time, gave up.
What had happened? In his book ”To
Lose a Battle,” Alistair Horne puts his finger on the essential reason.
Recognising that, in combat, ideas were as important as
weapons, the Germans had overhauled their strategic and tactical doctrines of
World War I. The French General Staff, on the other hand, ”allowed itself to
become bogged down in bureaucratic method; paperasserie, as the French call it,
the blight to which all armies are susceptible, flourished. It was difficult to
see where the power of decision lay. … There was not much discussion on a
higher strategic and tactical plane, and what there was tended to follow
abstractly intellectual paths from which little practical ever emerged.”
Absence of national
directives
Indian Army’s state today is something
similar. The country has been firing without aiming. Political guidelines in
the form of National Security and Defence Strategies are conveniently not spelt
out or possibly the powers that be are unable to comprehend what these
strategies ought to be. The threat perception has not been enunciated. No one
seems to be aware whether the country should be preparing for a two front war
while retaining the capability to handle terrorism or if the Government’s
assessment is something different. The form of warfare for which the military
is required to be structured, equipped and trained has not been specified with
each service working based on its own imagination, assumptions and presumptions.
The state of indecisiveness possibly brought about by the prevailing ‘palm off
the blame’ if something goes wrong attitude, of the Government machinery and
the political class is self-defeating.
The result is defence purchases or the
priorities for purchases are not based on sound professional logic and
requirements. The bureaucracy siting at the MOD are
incapable of professionally assessing the requirements or its priorities. Thus
the bargaining skills and the personal rapport between individual services and
the bureaucracy decide the ultimate laundry list of purchases and their quantity. To put it squarely, military procurement today is unconnected to the
needs of network centric joint war strategies or priorities.
Continued
in Part II: Modern weapons and equipment change concepts of war fighting (blogs.economictimes.com)
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