As year-end looms, a transient lull in India’s endemic election fever may permit the media a respite to focus on other matters of serious national concern. The voting citizen, given his or her preoccupation with pressing issues such as jobs, prices, health and social harmony, may not see national security, for example, as a priority issue. But she should, because paying cursory attention to security threats — internal as well as external — will only aggravate them, and divert the nation’s attention and scarce resources away from development and social welfare. Former Army chief, General MM Naravane, in his forthcoming memoir, highlights this with his recall of a serious security issue warranting a cabinet decision being handed to him as a “hot potato” in 2020.
Around us, we see a rapidly fragmenting landscape where schisms are breeding mutual hostility. If the Russia-Ukraine war served to widen the East-West divide, the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza has angered the Global South, which sees the West as guilty of hypocrisy, double standards and abetting genocide. As the world helplessly watches these brutal and sanguinary conflicts rage, the organs of the UN seem to have been rendered impotent and irrelevant.
This is, perhaps, the state of international anarchy that aspiring hegemon China has been waiting so that it can use its economic strength and coercive military power to “restore order and stability”. After all, China’s President Xi Jinping’s cherished “China Dream” does envisage the establishment of a new world order, governed by the concept of “tianxia”(all under heaven), in which China will dominate by virtue of its acknowledged superiority.
Manifestations of “tianxia” are obvious in China’s outrageous claims under the “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea, and repudiation of the 1914 McMahon line on the India-China border. As far as India is concerned, burgeoning trade apart, in every other aspect of the bilateral relationship, China has displayed open and deep-rooted hostility.
What started off as a stand-off between Chinese and Indian militaries along the Line of Actual Control three years ago has become a permanent posture. After 22 meetings of the special representatives and 20 military commanders, it is clear that a revanchist China is neither going to “de-escalate” nor restore the territorial “status quo ante” (whatever that means). For India, to downplay the ever-present dangers inherent in living with such a hostile neighbour would be imprudent.
The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza are as different as they can be, but both battlefields are seeing old paradigms being discarded and the deployment of new concepts, technologies and innovations. One hopes that our armed forces, even as they struggle with a radical new recruitment system while extracting military wisdom from ancient Indian texts, and exorcising the ghosts of a “colonial legacy”, will also devote adequate attention to the lessons of the current wars.
The East European conflict holds special interest for India because the military hardware deployed in combat by Russia and Ukraine also serves our forces. But what should provoke serious introspection in the Global South are the conclusions drawn by a Swedish think tank from a study of the Russia-Ukraine war. Pointing out the obvious fact that none of the immediate goals of its “special operation” on February 24, 2022, were achieved by Russia, it infers that this spectacular failure, apart from other reasons, is attributable to the absence of a joint command structure and a concept of joint operations in Russia.
The war commenced with Russian commanders conducting operations independently. It was only eight months later that a joint HQ was created and General Sergey Surovikin was given command of “integrated forces,” a hitherto unknown body. After three months, Surovikin was replaced by General Gerasimov (till then chief of general staff), who was subsequently re-assigned “to organise closer coordination between military branches and services”; a goal that should have been achieved long before the war. One of the main reasons for Russia’s military failure, the study says, is “the desire to preserve the archaic military culture at any cost.”
Back home, the process of defence reform and initiating jointness appears to have stalled. In the four years since the institution of a Chief of Defence Staff (and 22 years since LK Advani’s group of ministers recommended urgent defence reforms), little substantive change has taken place in India’s outdated higher defence organisation.
Any conflict with China will require forces/resources to be withdrawn from across India’s 14 Army, Navy and Air Force commands scattered all over the country. Facing this composite force, will be China’s integrated western theatre command under its unitary commander. Our military learnt many bitter lessons during the 1987-90 tri-service Indian Peace-Keeping Force operations in Sri Lanka, where issues related to inter-service coordination, command control, and logistics, led to many fiascos.
If the same fiascos are to be avoided, the obvious imperative is to reorganise these 14 commands into four or five “theatres”, on geographic or threat-based considerations, and place land/maritime/air forces, as required, under the commander, charged with the conduct of operations.
However, such has been the internal resistance to issues related to “jointness” and theatre commands that this reorganisation has remained stalled for over two decades. It is no longer a secret that apart from concerns about loss of “turf” and equitable sharing of senior posts, the main impediment to implementation of reforms has been inter-service disagreement over the employment of air power. While the IAF insists that air power is “indivisible” and must only be deployed under its control, the other two services want the “air warriors” to loosen their grip on air power assets and agree to modalities for sharing them with theatre commanders so that they can fight land and maritime campaigns successfully.
Moreover, while “indivisibility of air power” may have been an acceptable construct in the past, it is no longer valid because the Navy, Army and Coast Guard too deploy sizeable aviation components in service-specific roles. However, there is no overlap/conflict of roles since the IAF’s 2022 doctrine lists its main “objectives” as defence of national air space, prosecution of offensive air operations, war prevention through deterrence, and provision of assistance in internal security.
Even as this vexed issue awaits resolution, the situation is likely to be further complicated by IAF’s reported proposal that the service be re-named as “Indian Air and Space Force” with consequential re-allocation of charters and resources. Inter-service “turf battles” are not unique to India and have been fought amongst services in the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere, in the face of defence reforms. In each case, however, practical compromises invariably emerged with the forceful intervention of enlightened politicians.
Can we hope for the dawning of realisation at the political level that further procrastination could impose a heavy price in terms of national security?
Arun Prakash is a retired chief of naval staff. The views expressed are personal