GS Paper: GS3-24. Various Security Forces and Agencies and their Mandate.

Context

The Chief of Defence Staff General Bipin Rawat’s recent description of the Indian Air Force (IAF) as a supporting arm and the IAF chief Air Chief Marshal R.K.S. Bhadauria’s rebuttal highlights turbulent journey marking the reorganisation process of the armed forces.

Issues before IAF

• The IAF is warning against splitting it into packets.
• Reports suggest that counting even ageing aircraft, the IAF is 25% short on fighter squadrons.
• A pan service shortage of about 400 pilots, almost 10% of their authorised strength, further aggravates this.
• Therefore, the IAF has a point when it warns against splitting assets, for, there may be nothing much to split.

Way forward

• Confidence building: A common understanding of the nuances of military airpower is the key.
• With the experience of operating almost every kind of aircraft the IAF operates, the naval leadership understands air power.
• This applies to the Indian Army too, in its own way.
• Confidence needs to be developed that rightly staffed apex joint organisations can draw up professional operational plans for air power.
• Enhancing military education: Confidence building will need some effort in the short term towards enhancing professional military education though, at the staff level.
• Analysis before implementation: Major reorganisations must strictly follow the sequence of written concepts, their refinement through consultation, simulation or table top war gaming, field evaluation and final analysis before implementation.
• This would help address command and control, asset adequacy, individual service roles, operational planning under new circumstances and the adequacy of joint structures.
• Who gets to lead what also matters.
• The Western Command between the Indian Army and the IAF, the Northern Command with the Indian Army, Maritime Command with the Indian Navy and the Air Defence Command with the IAF may be an acceptable formula.

Why jointness?

• With dwindling budgets, a steadily deteriorating security situation and the march of technology, the armed forces understand the need to synergise.

Challenges

• Challenges in co-existence: Different services do not co-exist well where they are colocated.
• Bitter fights over land, buildings, facilities, etc. harms optimal operational synergising.
• Allocation challenge: Then there is the issue of giving each other the best, or of wanting to be with each other.
• Lack of operational charter: The Andaman and Nicobar Command suffered from the lack of a substantial operational charter, and the services not positioning appropriate personnel or resources there.
• Lack of interest in joint tenure: As a joint tenure did not benefit career, no one strove for it.
• The U.S., when faced with the same problem, made joint tenures mandatory for promotions.

Steps to be taken

• Security strategy: We need a comprehensive National Security Strategy to guide the services develop capacities required in their respective domains.
• Professional education: We need to transform professional education and inter-service employment to nurture genuine respect for others.
• Mutual resolution of difference: The armed forces must resolve their differences among themselves, as the politicians or bureaucrats cannot do it.
• Quality staff: Good quality staff, in adequate numbers, at apex joint organisations, will help to reassure individual services and those in the field that they are in safe hands.
• Tailored approach: There is need for the acceptance of the fact that what works for other countries need not work for us.

Conclusion

We may need tailor-made solutions which may need more genuine thinking. For genuine military jointness, a genuine convergence of minds is critical.

Context

The Chinese are about to extend their geographical advantage by building a new high-speed rail from Chengdu, running close by and parallel to the Arunachal border, up to Lhasa.

Manpower and Defence Budget: Comparison with China

• The Indian army, according to diverse sources, numbers between 12,50,000 and 14,00,000 officers and men.
• Chinese PLA actually has only 9,75,000 officers and men.
•  They have downsized their army.
• China is an aspiring world power that spends $252 billion on its defence budget, as compared to $72.9 billion that India spends.
• Both countries limit their budget to around 2 per cent of their GDP, which in China’s case is five times our size.

Why does India need to reduce manpower in defense?

• Expensive:  A major portion of the budget is spent on manpower, 81 percent of the army budget goes into manpower and maintenance. Gradually, manpower is going to get increasingly expensive.
• Also, our strategic options get constrained because the army gets 61 percent of the defense budget.
• We need to downsize the army by 2,00,000 men over five years through retirement and reduced recruitment.
• The reduction in manpower will save approximately Rs 30,000 crore, which can be equally divided between the three services.

Way forward: Bigger role to navy and air force

• We can achieve better conventional deterrence against China by giving bigger roles to the navy and air force.
• The first step is to accept that we are an asymmetric power and leverage the RMA (Revolution in Military Affairs) so that numerical inferiority is of no consequence.
• They are invulnerable on land, and their only strategic weakness is their reliance on the Indian Ocean SLOCs (sea lines of communications) for 70 percent of their imported oil.
• The only guarantee of Chinese non-aggression and good behavior is a well-crafted threat to their oil tankers and a complete naval mastery of the escalation that is bound to follow.
• India can also leverage the QUAD resources in various ways such as information.
• Build up the Car Nicobar airfield into a full-fledged airbase.
• We could negotiate with Oman for the use of the old RAF airbase at Masirah to dominate the Gulf of Hormuz and threaten the Chinese base at Djibouti.

Conclusion

China cannot be countered by throwing expensive manpower at the problem, but only by shifting the battlespace to advantageous geography, by a united navy and air force effort, while a technically advanced army holds the Himalayan border.

The recent controversy over the alleged marginalization of the Indian Air Force (IAF) in the proposed ‘theaterisation’ of the national security landscape has led to some debates.

IAF concerned over ITC

• The Indian military continues to work in silos, like all governmental agencies in India, and a need was rightly felt and directions issued by PM to bring about jointness.
• The aim is to bring about synergy in operations while economizing through the elimination of duplication and wasteful practices or processes.
• IAF is keen to bring in the requisite reforms to improve the war-fighting capabilities of the Indian military as a whole while also economizing.

Reservations of IAF

• In the current formulation of theatres, the objections from the IAF have essentially been due to air power being seen as an adjunct to the two surface forces.
• IAF veterans feel that the IAF is being divided into penny packets which would seriously degrade the effectiveness of air operations in any future conflict or contingency.
• They feel that the use of air power is found to be sub-optimal under the military ethos of “an order is an order”.

Hurry by the CDS

• Concurrently, such an intellectual exercise would identify duplication, wasteful resources and practices.
• This is what the CDS should have been pursuing before first freezing the structure and then trying to glue the pieces together or hammer square pegs in round holes.
• Only such a strategy can define the types of contingencies the military is expected to address, leading to appropriate military strategies, doctrines and required capabilities.

Why is the IAF right?

• Airpower is the lead element, particularly since the Indian political aim, even in the foreseeable future, is unlikely to be the occupation of new territories.
• A large, manpower-intensive army with unusable armour formations would then also come into focus.
• Even the proposed air defence command conflicts with the domain command in the seamless employment of airpower.
• It is due to the absence of such an intellectual exercise that the IAF does not wish to see its limited resources scattered away in fighting defensive battles by a land force commander with little expertise.
• The Army fails to realise that offensive air power is best not seen, busy keeping the enemy air force pinned down elsewhere as shown in 1971.

The Army-Air Force silo

• Historically, the Indian Army has always kept the IAF out of the information loop and demonstrated a penchant to ‘go it alone’.
• The charge that the IAF joined the party late during Kargil (1999) is also totally baseless and shows a lack of knowledge of events and a failure to learn from historical facts.
• Recorded facts and a dispassionate view would clearly show that the IAF began conducting reconnaissance missions as soon as the Army just made a request for attack helicopters.
• This despite the IAF pointing out the unsuitability of armed helicopters at these altitudes and their vulnerability.
• The use of offensive air power close to the Line of Control also required that the political leadership be kept informed due to possibilities of escalation, something that the Army was unwilling to do.

Echoes from Kargil

• Seen in this light, the Chinese incursion into Eastern Ladakh last year is reminiscent of Kargil.
• While the response has been swift, it is evident that a clear intent to use combat air power, as against 1962, has significantly contributed in deterring China.
• However, such intent and a joint strategy would have been forcefully signalled by the presence of air force representatives in the ongoing negotiations to restore status quo ante.
• The continuing build-up of the infrastructure for the PLA Air Force in Tibet further emphasizes the need for an air-land strategy, with air power as the lead element to deter or defeat the Chinese designs at coercion.

National security strategy should be at the centerstage

• If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then it is essential to first define the political objectives flowing into a national security strategy before any effective use of force can be truly contemplated.
• The failures of the mightiest militaries in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and even our own Indian misadventure in Sri Lanka bear testimony to the lack of clear political objectives and appropriate military strategies.
• It is, therefore, unfortunate that even after over seven decades after Independence, India still does not have a clearly articulated national security strategy.

Address the structural gaps

• Finally, theatre or any lower structure requires an institutionalized higher defence organization, which has been sadly missing.
• This has lead to little regular dialogue between the political and military leadership, except in crises resulting in knee-jerk responses.
• This led to a remark from a scholar-warrior that, “it is ironic that the Cabinet has an Accommodation Committee but not a Defence Committee”.
• In the current proposal, it appears that the CDS, as the permanent chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee (CoSC), would also exercise operational control of the theatre/functional commands.

Way forward

• Prudence demands that instead of ramming down such structures without adequate deliberations and discussions with all stakeholders.
• We need to first evolve appropriate military strategies in a nuclear backdrop in concert with the political objectives.
• Thereafter, joint planning and training for all foreseen contingencies, with war-gaming, would automatically indicate the required structures with suitable command, control and communications.

Conclusion

• We must remember that in war there is no prize for the runner-up.
• It is better that such objections and dissenting opinions come out now before the structure is formalized than once it is set in stone.
• The nation would then end up paying a heavy price, with the Air Force carrying the burden and blame for the failures.