Dsa September 2011 by Defence and Security Alert

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verything about the government’s attitude toward its largest armed force is epitomised by its handling over the age matter of the Chief of Army Staff. It is truly bizarre as to the depths of ignorance that the government can sink. And it is downright dangerous the levels that the government can go so as to manipulate its agenda onto the Armed Forces. In this case the army, its largest land force and the true reflection of the Union of India, for it is the union of all communities and regions of this country. And yet the government will not hesitate to mishandle sensitive matters concerning the army.

The one making most news is about the age discrepancies in the records of the Chief of Army Staff. His school-leaving certificate declares his year of birth as 1951, and another document claims it is 1950. The former document resides with the Adjutant General’s Branch and the latter with the Military Secretary’s Branch. In the functioning of the army, rooted in centuries of evolution, trials and errors, the AG’s Branch holds the personal records of the officers, amongst other duties and responsibilities. And the MS Branch makes and implements policies on promotions and postings. Little wonder that an MS Branch posting is regarded as a feather in the cap, a big one at that. But MS Branch does not set policies on personal records and neither does it hold them. The Government of India and its Ministry of Defence insist on going by the record with the MS Branch. In the process, completely ignoring the sanctity of functioning within Army HQs, the traditions and ethos of the army.

This is ample evidence on all that ails the growth and flowering of the Armed Forces and specifically in this case, it is the government that will decide how they should function, even internally. Similarly is the case with the purported contract to purchase light howitzers from the United States of America. Now comes the specious argument that there are problems with the angle of elevation and these howitzers cannot be used against tanks. A lot of weapons cannot be used against a lot of targets.

But when there is a requirement of such weapons in the mountain formations of the army, the science fiction of tanks in the snows just doesn’t buy. The likelihood of facing tanks at those altitudes is even lesser than that of finding water on the moon. And yet the contract is supposed to have been put on hold. Further delaying the modernisation of the army.

Most of Indian security concerns are land oriented, be it some neighbouring countries or even internal security duties that extract a heavy toll on the army. Despite all the data that shows just how many times the army has pulled political chestnuts out of the fire, there is nothing to suggest that the leadership of this country has learned any lessons. The latest episode certainly proves the point that the country continues to be led by those ignorant in the matters of security, military traditions, ethos and functional sanctity.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

publisher’s view

Soldier's Pride is Pa ramount!

rom the very beginning of civilisation, wars have taken place for one or the other reason but the methods have been different in every military campaign whether it was the ancient wars of Mahabharata or Ramayana or World Wars I and II or any other war.

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Volume 2 Issue 12 September 2011 chairman shyam sunder publisher & ceo pawan agrawal editor-in-chief manvendra singh executive editor maj gen (dr) g d bakshi SM, VSM (retd) director shishir bhushan corporate consultant k j singh art consultant divya gupta central saint martins college of art & design, university of arts, london corporate communications tejinder singh business development wg. cdr. sangeeta malla (retd) ishani bhowmik creative vivek anand pant administration shveta gupta representative (Jammu and Kashmir) salil sharma correspondent (Europe) dominika cosic production dilshad & dabeer webmaster sundar rawat photographer subhash circulation & distribution mithlesh tiwari ranjeet dinesh e-mail: (first name)@dsalert.org info: info@dsalert.org articles: articles@dsalert.org subscription: subscription@dsalert.org online edition: online@dsalert.org advertisement: advt@dsalert.org editorial & business office 4/19 asaf ali road new delhi-110002 (India) t: +91-011-23243999, 23287999,9958382999 f: +91-11-23259666 e: info@dsalert.org www.dsalert.org

disclaimer all rights reserved. reproduction and translation in any language in whole or in part by any means without permission from Defence and Security Alert is prohibited. opinions expressed are those of the individual writers and do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and / or editors. all disputes are subject to jurisdiction of delhi courts. defence and security alert is printed, published and owned by pawan agrawal and printed at graphic world, 1686, kucha dakhini rai, darya ganj, new delhi-110002 and published at 4/19 asaf ali road, new delhi (india). editor: manvendra singh.

In war it is the land forces that finally capture enemy territory. Undoubtedly fighter planes and warships play a vital role in modern war but we all know that without a strong and well equipped land force that puts boots on the ground it is impossible to show plausible victory. The land forces have to be the best equipped and honed to use their weapons to best advantage. They have to be highly disciplined and tough as steel and very motivated to be able to defend a terrain as varied as the Indian geography. They have to be made to feel that their pride in their profession is appreciated by the nation they defend with their blood. There should not be any compromise on the quality of arms and equipment made available to them. However, our land forces are being deprived of the most innovative technologies available only because the process of procurement of military weapons has become so contaminated with scams that nobody wants to take responsibility for selecting the much-needed weaponry for fear of becoming embroiled in charges and counter-charges. I feel the following questions deserve urgent attention: 1. Why should there not be a special cadre for all procurements for the defence of the nation? 2. Why should an exhaustive list of equipment needed over the next decade and beyond not be published so as to get the maximum number of arms producers to participate in the bidding? This will also help our own private sector to respond. 3. Why should not the offset policy that has been made part of the procurement process be reviewed every two years? 4. Why not have a separate defence procurement ministry? 5. Why should the expertise of retired senior defence personnel not be tapped for this process? If the government gives immediate attention to such questions, only then can we build strong land and other forces to counter any threats from our adversaries like Pakistan and China. I am sure our government is acutely aware of this. The pride of all the defence personnel must be the top priority for all the states of the Union of India. Yet the feeling has grown that there has been a steady erosion in the standing of the Armed Forces in the Order of Precedence that governs protocol and inter se relations between civilian and military bureaucracies to the disadvantage of the latter. Somewhere, somehow, our defence forces’ pride and elan does not get the priority it deserves. What we have been observing is that politicians forget that their parliament and their constituencies are safeguarded by these defence personnel only in times of natural disasters and even man-made calamities. It is these land forces personnel who are always there to extend their best support to the people in the time of dire need. It is they who save the lives of our people. And if they are taken for granted or even callously ignored then their morale will be seriously affected to the detriment of national security. Our land forces are one of the best and biggest standing armies in the world today and we are proud of them. Team DSA salutes them and this special issue is dedicated to our land forces. I hope our readers will like this issue as it has contributions from some very eminent and well-known generals from our land forces. India under terrorist attack. Once again. This time at the High Court, New Delhi. The US saw just one terrorist attack and we have seen hundreds till date. They revamped their entire security system to counter terrorism. What is our government waiting for? It seems we do not have the seriousness and compelling political will to counter and annihilate terrorism in India. When will our government wake up? Incidentally, the DSA has become the first and the only professional magazine in the defence and security genre to be awarded an ISO 9001: 2008 certification.

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“The country comes first – always and every time”. VITAL AND URGENT NEED TO PLUG GAPS

he Indian Army is the second largest and amongst the most battle tested armies in the world. The envelope of threats that it faces today are daunting. With China to its north and Pakistan to its west, it has to be prepared for a two–front war scenario. In addition, the Indian Army has to be ready for the entire spectrum of conflicts including low intensity threats from Jihadi tanzeems and the rising threat from left wing extremism. The entire Soviet subsidised capital stock of the Indian Army was due for turnover in 1990. Unfortunately the Indian economy collapsed in 1991. Our entire military modernisation plan has thus been delayed for well over two decades as a consequence. There is an urgent operational need to now speed up this process. The primary areas of concern are: • Medium artillery. Since the Bofors deal in 1987 - the Indian Artillery has not been able to mediumise its inventory around the 155/52 mm calibre. Artillery is critical to massing effects. Kargil had highlighted the need to marshal a hundred tubes to support each battalion attack in the mountains. We need some 1500 x 155 mm guns to mediumise our artillery. We need self-propelled artillery (wheeled) to support our mechanised formations. The acquisition of Smerch and Pinaka rockets has been the sole saving grace. • Night blindness of the tank fleet. With the T-90s and Arjuns we have made our Tank fleet current. After three decades, the Arjun has at last emerged as a splendid tank and we need to cash in on this success. However 70 per cent of our tank fleet is still night blind. 80 per cent of the Pakistani tank fleet and 100 per cent of the Chinese tanks are capable of fighting at night. This is a critical asymmetry. We cannot afford to let this differential persist even for a day. • Air defence. The entire air defence inventory of guns and missiles is of the 1960s vintage. The Kvadrats (SAM-6) electronic frequencies were compromised in the 1973 Yom Kippur war. There is an urgent need to replace this entire obsolete inventory of air defence missiles and guns as well as their radars. • Army aviation. Similarly the entire fleet of army aviation helicopters (Cheetas, Chetaks, Lamas etc.) is due for replacement now for well over a decade. The Eurocopter deal was torpedoed by Bell which subsequently opted out of the competition - imposing a delay of over seven years in the modernisation plans of our army aviation. The helicopter fleet is a critical component of our land warfare capabilities and we cannot afford to neglect it for such extended periods. • Mountain strike corps. We will need to raise at least six additional divisions to cater for the Chinese capability to field upto 34 divisions in Tibet in just one season. To generate even basal counter-offensive options we need to field a strike corps of two divisions each for the Northern, Central and Eastern Commands. • India would also need to generate an air assault division and at least one / two marine divisions capability for executing operational manoeuvre from the sea. This marine capability cannot just be of foot infantry which can hardly move beyond the bridgehead but has to be based on mechanised infantry vehicles and tanks that can swim and conduct decisive tasks once ashore. We must try and actualise the ”Over the Horizon Beach Assault” capabilities. • We need a meaningful and credible Special Forces capability to respond to asymmetric provocations and rapidly execute an “Op Neptune Spear” equivalent whenever called upon to do so. • Above all we need to indigenise our defence industry by rapidly involving the private sector and achieving genuine autarky in this critical sphere. We are simply racing against time and need to urgently accelerate this process. The need for civil-military synergy could not be higher. Today this is an area of acute concern. The DSA’s total Commitment to indigenisation is highlighted by the photographs of the Arjun and BrahMos on the cover. Inside we focus on the success story of our missiles in general and the BrahMos in particular. Three former Army Commanders and in specific the former Director Generals of the Mechanised Forces and the Infantry have contributed thought-provoking articles to this special issue on “Land Forces in India: The Way Ahead”. We thank all our contributors for their support and look forward to the response of our readers.

I also welcome new team members Wg Cdr Sangeeta Malla (retd) and Mithlesh Tiwari. Jai Hind!

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

Maj Gen (Dr) G D Bakshi SM, VSM (retd) September 2011 Defence AND security alert

contents

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contents

LAND FORCES SPECIAL ISSUE September 2011

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Volume 2 Issue 12 September 2011

A R T I C L E S

defence transformation: a case for mind over matter

Lt Gen Dilip Bhardwaj PVSM, AVSM (retd)

modernising the infantry

Lt Gen S N Handa PVSM, AVSM, VSM (retd)

army aviation: vital battle winner

Lt Gen Vinayak Patankar PVSM, UYSM, VSM (retd)

deception and perception management: the neglected art

Lt Gen Aditya Singh PVSM, AVSM (retd)

dominating space: the key to battlefield success

exclusive interview

Maj Gen Ravi Khetarpal VSM, (retd) CMD, Bharat Dynamics Limited

industry monitor

Indian army: internal security role

Col R S N Singh (retd)

deteriorating civil-military relationship: the demise of synergy?

Maj Gen (Dr) Sheru Thapliyal, SM (retd)

Dr Rajiv Nayan

Dr Monika Chansoria

air-mobile artillery

Cecil Victor

Maj Gen V K Singh (retd)

rashtriya rifles: dedicated CI force

Nitin Gokhale

army air defence: overcoming obsolescence 60 Brig (Dr) Anil Sharma (retd), Manish Madaan, Anshu Paliwal

Indian artillery: sluggish modernisation

cruise missiles in future conflict

Lt Gen Arvind Sharma PVSM, AVSM, VSM (retd)

restoring the soldier's izzat

arms build-up in Asia: India's inadequate response

missiles: role in the ground warfare

Maj Gen Dhruv C Katoch SM, VSM (retd)

military diplomacy: shaping the region

DSA research team

Maj Gen (Dr) G D Bakshi SM, VSM (retd)

modernisation of the mechanised forces (armour)

exclusive interview Army Chief - Gen V K Singh PVSM, AVSM, YSM, ADC

Lt Gen Hardev Singh Lidder PVSM, UYSM, YSM, VSM (retd)

Indian army: urgent need for doctrinal change

F E A T U R E S

network-centric cyber warfare

Dr Rajendra Prasad

Brig Gurmeet Kanwal (retd)

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September 2011 Defence AND security alert

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DSALERT September 2011 Defence AND security alert

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DSA: Prior to becoming Chief you had carried out a study on the Transformation of the Army. What were the salient recommendations and how much have we been able to implement them? Army Chief: The aim of the ‘Transformation Process’, is to transform the Indian Army into an agile, lethal, versatile and networked force, that is prepared for the emerging security environment and challenges of the 21st century. The overall focus is to develop our military capabilities, that can take care of the envisaged threats and challenges, which may manifest in the foreseeable future. The process entails optimisation of our operational preparedness and functional capabilities, through upgradation of our concepts and technologies as also reorganisation and restructuring of our formations. The process will be suitably complemented by fielding theatrised combat as well as logistic support systems. Tri-Service integration, synergy and jointness amongst the three Services, is also an important operational imperative which is being addressed by the study. Essentially, the recommendations entail a review of our capability, reorganising force structures, to achieve great synergy and operational value; networked environment, to ensure better decision making and restructuring headquarters for better efficiency. The intended transformation also seeks to mould military values, traditions and mindsets, besides, bringing about a professional, ethical and transparent functional attitude to reinforce our high ethical standards. The transformation, which is a time consuming and complex process, was set into motion, in May 2010. Significant envisaged changes are being validated through established procedures, such as ‘test bedding’ during our field exercises. DSA: How prepared are we to take on our external threats and challenges? What is being done to speed up our acquisitions – especially, where the need to re-capitalise our equipment stock has become urgent and pressing? Army Chief: Modernisation is a dynamic process and the last decade, has been a major challenge, with slippages being a cause of concern. Notwithstanding, we have made a concerted effort in this field and are progressively increasing our capability, through force enhancement, accretions, modernisation, upgradation of technology, besides improvement of infrastructure. The basic philosophy is to possess an equipment profile, consisting of 30 per cent modern state-of-the-art equipment, 40 per cent current technology and 30 per cent equipment that is reaching obsolescence. Modernisation plans, in consonance with the Defence Capability Development Strategy, encompass force modernisation and the development of critical combat capabilities, besides, overcoming obsolescence in core capabilities. Our thrust areas primarily include battlefield transparency, night fighting capability, enhanced firepower, integrated manoeuvre capability and network centricity. DSA: China’s infrastructure and capabilities in Tibet have undergone a quantum jump. Media reports indicate a 34 Div level threat in just one season. How prepared are

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September 2011 Defence AND security alert

we to deal with any such eventuality on our Himalayan borders? Army Chief: Strategic and operational analysis of emerging security threats to our country is an ongoing dynamic process. Own defence strategy and doctrines, are being constantly refined, in view of the changing security paradigm, in our immediate and extended neighbourhood and the world at large. Measures for strengthening and optimising our border management are in place, adequately addressing our security concerns. Our government has taken adequate steps, for large scale infrastructure development in our border areas, to meet the security requirements, as also improving the connectivity, to facilitate overall development of the border areas. Military capacity enhancement and modernisation are concurrently being undertaken by the government in a holistic manner to give a boost to our operational preparedness. We are working hard, to ensure that threats to our nation can be taken care of. DSA: How prepared are we today for a two front threat from China and Pakistan, with the additional Internal Security threat posed by Jihadi Tanzeems and Maoist insurgents in our rear? Army Chief: Indian Army is structured, to respond swiftly and effectively, to the entire spectrum of security challenges, across all frontiers, including sub-conventional and Internal Security threats. However, ‘Threat Assessment’ and ‘Capability Development’ are dynamic and ongoing processes which are subject to periodic reviews. Steps as deemed imperative are being continuously initiated and implemented, for strengthening and optimising our force structure, to cater for the emerging challenges. The type of threat envisaged by you would need all the resources of the nation under a single entity, to ensure them being addressed optimally. DSA: Is there a need for a Joint Doctrine for Limited War, against a nuclear backdrop, in the Indian context? The Chinese clearly visualise the prospect of Local Wars, under conditions of Informatisation and are preparing for the same. Should we not consider, evolving a specific doctrine for such limited wars? Should this not cover our response to asymmetric provocations, like mass casualty terrorist actions? Army Chief: Future security challenges mandate a joint approach and integrated application, by all the three Services, across the spectrum of conflict. Post the establishment of HQ IDS, the Indian Armed Forces, have embarked on the path to achieve “jointness”. Conceptualisation and promulgation of joint doctrines, including the visualisation of Limited War against a Nuclear Backdrop, forms an important facet of our integrated approach. Towards this

General V K Singh COAS in conversation with Maj Gen (Dr) G D Bakshi, Executive Editor, Defence and Security Alert at New Delhi. end, the Joint Indian Armed Forces Doctrine has already been promulgated, while the Indian Army Doctrine has recently been revised. Concurrently, a number of other Joint Doctrines have been promulgated by HQ IDS, to address some of the areas of joint mutual concern, like Amphibious Warfare, Sub-conventional Operations and Air Land Operations. We would consider your suggestion positively. DSA: On taking over, you had rightly expressed concern for the moral and ethical health of the Indian Army. What measures have been taken to improve the same and how satisfied are you with these? Army Chief: The moral and ethical value system in the Armed Forces, is not an abstract concept. In fact, it is the very foundation, upon which, the entire edifice of the Service organisation has been built. By virtue of a strong moral and ethical value system, the Armed Forces are held in high esteem, by the citizens of the country. The Chetwode Motto, ‘The Safety, Honour and Welfare of your country come first, always and every time ...’ is an apt and unchanging description, of such core values. Despite numerous ups and downs since independence, the

Armed Forces have remained on a high moral pedestal. Their saga is replete with bravery, valour and personal sacrifice that have won soldiers, sailors and airmen, universal accolade and respect. Over the past two decades, the Indian Armed Forces have emerged victorious and widely respected, for the supreme sacrifice made by the young officers and soldiers, during the Kargil Conflict and ongoing Counter Terrorism operations. Our Army during the last six decades, since independence has always succeeded in retaining the respect, love, faith and confidence of the people. Improving the ‘Internal Health of the Army’, as you correctly brought out has been one of my Key Result Areas (KRAs). My consistent efforts have been, to instill and maintain the high level of values and ethics that the Indian Army, is known for. I feel, a positive trend has set in and a clear message has been disseminated to the environment, wherein, defaulting personnel, irrespective of rank or seniority, have been subjected to the law of the land. We are moving in the right direction and I am confident, that the high moral fibre and standards of the Army would continue to be maintained.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

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CoaS interview ii. Time based promotion to Lieutenant Colonel and introduction of Colonel (TS). iii. Reduction of service for substantive ranks of Captain and Major. iv. Army Commanders pay equivalence. v. Running pay band for Lieutenant General. vi. Conversion of 10+2 Technical Entry Scheme entry into a mix of regular and Short Service entry. (b) Proposals under examination of government. i.

Measures taken to improve the ‘Internal Health’ are: ●● It is being ensured, that our system of dispensing justice is equitable and fair. The punishments meted out, are commensurate to the gravity of the offence and there is no leverage for rank or status. ●● The present system of checks and balances existing in the Army has been made more effective. Cases of corruption are dealt with in an exemplary manner, with the quickest means available under the Army Act. The punishments are exemplary and promulgated in an open forum, so that the environment draws necessary preventive lessons. I would like to re-emphasise that the “reputation” as also the image of Army in the minds of our countrymen is built on the immense hard work and dedication, with which the Army accomplishes its primary objectives of ensuring safety, security and sovereignty of our nation. DSA: The shortages of officers at the cutting edge of Lieutenant, Captains, Majors and Lieutenant Colonels is increasingly becoming a cause for concern. We are not succeeding in attracting the higher ability level candidates. What are we doing to address this problem? Army Chief: The officer cadre has generally been deficient, by approximately 24 per cent, in the last decade or so. The problem is further compounded, by the increase in future requirement of officers, due to the planned accretions for capability development and modernisation plans. A number of measures have been instituted, to address the issue. Towards this end, the Raksha Mantri had accorded ‘in principle’ approval, to a host of proposals contained in the AVSC report, aimed at reducing deficiencies and provision of better promotional avenues. The status of these is as under:

Pay benefit for senior select ranks.

ii. Measures to make Short Service Commission more attractive. These include grant of lump sum amount during release from service, grant of Ex-Servicemen status, Canteen Store Department and Ex-Servicemen Contributory Health Scheme (ECHS) facility to Short Service Commission officers and grant of Professional Enhancement Leave etc. iii. Reduction in regular cadre and corresponding increase in Support Cadre. iv. Peel factors, to include lateral absorption, additional deputation vacancies, industrial attachment, self-improvement programmes and relaxation in entrance in civil services examination. Multidisciplinary courses / studies and early exit through Voluntary Service Severance Scheme. v. Creation of additional Service Selection Boards (SSBs). vi. Restructuring of Permanent Commission (SL) cadre, to improve promotional prospects and widen intake base and introduction of Service Entry Scheme to improve the career progression of present Special Commissioned Officers (SCOs). Other initiatives taken by the government, to make the Army a better career option, are opening up of professional colleges for children of Army Personnel, construction of additional family accommodation through Married Accommodation Project (MAP), opening up of a second Officers’ Training Academy (OTA) at Gaya etc. Certain measures have also been undertaken by Army HQ, to ensure better intake, such as improving effectiveness of Service Selection Boards, to ensure a higher reporting rate as also optimal utilisation of training capacity by provision of additional funds and manpower at training academies. These measures have borne fruit, as all the three officers training academies, today, are functioning beyond optimum capacity. It is, therefore, expected that there would be an increase of 500 officers in the officer cadre, in the next few years, which is likely to further increase, subject to implementation of various proposals.

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Allocation of additional select ranks.

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METAMORPHOSIS

A former CISC, the architect of Op Sarpvinash and a highly respected combat soldier, reflects upon the need for change and transformation in our Armed Forces and the entire process of national defence per se. Keeping in view the complexities of modern warfare, he calls for a “whole of the government approach” to defence. He emphasises the need to Transform entrenched mindsets and graduate from a defensive to an offensive orientation. He makes a strong case for emphasis on air-mobility and air-cavalry for fighting non-linear battles and turning defences. Based on his experience as the head of the Integrated Defence Staff, he makes some invaluable and practical suggestions about how we can leverage the private sector to build a vibrant defence industrial base and generate value engineering by fostering competition. The article is valuable for its plethora of penetrating insights that facilitate transformation.

hange is the eternal law of life. Everything around us is changing and evolving. It is in such an environment, that the organisations which operate in it are under pressure to change and evolve in order to maintain their relevance and avoid redundancy and marginalisation.

In the post cold war era our country has moved away from being insular to being assertive in South Asia. Our country desires to play a pre-eminent role in South Asia and eventually on the global stage itself. Our Armed Forces have to reorganise and transform themselves to deliver upon this desire whenever called upon to do so There is an equally powerful paradox which propels organisations to preserve the past and oppose change. This aspect afflicts all organisations which have been eminently successful. Most successful organisations desire to preserve success by ensuring continuation of means and methods that were responsible for the creation of success in the first place. This places them firmly in the path of impelling change. Knowledge in every field in the world these days is growing rapidly. As some researchers have opined, knowledge doubles every 5-7 years in almost all fields except in IT where it doubles every year / year and a half. Stated in

other terms, if one does not evolve at this pace one would be a fossil in his field in five years. This understanding underscores the impelling need for transformation - nations and their functional polity, bureaucracies and militaries have to transform in a bid to survive and remain contemporary. Aspects that need to change to truly transform the defence field should include mindset, deeper understanding of military / conflict theories, military objectives, military strategy, organisation to achieve stated national and military objectives, operating environment, utilisation of technology, doctrinal construct to convert desires into action, equipment profile of the services and their institutional and operational training. Rules and regulations too are required to be brought into alignment in order to synergise and harmonise the tangible and intangible aspects, so that a military organisation can achieve tasks set for it.

National mindset Our economy has been growing steadily for the last decade at a steady 8 per cent. This has raised the profile of our country. With the focus firmly on Asia in the present century, the world is looking towards the trajectory being followed by both India and China in economic and military terms. India unlike in the cold war is more organised and self confident. Its strategic linkages with powerful nations who are likely to shape the multipolar world are growing. A sense of well-being pervades and needs to be consolidated. For this we need to move away from a pure “conventional”

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

Lt Gen Hardev Singh Lidder PVSM, UYSM, YSM, VSM (retd)

mindset to a balanced “continent-cummaritime” mindset in order to achieve a true strategic balance in our security calculus. Our mindset also needs to move away from purely defensive – “we have never ventured out to conquer territory” to, “we will do everything in our power to ensure that the threat to our national integrity is defeated, if possible, even before it reaches our borders”. Indians also need to understand that there is a direct connect between our ability to sustain war and our well-being with the maritime domain, since 90 per cent of our trade and energy requirement moves through sea. The Indian Ocean Rim countries therefore constitute our vital linkages which provide the connectivity for successfully sustaining security challenges to our country. No country can fight a war on its own because due to the prohibitive costs involved. There is therefore now an ever growing trend globally, to create international consensus and form coalitions which will mitigate the cost of fighting a war. India too will have to reexamine its thinking on strategic independence and move towards coalition joining / coalition forming in any future conflict. Our diplomacy and military to military diplomacy will have to create the mutual need and inter-operability in this regard. This may call for regional approaches to local problems. The route to the Security Council table, which is the global power brokers' table, lies through economic and

DEFENCE TRANSFORMATION: A CASE FOR MIND OVER MATTER military power and our understanding and application of the nuances of soft, hard and smart power. The route definitely does not lie through merely our population base vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

Military mindset Along with the changes in the national mindset, the services too should begin to give shape to the means of ensuring

that national desires and imperatives based on the nation’s revised thinking can be achieved through a combination of military diplomacy, hard as well as smart power. Balanced thinking: There is far too much emphasis on “processes” in our organisational behaviour. This needs to be balanced out between “concept” and “process”. A process usually flows out of a seminal concept. Officers therefore

need to be trained to first work out concepts and then evolve the processes for achieving the objectives of the concept. A process necessarily deals with operational and tactical plans while a concept automatically pulls one’s thinking to the strategic level. Prepration for change: Our services officers are excellent “critics”. They are taught from the beginning to look for weaknesses in a concept, plan or

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

land forces

We need to shed our preference for the defensive and shift the emphasis to the offensive as our principal operating concept proposal. Over a period of time, this virtue has become the services’ biggest liability. Most officers fail to notice the strengths / virtues of a concept, plan or proposal and focus purely on the weaknesses. Our institutional training is to blame for this state of affairs to a large extent. This aspect needs urgent rectification, so that officers of the force are transformed from being critics to innovators, failing which transformational efforts will never fructify. Security in numbers: India’s large size and population provide a natural attraction for making numbers as our principal battlefield and strategic arbitrators. On many occasions in the past, doctrinal innovation and technological edge was sacrificed at the altar of numbers with detrimental and catastrophic results. Our transformation needs to take note of this aspect, for no country can create its unique winning proposition on numbers alone and give the go by to doctrine and technology. Transit from defensive mindset to an offensive one: Our Armed Forces need to recognise that in the post cold war era our country has moved away from being insular to being assertive in South Asia. Our country desires to play a pre-eminent role in South Asia and eventually on the global stage itself. Our Armed Forces have to reorganise and transform themselves to deliver upon this desire whenever called upon to do so. Back to basics: For long the army has violated tried and tested operational principles to accommodate and explain political stances rather than base its actions on sound military principles. Some of the unprofessional diversions we have indulged in are: a) No loss of territory. While this is a genuine desire of any political dispensation, militarily it is untenable, because, we know that no defence has ever been able to prevent ingress by an attacking force. We need to shed

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METAMORPHOSIS our preference for the defensive and shift the emphasis to the offensive as our principal operating concept. This will not only change our defensive mindset but would ensure that we would always gain territory and cause destruction to enemy forces. By making this switch, we could even hope to make our opponent to capitulate. b) Heavy investment on linear obstacles. Knowing full well that enemy can make ingress wherever he chooses, such an investment is not cost-effective particularly when we have a larger conventional army, which can contain an ingress and eliminate it through offensive manoeuvre. c) Excessive emphasis on the tank without matching mobility for other elements in the combined arms concept being applied, thus ensuring that our strike corps are lame-duck formations and their full potential cannot be realised. d)

Little emphasis on force multipliers.

e) Inadequate emphasis on air-mobility and air-cavalry for turning defences and fighting a truely non-linear battle. f) Inadequate efforts to ensure full spectrum capability thus foregoing full range of options to create unmatched military superiority over our adversaries.

Strategic guidance ■■ For any country strategic guidance flows from its National Security Strategy, Defence Policy guidelines which lay down the Defence Strategy and its Joint Military Strategy. In our case the RM’s Op Directive stands-in for all three. There is a need for the services to draw up a “Joint Military Strategy” which covers important aspects like operations, intelligence, logistics and training which will guide their actions. For this purpose, services can make suitable assumptions related to the National Security Strategy as well as MoD’s Defence Strategy. ■■ There is a tendency within the staff to extrapolate thought linearly. It is a command function to create bye-pass strategies so that a unique fighting proposition is created, providing us the

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means of staying ahead of our potential adversaries.

Doctrinal issues Op mission of the Armed Forces: There is a need to remember the operational mission of the Armed Forces while carrying out planning, training and procurement for them i.e. “The Armed Forces should be able to operate both during day and night, in all types of climatic conditions, over all types of terrain and be effective in all types of operating environments obtaining at the time of application.”

MoD’s role The ministry of defence has traditionally perceived control of the Armed Forces to preserve the primacy of civil control as also prevent possible coups which were endemic in the 50s and 60s. For this reason, all major functions governing manpower, organisation, finance, external contacts, procurement etc. were made the preserve of the ministry, leaving day-to-day functioning to the services. This resulted in major diversion of energy of both the ministry and the services in establishing a working relationship over the “them versus us” divide. Moreover, the knowledge of the military domain rests naturally with the services, leaving the ministry officials the choice of learning on the job with partial inputs from self-serving officers. The lack of a formal education pertaining to the complex subject of defence and matters military, prior to taking up their jobs in the ministry, has had a telling effect on the efficiency of the ministry officials and they have continued to exist, sans the respect from services, due to overriding power vested in them by the ministry. All this, has resulted not only in deep fissures between MoD and Service Headquarters but also in the MoD becoming a marginal player in the security calculus of the country. Passage of time and periods of political turmoil in the country have proved that the Indian Armed Forces harbour no political ambitions - in fact abhor a political role. In this backdrop, particularly when we are under pressure from China and seek for ourselves a role of primacy in South Asia and a place on the Security

For any country strategic guidance flows from its National Security Strategy, Defence Policy guidelines which lay down the Defence Strategy and its Joint Military Strategy. In our case the RM’s Op Directive stands-in for all three. There is a need for the services to draw up a “Joint Military Strategy” which covers important aspects like operations, intelligence, logistics and training which will guide their actions. For this purpose, services can make suitable assumptions related to the National Security Strategy as well as MoD’s Defence Strategy Council, there is an urgent need to relook at our self-debilitating introverted and compartmentalised functioning in MoD. An integrated functioning within MoD will transform MoD functioning from “Them vs Us” to “Us”, an attitude, we urgently need to foster in order to migrate to an inter-agency / inter-department / inter-ministerial functioning which the emerging security environment is demanding. We must move towards a “whole of the government approach.”

Separation of matters defence and military There is a distinct difference in the activities that govern these two terminologies. “Defence” of which the Defence policies and Defence Strategy are the epitome, constitutes the concerns of the Defence Ministry and its thrust areas. The Defence Minister is assisted by the Defence Secretary who husbands this aspect. The term “military” epitomises issue of how the services are organised to fight. Joint Military Directives, Joint Military Strategy, are the instruments from which the Operational Directives and Strategies flow to the three services. These issues being professional in nature cannot be understood by anyone outside the uniformed fraternity.

Asymmetry capabilities

fighting Proactivism vs reactivism

There is a serious asymmetry in South Asia as far as the conflict continuum is concerned. While the three countries USA, China and Pakistan which hold prime interests in South Asia field a full spectrum capability i.e. Nuclear, Conventional and Sub-conventional, India responds with only two segments i.e. Nuclear and Conventional. India therefore needs to activate the offensive subconventional compartment if it is not to place itself at a disadvantageous operational position. Special Forces along with intelligence agencies are the favoured instruments for the activation of the sub-conventional compartment.

Expanded battlefield With the USA consolidating a huge military advantage over likely regional challengers and with their display of this asymmetric advantage during the two gulf wars and in Afghanistan, the world has commenced redefining of the traditional battle space. Chinese are the leaders of this conceptual redefinition, which they spelt out in their work called “Unrestricted Warfare”. A plethora of avenues dealing with the economic, social, political, legal, diplomatic arenas have been brought into focus in what has become a form of total contention. Warfare thus has raised the battle arena from the MoD’s domain to a “whole of government” domain. Responses have to now encompass a number of ministries /agencies /departments. A new response mechanism therefore has to be devised by India to meet these new forms of challenges which would be applied along with military force.

There is much virtue in making countries/people respond to our actions rather than reacting to external stimuli all the time. However, there are those who argue that when we react we have fully comprehended the challenge and therefore are responding to knowables with doables and are therefore balanced at all times. This understanding can be easily defeated by a State which applies the “accelerated time factor” in interState interactions. This accelerated time factor calls for unleashing upon the opponent a series of actions which disorient the reactive mechanism and grind it to inactivity for want of clarity of the operating space / activities.

Joint military strategy At present we do not have a CDS who has to provide the glue required by the three services in order to make them fight synergistically and not in compartments as they do at present. This glue at the apex level would be in the form of Joint Directives, which would eventually result in the formulation of a “Joint Military Strategy”. The COSC in the meantime - till a CDS is appointed has to oversee the above formulations.

Fronts vs segmented theatres There is a need to look at our adversaries in a holistic manner than the segmented way we do at present. We need to view challenges posed by Pakistan across the whole western front in order to achieve better results in a cost effective manner. Our ability to do so calls for a change in the way we are organised in the Army Headquarters. Pakistan virtually orchestrates the entire border, since their GHQ directly controls all the Corps. The same

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India is increasingly being drawn into a likely “two front” scenario in a future military conflict. Indian survival and victory depends upon the “swing” factor of its deployable forces. The SWING has to be rehearsed adequately in order to make it efficient. There is also a need to ensure that we develop our military organisations in a manner that they are equally effective in plains as well as in mountains applies to our northern front opposite China.

Migrating from attrition to manoeuvre warfare Manoeuvre warfare is aimed at the mind of the opponent wherein he is brought to situation of helplessness due to the obtaining operational situation rather than by the destruction caused to his Armed Forces. Our war against erstwhile East Pakistan was a classic war of Manoeuvre and not one of Attrition. This method therefore needs to be seriously examined for adoption, so that we do not seek solutions in numbers alone.

Two front war With the deepening of Sino-Pak relations, India is increasingly being drawn into a likely “two front“ scenario in a future military conflict. Indian survival and victory depends upon the “swing” factor of its deployable forces. The SWING has to be rehearsed adequately in order to make it efficient. There is also a need to ensure that we develop our military organisations in a manner that they are equally effective in plains as well as in mountains. Forces have to be re-positioned in a manner that our capability against both fronts is optimised. There is a need to rework this aspect. It is common military knowledge that mountains eat troops. Also our “northern front” would be the front of

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METAMORPHOSIS decision. Our war against China should be converted to a war of logistics, since China has a longer logistic chain than us. This will give us a decisive edge over them in any future conflict. This conversion can easily be done by negating China’s advantage in numbers. This can easily be achieved by doing the following: ■■ Raising reserve formations in the face of a conflict. ■■ Converting TA from third line functions to second line functions, so that they can take up the defensive and relieve regular formations for offensive actions. ■■ Convert the Assam Rifle units to five fighting formations so that they can cover depth areas more effectively and retrieve regular troops for offensive purposes. ■■ Transfer 105 mm and 130 mm artillery guns being replaced by 155 mm guns to support Assam Rifle formations. The manpower for this could be provided by Home and Hearth TA units.

Organisation Service Headquarters need to reflect upon their new operational realities. Unfortunately growth in Service Headquarters so far, has been incremental and not as part of any functional reform. For example, the MO Directorate of our Army is still organised to fight conventional operations only. They have not re-organised themselves to reflect a full spectrum operational reality. They have also not created a Joint Operational Planning group to reflect their desire to create a joint war fighting paradigm. Additionally, there is a requirement to create a “whole of government” real time response mechanism based on networks and data bases rather than the outdated method of holding time wasting series of conferences. Our organisations reflect our war fighting methods and are indicative of our resolve to respond efficiently and effectively. All this is a natural part of our deterrence. “Government Response” should be internally applied as well in order to create” Whole of Service” and ”Joint Services” response.

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Equipment and procurement Forecasting: All agencies dealing with procurement, require time to carry out their functions. At the present juncture, agencies are informed the day a service registers its desire for procuring an item with HQ IDS. The process thereafter takes about 3-4 years till the contract is signed. In order to cut short this time, the Revenue and Capital Acquisition aspects need to be dovetailed. Only then can one derive which system is due for deinduction at least 5-7 years and more, prior to the request being formally registered. This would help to make the R and D and procurement cycle more efficient. Blacklisting: After the infamous Bofors case, we have become hyper sensitive to aspects of defence commissions and have begun to blacklist companies wherever we have come to know of some aspects of these payments. In hindsight, we can see, that in a number of cases we have had major deals with foreign companies in which we had a “Buy” and a “Make” component the scandal erupted once the “Buy” component had been executed and before the transfer of technology was to be made. Blacklisting the company at this stage denied us the technology we were seeking. It is therefore for consideration whether we ban the company from future contracts, but go through the execution in full of the contract which we have signed. After all obtaining the contracted technology for the country is central and not our clean images. Blacklisting from future contracts meets all our clean image needs and yet gets us our technology. Matching capacities to requirements: There is a need to tailor our outputs with the requirement. Extraneous issues related to employment and long term justification of organisational structures’ existence should not be the overriding factors. For example, it is a known fact that there has been an exponential growth in encryption demand. SAG is incapable of meeting the demand for algorithms. No expansion has been affected to increase capacity. Our inability to meet the requirement of services compromises security, since it forces the user to communicate in plain or resort to low grade public keys.

Listing the PSUs on the stock exchange with a 51 per cent government and 49 per cent public holding. This will help in keeping government hold over the unit, but will bring agility due to public participation. Capital so generated can be used for modernisation of the PSU or setting up additional capacity Equipment profile: Usually services have on their itinerary a mixture of equipment. Broadly equipment follows a 30:40:30 rule. 30 per cent of new equipment being inducted, 40 per cent of contemporary equipment and 30 per cent of obsolete equipment awaiting de-induction. Procurement efforts need to be focused to ensure that this ratio is not upset because it will have a detrimental effect on our war fighting abilities. Continuous tech-development cycle: There is a need to understand that technology moves incrementally because knowledge is doubling every five years. The logjam between the shifting goalpost made by DRDO and users dissatisfaction registered by the users, needs to be broken. This can be done if we adopt the “continuous technology development cycle” and produce a chain of subsequent models which account for 20 per cent growth in technology. The users will most certainly go along with this approach. Transfer of technology: There is a need to be circumspect in this area. When we seek technology, we need to remember that the recipient has to pay exponentially for it. When we see the pace of change and compare it with the fact that technologies which are usually on sale are ones that are available off the shelf it means that they are already 10-15 years old. Once we follow the CKD / SKD route we take another 10-15 years before reaching the technology transfer stage. We would therefore be paying for technology which is 25-30 years old.

We therefore require to shorten the technology absorption route. This is possible by adopting the following means: ■■ Seek technology transfer as an exceptional case. ■■ Technology transferred should have an elaborate R and D plan for its absorption as well as to make it grow into subsequent systems. ■■ Adopt concurrent manufacturing practice in place of CKD / SKD route. This method calls for • Foreign purchase. • Establishment of factory in India immediately after signing the contract in order to commence concurrent manufacture.

Abandon the RUR route and encourage the private sector to form consortia for land systems, maritime systems, aerospace systems, IT systems, R and D and space systems. These consortia can draw-in the small scale industries as sub-contractors on as required basis. MoD should deal only with these consortia. The consortia route cuts short the evolution cycle of defence industry considerably. Globally the world has gone from single company manufacturing to consortia manufacturing, since no single company in the West had the technology or financial clout to manufacture the present day’s sophisticated machines. By encouraging our industry to form consortia we will help them to evolve quickly.

Competition

• Mid-life upgradation.

Competition between various sectors needs to be engineered / encouraged for obtaining better efficiency. Even a communist country like China has split their single corporations in order to generate competition. A concerted effort needs to be launched to ensure a level playing fields and curb unhealthy monopolistic tendencies in the defence industrial base.

• Spare parts manufacture.

Conclusion

• Subsequent models.

There is an ever present need for effecting change in any organisation in order to remain contemporary. Change begins in the mind and then gets translated into action, therefore it can be safely called a “mind over matter” issue. Traditionally we have been very weak at conceptualising and doctrinal aspects. These must lead and guide our actions so that these conform to a well thought out plan and design and our actions are not simply knee-jerk and reactive.

• Corporatise manufacturing of all major war fighting weapon systems. Technology transfer should be made to these corporatised entities which are charged with • Technology absorption.

Leveraging the private sector: There is a need to create a “whole of defence capability” based on PSUs, OFBs and private sector industries. Since our private sector industry is yet in the nascent stage and our PSUs / OFBs have been overtly protected we have a problem. The problem calls for energising our PSUs / OFBs for competitiveness and for nurturing the nascent capabilities in the private sector. This can be done by the following means: Listing the PSUs on the stock exchange with a 51 per cent government and 49 per cent public holding. This will help in keeping government hold over the unit, but will bring agility due to public participation. Capital so generated can be used for modernisation of the PSU or setting up additional capacity. Group and corporatise the OFBs on lines of PSUs described above.

The writer was commissioned in Indian Army in December 1967 in the elite Parachute Regiment. A Special Forces officer, he has extensive experience of Sub-conventional Warfare. He is a graduate of Defence Services Staff College and National Defence College. He has experience of multifarious instructional, staff and command assignments. He has been Military Liaison Officer in Indian Embassy at Colombo and was Defence Military Adviser in Embassy of India at Washington DC when momentous changes in Indo-US relations began to take shape. He hung his uniform as the CISC, IDS.

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LIMITED WAR

Maj Gen (Dr) G D Bakshi SM, VSM (retd)

During World War II, the British Indian Army that fielded 2.5 million men, was the largest all volunteer force in the world’s history. The Indian Army therefore is heir to a tradition of total war. Till recently, the Defence Ministry’s Annual Reports stated that Indian Armed Forces would prepare for a full-fledged or generalised war and this could take care of any lesser contingency. The Chinese, in sharp contrast, are focusing only on local or limited wars. India is now poised for a major rearmament and re-equipment programme, which its vibrant economy can now make possible. It is therefore imperative that we urgently crystallise our doctrine for Limited Wars against a Nuclear overhang and outgrow the World War II mindset of general wars, lasting for many years. That era is over and it is time that we formalised this change and prepared specifically to fight the kind of limited wars that are likely in today’s radically altered scenario. The nuclear backdrop must now be factored intimately into our military doctrines. This calls for extensive debate and discussion not just amongst the three services but also with the political masters and civilian bureaucracies. Such a radical doctrinal redefinition calls for a “whole of the government “ approach. 16

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ubstantive change in a military organisation is invariably driven by a change in doctrine. Doctrine defines force structuring and spells out how we will fight. Doctrine is a body of thought on the nature, role and conduct of armed conflict. This body of thought contains the fundamental principles by which military forces guide their actions in support of national objectives. Military Doctrine is distilled from the military historical experience of a people. It is also driven by the changes and transformation in technology. Doctrine must develop in the context of contemporary and emergent factors that influence the way India intends to use military force. Very simply stated this has, in recent times, been one of the biggest failings of the Indian Army. It has failed to evolve doctrines to suit its radically changed context in South Asia.

Total conventional war to limited war. The Indian Army inherited the vast battle experience of its colonial predecessor institution of the British Indian Army. This was the largest all volunteer army in the history of the world and had fielded 2.5 million men in World War II and successfully fought the Germans, Japanese and Italians in Europe, Burma and North Africa. This huge army was rapidly demobilised at the end of the war and reduced to a tactical level force of some six divisions. The 1947-48 Jammu and Kashmir war, the liberation of Hyderabad and Goa and the disastrous war with the Chinese in 1962 were all tactical level engagements where the force levels employed were no more than two to three Divisions. These wars were limited wars, limited simply because we lacked the capacity for doing anything more. It was only with the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war that the post-independence Indian Army graduated to the level of Operational Art and some 12 Divisions and the entire Western Command of the Indian Air Force saw extensive combat. This war was a stalemate but proved to be an invaluable learning experience for our higher commanders and staff. By 1971 - India’s Soviet subsidised military build-up

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The basic flaw of Op Parakram was its all or nothing format. All civilian political leaderships are risk averse and presented an option of “all or nothing” - will most likely chose “nothing”. Op Parakram painfully highlighted the need for doctrinal change. There had been lot of discussion on the Doctrine and theory of Limited War in the wake of Kargil. Surprisingly it died out in two years. By Op Parakram, the Indian Army was back to the Gen Sundarji era of ponderous Strike Corps Operations which were hardly viable instruments to initiate conflict in a nuclearised context (initiated after the 1962 debacle) was nearing completion. Pakistan provoked India by unleashing genocide in the then East Pakistan and causing a flood of refugees to flee to India. In a brilliant blitzkrieg of just 14 days – India broke Pakistan in two and captured Dacca. Some 93,000 prisoners of war were taken and a new nation-State formed with the force of arms. It was a historic and decisive military victory that marked the rise of India as a significant regional power. Some 19 Divisions of the army and the entire Indian Air Force and Navy saw active combat in this war. Indian military and political leadership demonstrated the managerial skills to conduct a quasi-total war with decisive results. Thus from the World War II era army designed for total war, the post-independence Indian Army had crept back from the tactical level to the operational art level and then almost back to the level of conducting a near total conventional war in Bangladesh. Gens Krishna Rao and Sundarji subsequently oversaw the large scale mechanisation of the Indian Army and the concept of using ponderous Strike Corps to bisect Pakistan.

Paradigm shift: Asymmetric war and nuclearisation Unfortunately almost all the gains of the 1971 war were undone by the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan and the CIA’s massive support to Pakistan’s ISI

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LIMITED WAR that transformed it into a formidable instrument of waging asymmetric warfare. This Afghan ulcer and major economic factors like the collapse of oil prices in the 1980s, led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. This completely dried up India’s source of subsidised arms. Thereafter, for the last 30 years India has tamely surrendered the strategic and tactical initiative to Pakistan - first as it instigated terrorism in the Punjab and next when it launched the proxy war in Kashmir and later spread terror to the whole of India. The reason for this diffidence lay largely in the virtual collapse of the Indian economy that had occurred as a result of the oil shock caused by the First Gulf War in 1990. India was on the point of debt default. As such the recapitalisation of the entire Soviet era capital military stocks of jet fighters, tanks, artillery, ships and submarines had to be postponed for two decades. During this period India struggled to liberalise and modernise its economy. In 1998 the entire situation was further compounded by the nuclearisation of South Asia. Pakistan now felt it had both nuclear and conventional military parity with India. Nuclearisation bred what Chris Gagne calls the “Stability-Instability Paradox”. The nuclear overhang, Pakistan felt, completely ruled out any conventional retaliation by India to Pakistan’s sub-conventional provocations. Greatly emboldened it launched the Kargil misadventure in 1999.

Return of the tactical era India now responded by initiating conventional conflict at the tactical level but within its own territory. Two divisions were employed and the Indian Air Force and artillery massed effects to induce local shock and awe over the intruders. In two months of costly attrition and direct frontal assaults they were all ejected from Indian territory. The Pakistani military leadership was largely cured of its nuclear hubris. The world had let the Kargil War rage on for over two months. However the Pakistanis concluded from India’s failure to cross the LC or IB in the Kargil War, that their conventional deterrence had worked very well. After all the Taliban in Afghanistan had freed Pakistan from its two front situation and made available two additional Strike Corps against India. (The Peshawar based 11 Corps and the Quetta based 12 Corps). 95 per cent of the weight of deterrence in Pakistani thinking, said Peter Lavoy, had now shifted to the conventional military level. Pakistan intensified its sub-conventional provocations. The last straw was the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001. This led to Op Parakram wherein, India mobilised its entire Armed Forces and postured menacingly. It failed however to take any real action or initiate live combat at whatever level. Pakistan was sufficiently chastened initially but the credibility of the entire deployment exercise petered out as the months dragged on. The basic flaw of Op Parakram was its all or nothing format. All civilian political leaderships are risk averse and presented an option of “all or nothing” - will most likely chose “nothing”. Op Parakram painfully highlighted the need for doctrinal change. There had been lot of discussion on the Doctrine and theory of Limited War in the wake of Kargil. Surprisingly it died out in two years. By Op Parakram, the Indian Army was back to the Gen Sundarji era of ponderous Strike Corps Operations which were hardly viable instruments to initiate conflict in a nuclearised context. The massive conventional response doctrine of Op Parakram proved unviable and unrealistic. There was a dire need for India to devise a more flexible Limited War Doctrine against the backdrop of a nuclear overhang. Cold Start was the Indian Army’s answer. An attack from the line of march with Divisional sized battle groups making shallow but rapid penetrations over a wide front. Pakistan used the Cold Start bogey to resist American pressure to switch troops from the eastern to the Afghan border to deal with the Taliban. Had Cold Start worked as a doctrine? Unfortunately not. Had it served to deter Pakistan? If so, the ISI would not have launched the mayhem in Mumbai of 26/11, just four years after the formulation of the Cold Start doctrine. India’s doctrinal dilemma was painfully highlighted by Mumbai. Unlike Op Parakram, India’s response to 26/11 was a painful zero in military terms. When 13/7 happened in July this year, there was not even the talk or pretense of a response. Despite the heavy casualties, just 10 days later, the establishment was gushing to greet Hina Rabbani Khar and faint

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over her hand bags and perfume. It callously chose to downplay the Kargil Vijay Divas to create the right atmospherics for these peace talks held with complete insensitivity in the immediate aftermath of yet another terrorist strike in Mumbai.

Problem statement The unfortunate problem is that the Indian political elite seem to be convinced that with the advent of nuclear weapons there is simply no scope for a conventional conflict in South Asia. This is a tragically flawed premise. Currently there is little scope for such a war simply because the Indian Armed Forces have not been modernised and enabled to field superior war fighting capabilities that can generate asymmetry of a level that can be pressed home in a local / limited conflict. India’s economy is now booming. We have the 4th largest GDP in the world and are at last in a position to modernise our military and generate a conventional military edge over Pakistan. This military build-up has started. So far India has spent US$ 30 billion and intends to spend another US$ 100 billion over the next decade to import modern weapon systems. Compared to what China, Japan, South Korea and Australia are spending in the same period on weapons acquisitions, this is too little and it is coming far too slowly to generate a visible edge in a viable time frame. In response to this conventional military build-up, Pakistan however is threatening to lower the nuclear threshold in South Asia by recourse to low yield Tactical Nuclear Weapons like the Hatf-9 or Nasr “shoot and scoot” missiles. Even more important than the induction of modern military equipment is how we intend to use it to resolve the Stability-Instability Paradox that has been ushered in by the introduction of nuclear weapons in South Asia.

Limited war doctrine In the 1970s, China’s paramount leader Deng Xiaoping had come to the clear cut determination that general wars (like World War I and II) were now relics of history. The present era was the era of limited or local wars under hightech conditions (subsequently termed - “Conditions of Informatisation”). The Chinese PLA was very consciously

preparing for such limited or local wars. The Indian viewpoint (as expressed in the Defence Ministry’s Annual Reports) was that Indian Armed Forces would prepare for a full-fledged or generalised war and this could take care of any lesser contingency. This impulse towards a general war failed to actualise in Op Parakram under a highly visible nuclear overhang. The pity is our failure to adapt and innovate and usher in doctrinal change, which is now long overdue. One is heartened to note that this churning process has now, at long last, been initiated by the current army brass.

Contours of a limited war doctrine for India There is a need for wide-ranging and participative debate and discussion to crystallise the essentials of a Limited War Doctrine for India. ■■ We must understand the difference between compellence and deterrence. A limited war doctrine must focus on the need for compellence, to force Pakistan to roll back its proxy war and asymmetric provocations. India has clearly failed so far, to deter such attacks. The response options to such sub-conventional provocations can be Military, Quasi-military or Non-military. Here we will discuss the military response options. ■■ We have to transit from deterrence by denial to deterrence by punishment. For this, we must identify and rapidly field the requisite war fighting capabilities. ■■ The current RMA is based on aerospace capabilities. India needs to invest heavily in airpower. We need a 60 squadron Air Force of 4th and 5th generation fighters with a large inventory of Precision Guided Munitions (PGMs). These must be backed up by enhanced levels of battlefield transparency ■■ Cold Start was a land power-centric doctrine. Use of land forces to initiate a conflict generates tremendous fog of war and uncertainty. Land forces once engaged cannot be easily disengaged or recalled. Land power cannot be made flexible, precise, focused and proportionate. Hence, it would not be a just, initiating response to a terrorist strike. ■■ Conflict must be initiated by air or naval power responses that are precise and focused; and gradually move up the escalation ladder retaining escalation dominance all the way. ■■ These must put the onus of further escalation squarely on the aggressor. ■■ Graduated employment of airpower and even naval power projection from the littoral must be employed to set the stage for a more meaningful air-land conflict.

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■■ The precise aim of such a conflict should not be simply to gain territory for bargaining, but “Raise the Costs for Pakistan” for its asymmetric adventurism. ■■ This can be achieved by bringing its operational and strategic reserves to battle and by inflicting serious attrition on them, inside the Pakistani territory. ■■ Such air-land offensives may well be launched in densely populated terrain to make it difficult for Pakistan to even think of employing low-yield tactical nuclear weapons. In any case, our mechanised formations are well equipped to survive a nuclear strike. ■■ Airpower will be the key and set the stage for such a punitive conflict to raise costs for Pakistan’s adventurism. ■■ The ISI and its terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) must be specifically targeted in this conflict. ■■ Our nuclear doctrine already makes it clear to Pakistan that any attempt to cross the Nuclear Rubicon will invite a massive “Counter City response” that would imperil Pakistan’s continued existence as a viable State. Pakistan is one-fifth the size of India and its population would suffer catastrophically in any nuclear exchange - especially in the Punjab. ■■ In terms of land power, such a limited war doctrine calls for an ability to mass effects rapidly. This translates into an urgent need to mediumise our artillery. It calls for a tank fleet that can fight by night and focus on the destruction of the adversary’s key reserve formations on his soil. It calls for a dramatic increase in the quantum and lethality of our Special Forces. It calls for a marine capability to carry out operational manoeuvre from the sea and exploit the air dominance gained to launch air assaults that can execute a “turning manoeuvre” like the Second Chindits operation had attempted in World War II. Above all, it means that we do not once again regress to the tactical level of war but meaningfully focus on the level of Operational Art. The Chinese concept of local wars as seen in Korea, envisaged the employment of a million men in intensive combat!

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LIMITED WAR ■■ Escalation dominance and control would be the key to the conduct of such a limited war. The conflict must be initiated and ended on Indian terms. This calls for very extensive wargaming of various options and the evaluation of several escalation ladders. ■■ Even a military stalemate in such circumstances has seriously eroded the will of adversaries to continue with hostile behaviour in the past. Witness Egypt and Syria (1973) and the Hamas (2006). Even though these conflicts with Israel were stalemates, they drained the Arab States involved of the will to continue with their hostile behaviour. ■■ If we field dominant war fighting capabilities, we can cause serious and salutary attrition on the Pakistani military machine and discredit this truculent organisation in the eyes of its own people. The Pak Army constitutes the core of animosity and hostility towards India and has a major stake and vested interest in perpetuating this hostility. The Pak Army dominates national security planning and has systematically sustained regional instability through obsessive competition with India. One American official has said that the Pakistani Army is as autonomous and pernicious an institution as the Mexican drug cartels! As long as the military maintains its unique world view and its autonomy in national security and foreign policy arenas Pakistan will remain an epicentre of violence and a threat to stability. ■■ Hence the Pakistan Army and ISI and their trenchant anti-India mindset are the core of the current problems in South Asia. As such this Military-ISI complex must be the prime target of any limited war in South Asia. ■■ Against China, a limited war would be far larger in scale and scope. The Chinese had thrown in a million men into Korea and 2,50,000 into North Vietnam. The nuclear threshold would be far higher in an India-China war. Courtesy the railroad and enhanced infrastructure, China can now field up to 34 divisions in Tibet. ■■ In response, we will urgently need to raise three strike corps of two divisions each for our Northern,

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Central and Eastern commands, to create worthwhile counter offensive options. We need to create substantial air assault capabilities. It should not be forgotten that India had fielded an Air Borne Corps of two Parachute Divisions in World War II. The Chindit’s tradition needs to be revived for attacks over the Himalayan hump. ■■ The Indian Navy would play a decisive role in interdicting the Chinese SLOCs in the event of an adverse situation in a land war on the Himalayan borders. It is a very major and considerable leverage that our geo-strategic location offers to us and could serve to help terminate hostilities in the event of any adverse situation developing on land.

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A N N O U N C E S October 2011 2nd Anniversary Issue on

Aerospace Power in India: Challenges and Response

India is now poised for a major rearmament and re-equipment programme, which its vibrant economy can now make possible. It is therefore imperative that we urgently crystallise our doctrine for Limited Wars against a Nuclear overhang and outgrow the World War II mindset of general wars, lasting for many years. That era is over and it is time that we formalised this change and prepared specifically to fight the kind of limited wars that are likely in today’s radically altered scenario. Do such Limited Wars get confined to the tactical level alone or is there a need to orchestrate more meaningful engagements at the level of Operational Art? The nuclear backdrop must now be factored intimately into our military doctrines. This calls for extensive debate and discussion not just amongst the three services but also with the political masters and civilian bureaucracies. Such a radical doctrinal redefinition calls for a “whole of the government approach”. The writer is a combat veteran of many skirmishes on the Line of Control and counter-terrorist operations in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab. He subsequently commanded the reputed Romeo Force during intensive counterterrorist operations in the RajouriPoonch districts. He has served two tenures at the highly prestigious Directorate General of Military Operations He is a prolific writer on matters military and non-military and has published 24 books and over 100 papers in many prestigious research journals. He is also Executive Editor of DSA.

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GLOBAL TRENDS

Lt Gen Dilip Bhardwaj PVSM, AVSM (retd)

“If the tank succeeds: Victory follows” – Heinz Guderian The writer, a highly respected former Director General of the Mechanised Forces, crystal gazes into the future of the Tank in the Indian context. He extrapolates from the experience of recent conflicts to define the type of tanks we will need in the years ahead. He states emphatically that the “one size fits all” concept is not possible and therefore we would in the future need different types of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. Mechanised forces would need to adapt to fighting in built-up areas. Therefore the present and the future generation AFV’s would have to be equipped with urban fighting and survival kits. Along our northern borders there is an inescapable need of deploying a limited number of wheeled light tanks. Wheeled tanks can also be employed in Out of Area contingency operations and riverine terrain. He surveys global trends to highlight that only four countries in the recent past have produced tanks. (This includes India’s Arjun). The Abrams / Arjun class of tanks have proved their effectiveness both in Iraq and Afghanistan. An invaluable and timely analysis. 22

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Modernisation of the

Mechanised Forces (Armour) I n the days of yore, heavy cavalry was the arm of decision as it performed a function no other arm could – to break the will of the enemy to resist by their sheer speed, surprise and ferocity of attack. Captains of war would hold their heavy cavalry back to be unleashed at the decisive moment and point of application to ensure victory. No other arm enjoyed such supremacy in the battlefield hence cavalry was always revered and placed on a pedestal. During World War I, the stalemate of trench warfare was broken with the introduction of the tank on the battlefield and with the demise of the horse cavalry it was only natural for the cavalry to man the tanks. Tank

battles of World War II are legendary and tanks evolved into a mean fighting machine and gave birth to the all arms concept. In India the euphoria of Independence had not yet sunk in when the Indian Army, in October 1947, was called upon to push back the “raiders” from Pakistan, in Kashmir. During the operations armour was employed in the dizzying heights of Zojila Pass (11,400 ft) where our Stuart tanks were transported piece-meal, reassembled and thereafter conducted operations with devastating effect. Tanks were also employed in support of infantry in the Rajouri sector, however in both

these sectors employment was limited due to constraints of equipment. During the 1962 operations, two armoured regiments were sent to the eastern borders, but saw little or no action. It was only in 1965 that the armoured corps proved its mettle and blunted the much touted thrust of Pakistan armour spearheaded by Patton tanks to create their “graveyard” at Khem Karan in Punjab and in turn launch the counter-offensive in the Sialkot sector. In both these sectors the Centurion tanks proved their superiority supported by the Sherman (up-gunned) tanks manned by better trained crews.

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GLOBAL TRENDS

Since the demise of the cold war most countries have concentrated on upgrading their existing tank fleet to meet their operational requirement. During the past two decades only Russia (T-90S), France (Leclerc), South Korea (M-2) and India (Arjun) introduced new MBT’s. However from the lessons learnt from their war’s in Iraq, the US embarked on their Future Combat Systems (FCS) and the UK on their Future Rapid Effect Systems (FRES) programmes During the intervening years T-54 / T-55 / PT-76 and Vijayanta tanks entered service and hence in 1971 the Corps played a major and decisive role in the liberation of the Bangladesh and the bloody battles in the Shakargarh bulge, in the western sector. An analysis of all these battles as regards the mechanised forces brings out the following pertinent points: ■■ Wars are won by the side which has a decisive competitive edge with regards to quality of equipment. ■■ For armour to be fully exploited it must suit the terrain in which it is employed. ■■ Due to the vast and varied terrain configuration along our borders specialised equipment, pre-positioned, gives disproportionate advantage. ■■ Armour must be employed concentrated and used boldly. Holding back large reserves at every level will ensure that the majority do not participate in the operations. ■■ There is no substitute to a well trained tank crew.

Geo-strategic environment India’s rising status as a regional / super power makes it an important pillar of stability within the region. However to maintain and further this status we must take into consideration the changing geo-strategic environment and emerging security challenges which will entail expanding our sphere of influence to protect and further our interests in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) and even beyond. Geo-strategic compulsions may dictate tasks for Out of Area Contingencies (OOAC) which could be supportive, interventionist, or preventive in design. The key geo-strategic challenges emanate from the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan

and the unresolved territorial disputes along our northern borders with China as also against Pakistan. With the collaboration between China and Pakistan getting stronger by the day there is a high probability that the next conflict on the Indian sub-continent would breakout in the mountains first before expanding to the plains sector. The need is thus well established to evolve a strategy and force capability for the mechanised forces to remain ready and relevant from the point of view of our national aspirations and the dynamics of the future geo-strategic environment. This mandates a threat cum capability based approach for our force restructuring that would ensure it is capable of performing its task in diverse terrain. Obviously one size fits all concept is not possible and therefore we would in the future need different types of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to be able to perform their operational task.

Operational scenario The Armed Forces doctrine enunciates that they are to be prepared to conduct operations form a “Cold Start” along the western front and yet be prepared for a simultaneous two front war. Whereas the mechanised forces have the requisite capability to conduct successful operations along the western front, along the northern borders it is more dissuasive in nature. Dissuasion needs to be converted to a deterrent capability which would require an augmentation in the capability and versatility of the equipment. In any future conflict the bulk of the mechanised forces will be facing the western border. With the “greening” of our immediate borders future battles are likely to be fought in terrain akin to the developed sector whilst seeking high value targets in a limited time frame. Mechanised forces would, therefore, need to adapt to fighting

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in built-up areas with a high density of vegetation and water channels. Therefore the present and the future generation AFV’s would have to be equipped with urban fighting and survival kits. Along our northern borders there is an inescapable need of greater strategic and tactical mobility for AFV’s to be able to switch axes along the valleys which have no lateral connection. Due to the slow rate of the development of infrastructure along the northern borders it is a logistic nightmare to deploy an MBT in these areas as they have to be air lifted in sections and re-assembled, tested and thereafter deployed. Once deployed the problem of tactical mobility arises. Therefore there is an inescapable need of deploying a limited number of wheeled light tanks which can be gainfully employed to initially blunt any offensive at the border itself gaining time for the heavy forces to build-up. Wheeled tanks can also be employed in OOAC operations which in the foreseeable future is a reality. With the eastern border and the riverine tract of our western borders getting active, the light tank is an operational necessity which would provide the strategic commander a means of gaining the initiative with deep outflanking manoeuvres over difficult terrain. The current generation of light tanks have the desired fire power of a 105 mm / 120 mm gun and the ability to fire a missile through the barrel of the gun. Survivability is enhanced with the fitment of the Active Defence Suit (ADS) and the Explosive Reactive Armour (ERA) panels. This versatile weapon system would provide the operational commander multiple options to execute his task.

Global trends Since the demise of the cold war most countries have concentrated on upgrading their existing tank fleet to meet their operational requirement. During the past two decades only Russia

(T-90S), France (Leclerc), South Korea (M-2) and India (Arjun) introduced new MBT’s. However from the lessons learnt from their wars in Iraq, the US embarked on their Future Combat Systems (FCS) and the UK on their Future Rapid Effect Systems (FRES) programmes. The FCS modernisation programme was evolved on the concept of homogenous brigade combat teams. Based on the premise that wars in the future would be expeditionary in nature the intention was to ensure

that an integrated family of systems were deployed in a massed effect to fight jointly on arrival in a matter of 72-96 hours anywhere in the world. To ensure strategic mobility the family of vehicles (wheeled and tracked) are lighter, equally lethal, air transportable to initially engage the enemy … before the heavier forces were inducted. As a start the Stryker ICV was developed followed by M-1128 Mobile Gun System (MGS), based on the same wheeled chassis with a 105 mm gun. The role of the MGS was not only to engage other AFV’s, but also to neutralise battle field targets and support their infantry. The MGS was successfully deployed in Iraq in 2003. However, in Afghanistan all nations of the ISAF have called up their MBT’s (Abrams 2A, Leopard 2A4) as they realised their devastating effect and moral ascendancy the tank provided. No doubt these tanks were duly modified for urban warfare raising their weight upto 70 tonnes. Due to budgetary constraints the FCS and FRES programmes have been temporarily stalled.

Fighting in built-up areas Whether it is conventional operations or counter insurgency operations (COIN) wars will be fought in and around built-up areas which pose certain specific challenges which need to be addressed. In Iraq during the stabilisation period it was the Abrams tank along with the Stryker ICV which ensured success. Tanks duly modified with Tank Urban Survival Kits (TUSK) preceded any operation to absorb and blunt the initial attack especially

from IEDs and short range anti-tank weapons before the infantry sanitised the area. The Israelis also learnt a bitter lesson of ignoring the all arms concept during the skirmish in Lebanon in 2006. Both these recent conflicts clearly brought out that tanks must lead any attack in developed terrain and built-up areas but as part of an all arms combat team to ensure inherent protection. The IDF have gone one step ahead by converting the old T- 55 tank chassis as a heavy APC and have now modified the Merkava tank chassis as a heavy APC (Namer).

Current status The equipping philosophy of the army is governed by the 30:40:30 concept, wherein 30 per cent comprise of the obsolescent technology equipment, 40 per cent is the mainstay matured technology equipment and the balance 30 per cent of the state-of-the-art equipment. This ensures the gradual modernisation of the equipment and a smooth induction of new technology equipment

to ensure that the army maintains its operational edge over our likely adversaries. Design and manufacture of tanks is a complex process which has a long gestation period and requires a strong R and D and industrial base. Unfortunately, in both these aspects India lagged behind the few tank manufacturing countries in the world. It was only in 1974 that the project of design and development of an indigenous tank was taken up in the earnest. After a protracted delay of nearly

35 years the first regiment equipped with Arjun tanks was introduced into service in 2009 after the users were fully satisfied with its capabilities. Today, the current holding of tanks exceeds 3,000 comprising of a few regiments of T-55 tanks, the mainstay being the T-72 M1 and a number of regiments of the state-ofthe-art T-90S tanks and the indigenous Arjun tank.

Modernisation programmes The modernisation schemes for the tank T-72 M1 include the installation of thermal image integrated fire control system (TIFCS), uprated engine with a minimum 1,000 HP and a commanders thermal imaging sight. For all tanks the endeavour is to provide an APFSDS ammunition having a higher penetration and the APAM round. To ensure that ground and aerial targets are engaged without exposing the crew the anti-aircraft Remote Weapon Station with a 12.7 mm MG would be fitted.

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GLOBAL TRENDS

UPGRADATION

Reconnaissance vehicles The most critical function in the future battlefield is the acquisition of real time intelligence. Whereas a lot of information would be available by electronic means from higher HQ’s, the Commandant of an armoured regiment relies heavily on his own eyes and ears. For this it is imperative that the recce troop of an armoured regiment is appropriately equipped with a specialist vehicle which has the ability to survive in a hostile environment and provide electro-optical surveillance. A number of such suitable vehicles are available in the world market and can be manufactured in India to suit our specific requirement. In the future battlefield survivability would be the key to success. Hence all tanks would be fitted with the ADS to ensure their survivability against CE ammunition attack including missiles. Better passive protection would be provided with the fitment of ERA panels, mobile camouflage systems and the advanced laser warning system connected to the aerosol anti-thermal anti-laser smoke grenade discharger system.

Future equipment profile The T-72 M1 (Modernised), T-90S (upgraded) and the Arjun MK-II will be the mainstay for the mechanised forces for the next three decades. Modernisation / upgradation is an on going process for the tanks to maintain their superiority in the battlefield. Ideally upgradation schemes are implemented when tanks are due for periodic overhaul. However keeping in view the large numbers of T-72 M1 tanks and the limited capability to overhaul, this process may not be possible. Hence the two would have to be done concurrently. To speed up the process the alternate method is to involve the private sector to take on one of the two tasks.

Arjun MK-II The upgradation of the Arjun tank is well underway and by 2012 the prototype of Arjun MK-II would be fielded for trials. The most important aspect is the ability to fire the missile from the barrel of the gun. Though this was proven earlier the same

needs to be fully integrated with the FCS. So also is the upgradation of the APFSDS ammunition and the development of the APAM and the anti helicopter ammunition. Arjun’s Kanchan armour is among the world’s best, but there is a scope of improvement by fitting explosive, non- energetic reactive armour to further enhance its protection. Apart from the ADS, the mobile camouflage system and the advance laser warning system will further enhance its survivability. Strategic and operational mobility have been provided by the introduction of the new railway rakes and a 60 tonne tank transporter. Most of the sub-assemblies are now being manufactured in India thereby reducing its import content. To further exploit the success of Arjun its variants such as ARV, BLT, trawls etc. must be introduced at the earliest. The experience gained on this project would be gainfully employed in the design and development of the future MBT (FMBT).

Light tank The case for introducing into service a light tank has been amply justified. Limited number of light tanks would be required along our northern borders as also for OOAC. The greatest spin-off would be if a common wheeled chassis could be developed for the light tank, wheeled APC, SP Gun, AERV and a host of command and control vehicles. This would provide the holding and strike Corps in the mountains the desired flexibility to execute their task.

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Lt Gen S N Handa PVSM, AVSM, VSM (retd)

FMBT Any country takes 10-12 years of design and development for an FMBT to reach the production stage. Work has already commenced to ensure that it fructifies by 2020 so as to be able to replace the T-72 M1 tank. With the experience gained with the Arjun tank project this is an achievable target if a dedicated team of scientists and users are exclusively earmarked for the project.

Conclusion The relevance of the tank in the future battlefield has been questioned in various forums over the past four decades especially since the advent of the hand-held anti-tank missiles. A similar debate was initiated on the future of ships when missiles were first introduced in the 1950’s. Both weapon systems have survived and remain relevant, as for every new weapon system developed a counter system is already on the drawing board. Hence the future of the tank especially in the sub-continent is undisputed. What however needs to be ensured is that the most effective weapon system is fielded in the appropriate terrain and operating conditions. In war there is no prize for runners-up, hence to ensure fool-proof national security over the full spectrum of operations capabilities must be developed to field the best and the most appropriate equipment for the mechanised forces.

The writer is a Former Director General of the Mechanised Forces.

MODERNISING “The least spectacular arm yet without which you can do nothing at all”. A former Director General of the Infantry makes a strong plea in this article for speeding up the modernisation of this critical teeth arm. Since independence the infantry has remained the arm of first call by the nation; be it conventional, sub-conventional or internal security operations. It must be given the best personal weapons and equipment and these must be made available in an operationally realistic time frame. Five focus areas identified for capability development of the infantry are Lethality, Survivability, Mobility, Situational Awareness and Sustainability. Modernisation must not be delayed by promises of developing equipment that cannot be met in the time frame desired. He highlights some practical difficulties in procuring simple and low cost items that call for suitable changes in the DPP. September 2011 Defence AND security alert

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nfantry is the largest and the most premium arm of the Indian Army. It encompasses within its fold specialised infantry like Airborne troops, the Special Forces and Scouts battalions besides the Amphibious forces and a large chunk of the Rashtriya Rifles. The Mechanised infantry went under the mechanised forces fold over a decade back. With close to 400 battalions, the infantry constitutes almost one third of the Indian Army. Since independence the infantry has remained the arm of first call by the nation; be it conventional, sub-conventional or internal security operations. It has performed commendably in all operations since independence and has an unparalleled record of valour and sacrifice in the service of the nation.

In sum, while the Infantry continues to go about its tasks with its traditional devotion and commitment, its modernisation needs to be pursued with ever greater vigour and determination. There has to be a well deliberated General Staff Policy Statement backed by detailed philosophies for individual components of the modernisation programme like small arms, anti-tank weapons, surveillance / battlefield transparency, communications etc. to guide the process. One hopes for necessary changes in the DPP to facilitate easier procurement of some basic and low-cost equipment for the infantry soldier The current and emerging regional security scenario coupled with a fluid and potentially volatile internal security situation, call for maintaining the highest levels of operational preparedness at all times to deal with any contingency. Even as the contours of future conventional wars undergo

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UPGRADATION a paradigm shift with enhanced battlefield transparency, greater accuracy and lethality of fire power, higher tempo of operations and shorter, more intense conflicts, infantry will continue to play a vital battle winning role in the combined all arms and joint operations environment of the future. The infantry also remains the primary instrument for dealing with asymmetric, sub-conventional and emerging hybrid war scenarios, more so in view of the persistent challenge of a proxy war being waged against the country for the last over two decades. Needless to mention then the overriding importance that maintaining the highest levels of operational preparedness of the infantry and its modernisation assume. Even as the army determinedly pursues its modernisation goals, which have today fallen behind by almost two perspective plan periods with the tenth plan procurements yet to substantially materialise and only a few months remaining for the eleventh plan to draw to a close, it is becoming increasingly difficult to explain to the infantrymen in the field as to why their low-cost and elementary requirements of equipment and weapons cannot be met in an operationally viable time frame. There are continuing deficiencies in War Establishment equipment profile of infantry battalions on Model 4B (Modified), which was promulgated in 2003. The dynamics of modernisation in general and infantry modernisation in particular bear analysis and urgent speeding up.

Modernisation dynamics Modernisation of the infantry is being pursued in consonance with the infantry vision, “To be optimally configured to conduct operations at short notice across the entire spectrum of conflict prevention, conflict and post-conflict activities both within and outside the region.” Five focus areas identified for capability development of the infantry are Lethality, Survivability, Mobility, Situational Awareness and Sustainability. The current dimensions of modernising the infantry encompass making up the deficiencies of Model 4B (Modified), developing enhanced capability of Ghatak platoons, pursuing the flagship F-INSAS programme, modernisation of the PARA and PARA (SF), equipping

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infantry battalions for amphibious role and certain other procurements as part of the ongoing process of capability development of infantry. Of the dynamics, first and foremost what needs to be appreciated is that the role and nature of tasks performed by the infantry inherently demand that the infantryman himself is the most important weapon of the infantry. The basic equipment of the infantryman that enhances his battle worthiness, from simple low cost items like elbow and knee pads to body armour and lightweight individual equipment and sighting systems on his personal weapons that help him acquire a target quickly and engage it accurately thus assume great importance. Unfortunately, however, the elaborate Defence Procurement Procedure (DPP) being virtually the same for acquiring a knee or elbow pad and a tank and possibly an aircraft, the infantry has remained deprived of even such simple items. Some related aspects are low cost and size - while most of the items needed by the infantry are low cost, the size of the arm being the largest necessitates larger numbers, which impact the overall cost of procurement raising the level of competent financial authority required to sanction purchases of simple low cost items. Even so the overall cost of infantry procurements is relatively lower than other arms and since the effort required at various levels to process a proposal is the same, the temptation is to process high value procurements on priority because of their favourable impact on budgetary spending. We definitely need to be looking at suitable changes in the DPP, which factor the cost of an item rather than the total value of procurement into consideration for the purpose of both, simplifying the procurement procedure for such items as well as the competent financial authority for sanctioning the same. Another aspect which has adversely impacted on modernisation all around is the prevailing ‘anti-corruption’ environment in the country, which has virtually made the modernisation process a hostage to the requirements of probity. While the services wholeheartedly support the need to keep the acquisition process absolutely clean and corruption free (it can be nobody’s case that probity and transparency in procurements be compromised in any manner), the ongoing inquiries and environment have definitely created a sense of

insecurity leading to a ‘play safe’ attitude especially amongst those in the final decision making loop. This leads to inordinate delays and cost overruns that are very injurious to our overall security. This has manifested itself in absurd interpretations of the DPP in some cases leading to avoidable delays and falling through of even fully matured proposals after over a year’s or several years’ toil at various levels. The ‘letter’ of DPP should not assume more importance than the ‘spirit’ and there

as part of the endeavour presently underway for ‘transformation of the army’. Also, a reassuring environment, which generates the confidence that upright officers will not be hauled over coals over decisions taken in the line of duty certainly needs to be created.

will always be limits to our writing good English, which caters to all eventualities. Can we really visualise all such eventualities in the early stages of a proposal’s long journey through the labyrinthine requirements of the DPP and multitude of agencies, which are involved! And while the provision for waivers exists, it is subject to the aforementioned probity syndrome. One often gets the feeling that sincere and upright officers, especially in the Ministry, would rather avoid an innings in procurement related jobs and actions of those who cannot, tend to be guided more by the thought of avoiding an inquiry, now or later, rather than any concern for modernisation goals or enhancing operational preparedness. A generally prevailing environment of diffused accountability and the ease of shifting the blame for delays or inefficiency on to lower rungs in the chain of procurement allow those with such a mindset to ride the system. Notwithstanding the above, energetic efforts are on to create higher levels of sensitivity towards operational needs and modernisation goals. To be fair, some structural inadequacies relating to resources available for processing of proposals at various levels need addressing and should come about

The inventory, its diversity and huge size and a far larger number of proposals definitely add to the complexity of procurements by the army. The country’s military industrial complex comprising the Ordnance Factories Board (OFB), the Defence Public Sector Undertakings (DPSus), both under the Department of Defence Production (DDP) in the Ministry of Defence and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) play a very significant and dominant role in the entire modernisation process, with the focus on indigenisation of defence production. Their overlapping roles and responsibilities, degree of accountability, capability, competence and efficiency, pricing, responsiveness, quality and ability to deliver on time, merit an honest and genuine introspection. And, last but not the least of the players are the vendors, some of whom have begun to exploit the DPP unfairly for their narrow commercial ends leading to avoidable diversion of effort towards replying to their motivated representations and consequent procurement delays. The system needs to come down heavily to curb this emerging tendency amongst the defaulting vendors. A system of blacklisting the vendors who default on

Unfair comparisons are also at times made about the relatively sluggish pace of processing of army proposals as compared to the other two services.

the integrity clause does exist but this has also led to a ‘play safe’ approach for future procurements from such vendors and consequent delays. With the judicial process being time consuming, what we perhaps need to consider is a system of imposing heavy penalties instead of blacklisting especially since some of these vendors happen to be the only ones in the market to meet the requirements of some operationally critical equipment.

Approach to modernisation Modernisation of the infantry needs to be guided by its basic characteristics of self reliance and mobility, technological upgradation, ensuring that individual soldier is not encumbered unnecessarily and weight carried by him is kept manageable. His capability to perform effectively in the net-centric, combined arms, joint operations battlefield environment of the future needs to be developed. These aspects, as per media reports, have been incorporated in the F-INSAS programme, which is the flagship programme of not only the infantry but the Indian Army. The three basic weapons of the infantry, the carbine, assault rifle and the light machine gun are due for replacement as part of this programme. The replacement of the carbine has been delayed for long partly due to the inability of our military industrial complex to provide an adequate suitable indigenous alternative in the last over five years. We need to be open minded and innovative in our approach to meet the small arms requirement of not only the infantry and the army but also of the para military and police forces, especially since the latter are now

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UPGRADATION

involved in battling the Maoists. It is an open secret that leaves aside the paramilitary and the police, even the army today does not have an inventory of small arms, which can be called worthy of one of the largest armies of the world and that too when some of the smaller neighbours boast far superior weapons in that category. Whatever be the reasons, the indigenous INSAS family of weapons has fallen far short of the operational requirements as well as the aspirations of troops even after almost a decade and a half. The nation owes it to the infantry soldier who is required to unflinchingly make the supreme sacrifice in close quarter combat with the enemy with only his personal weapon, to provide him a quality personal weapon that in the very least inspires confidence in him and bestows on him the ability to get the better of his adversary in battle. While the need for indigenisation is well understood it has to be done in an operationally viable time frame. Instead of taking decades to reinvent the wheel, will the system do better to establish a state-of-the-art small arms manufacturing facility now that all three key small arms are due for replacement, which will meet the requirements of both, the army and paramilitary and police forces? Keeping in view the inordinate delays that have occurred in producing acceptable versions of these small arms, it may now be the operationally optimal solution to set up plants to manufacture state-of-the-art versions under license. Is it not surprising that when manufacturing facilities for state-of-the-art cars are allowed to be established in the country then why do we shy away from providing our soldiers the essential wherewithal to not only come out victorious in any battlefield engagement but also to improve their survivability on the emerging highly lethal battlefield of the future. Indigenisation is highly desirable but the products have to be made available in a realistic time frame. The Sten Machine Carbine (SMC) for instance was found to be sub-optimal as far back as the Sri Lanka operations in 1987! It was grossly underpowered and prone to accidental discharge. Today, some 24 years later we still have not been able to give a replacement SMC to our soldiers. Half-indigenisation inspired by transfer of technology as part of the defence procurement process is also encountering some difficulties

with constraints on absorption of technology transferred. Genuine and meaningful indigenisation will remain a distant dream unless there is an effort at switching focus of defence research from immediate and short term requirements to long term defence needs. A well coordinated effort is needed to optimise the existing dedicated human resource and some excellent research facilities. In the interim modernisation must not be delayed by promises of developing equipment that cannot be met in the time frame desired. Some questions prevail in some quarters of the environment on the viability and desirability of the F-INSAS programme. Some of these have to do more with the semantics and designation that inspires some hard core infantrymen to ask if an infantryman should or indeed can be transformed into a system. The programme has five sub-systems-weapons, which is basically focused on personal weapons of the infantry soldier, body armour and individual equipment (BAIE), which as the name suggests is focused on body armour and lightweight modular equipment for the soldier, target acquisition that is focused on surveillance equipment and weapon sights, communication system, which seeks to upgrade the radio sets to software defined single and dual band radios and the computer system, which will be selectively provided to meet the requirement of making the infantry effective in a net-centric environment. Notwithstanding the programme designation, bulk of the programme is geared towards modernising the basic weapons and equipment of the infantry soldier to empower and enhance his battlefield efficiency in both, networked as well as non-networked environments. It does not detract from the ‘primacy’ of an infantry soldier being the ‘primary infantry weapon’ even as it provides him systems support for enhanced and fully enabled operational effectiveness when necessary. Request for information (RFIs) for most of the equipment under the programme have been hosted on the web and several proposals are apparently in more advanced stages. Proposals for enhancing the capability of infantry battalion Ghatak platoons were mooted in the aftermath of 26/11. Two years down the line

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some of the important proposals for equipment like door breaching grenade, breaching ammunition, sub-machine gun and sniper rifle may well be near fructification. Some important tenth plan modernisation proposals for the Special Forces have since fructified. The guiding philosophy for their modernisation needs to be obviously benchmarked against the best in the world and definitely a shade better than any other hue of Special Forces within the country. We must always remember that in any situation the Armed Forces remain the last resort option, which simply cannot fail the nation in any contingency. Infantry tasked for amphibious role constitutes an emerging strategic capability and needs due priority and attention. While the army has more than made up for lack of equipment through its innovativeness, training and a very strong sense of commitment to any assigned task, it remains the moral obligation of the State to provide the best for its Armed Forces. In sum, while the infantry continues to go about its tasks with its traditional devotion and commitment, its modernisation needs to be pursued with ever greater vigour and determination. There has to be a well deliberated General Staff Policy Statement backed by detailed philosophies for individual components of the modernisation programme like small arms, anti-tank weapons, surveillance / battlefield transparency, communications etc. to guide the process. One hopes for necessary changes in the DPP to facilitate easier procurement of some basic and low-cost equipment for the infantry soldier. Coupled with this an attitudinal change and greater sensitivity to making up the operational capability shortfalls will, of course, be welcome. The writer was commissioned into the Fifth Battalion of the Third Gorkha Rifles in November 1971 on the eve of Indo-Pak War 1971 and saw action with his battalion in the Kargil Sector. He was Deputy General Officer Commanding of an infantry division in the deserts during Op Parakram and Chief of Staff of the Srinagar based Chinar Corps. He was Chief of Staff of the Jaipur based South Western Command before taking over as Director General Infantry in March 2010 from where he superannuated in April 2011.

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POTENT ASSET

Army Aviation is certainly a battle winner for the army but it is also an invaluable national asset. A statesman like vision is necessary to exploit its potential. Apart from attacking enemy troop concentrations, tanks, infantry combat vehicles and artillery either with the direct fire of its integral guns and missiles or by directing fire of guns and rockets of the artillery, Army Aviation is also well suited to undertake air to air engagement of enemy helicopters and UAVs. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fleet comprises mainly Chetak and Cheeta helicopters that not only belong to an earlier generation of helicopters but they have outlived their recommended operational lives many times over. That despite the vintage of their aircraft, the aviators and maintenance crews of Army Aviation continue to operate them for vital operational missions week after week is a tribute to their professionalism and devotion but it is certainly not fair to expect them to do so endlessly.

Lt Gen Vinayak Patankar PVSM, UYSM, VSM (retd)

The intrepid, magnificent men of Army Aviation deserve better!

he Armed Forces do not have the luxury of speculation. Whatever the scale and magnitude of threats to our security, the Armed Forces will have to be prepared to deal with all possibilities - a wide spectrum of conflict from sub-conventional conflicts to conventional wars with even possibilities of nuclear, chemical and biological warfare. The other aspect that seems unambiguous is that future conflicts will be characterised by rapid escalation, high tempo of operations and high attrition. The Armed Forces will need to keep their powder dry at all times; continue to maintain constant vigil along the entire border and respond effectively at the first sign of trouble.

Wide array of roles Army Aviation is that versatile component of the army which has the necessary speed, agility and sting to carry out just such missions surveillance, retaliation, reinforcement (where and when required) and replenishment of men and material in the shortest time frame. Army Aviation is the element of combat forces that, if judiciously and boldly employed, could be omnipotent. With the wide array of roles and missions it can undertake, it is an indispensable constituent of any field force on the modern battlefield. Just

consider the range of missions it is capable of performing. It can undertake both offensive and defensive tasks. Apart from attacking enemy troop concentrations, tanks, infantry combat vehicles and artillery either with the direct fire of its integral guns and missiles or by directing fire of guns and rockets of the artillery, Army Aviation is also well suited to undertake air to air engagement of enemy helicopters and UAVs. While utility and medium lift helicopters of Army Aviation can launch heliborne forces for air assaults, they can also be employed for insertion and extraction of small teams in special missions like raid or rescue. They can act as path-finders to an airborne (assault or reinforcement) force. Its other missions are the more familiar ones - observation and reconnaissance, air transport support (operational logistics) and air evacuation of casualties. As an adjunct to armed reconnaissance, Army Aviation could be tasked for guarding open flanks, particularly in mobile operations. In fact it will not be wrong to say that, employment of Army Aviation is limited more by the imagination of force commanders and less by its technical capabilities. Capabilities of Army Aviation can be very useful in rendering aid to civil authority in disaster relief operations. All the attributes mentioned in the context of its employment in military

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operations can be invaluable in situations like floods, earthquakes, major accidents or when road communications are disrupted owing to landslides, snow fall and so on. For all this to happen, Army Aviation should be organised, equipped and managed commensurately and efficiently. Although Army Aviation is manfully executing every task assigned to it currently, it is doing so in the face of great odds. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fleet comprises mainly Chetak and Cheeta helicopters that not only belong to an earlier generation of helicopters but they have outlived their recommended operational lives many times over. Operating at the dizzy heights of the Siachen glacier or navigating between the shifting sand dunes of the Thar Desert, Army Aviation aircraft are flying at the edge of their flight envelope for the most part; exacting conditions that test the skill of fliers and technicians alike. That despite the vintage of their aircraft, the aviators and maintenance crews of Army Aviation continue to operate them for vital operational missions week after week is a tribute to their professionalism and devotion but it is certainly not fair to expect them to do so endlessly. All this is eminently avoidable if the government could act expeditiously to induct suitable replacements. The intrepid, magnificent men of Army Aviation certainly deserve better.

ARMY AVIATION: VITAL BATTLE WINNER

A lot needs to be done and done quickly to make up for the long era of apathy and neglect of this potential battle winner. Army aviation is in need of rapid modernisation; not just in terms of its aircraft but even in terms of management of military aviation in general and that of Army Aviation in particular.

It may be easier and more economical to operate just one or two types of aircraft from the point of view of logistic support such as stocking of spares and sub-assemblies as well as maintenance than holding several different types of aircraft in the inventory. However, in the matter of the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s defence, such consideration should not come

in the way of giving the sentinels of our security the right wherewithal. Having invested in the right equipment sagacity would lie in managing the assets in the most cost-effective manner. As basic consideration, our future Army Aviation aircraft should have the following essential attributes:

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• Capable of all weather, day-night operation. • Multi-role capability. • Agility. • Stealth (low radar signature and noise). • Large flight envelope (to cater to the formidable challenges of altitude and environmental conditions). • Ease of maintenance, particularly under field conditions.

Army Aviation is that versatile component of the army which has the necessary speed, agility and sting to carry out just such missions surveillance, retaliation, reinforcement (where and when required) and replenishment of men and material in the shortest time frame Obviously, in order to carry out its roles and missions, Army Aviation’s inventory of aircraft will have to include both fixed and rotary wing aircraft of various categories (classes). In war there may be many missions of strategic value, however, in peace time too some missions of significant national importance may have to be executed. From the successful raid by Israel’s elite commandos on Entebbe airport to the recent one by US Navy SEALS at Abbottabad, history is replete with such type of missions. After the last named mission (Operation Neptune Spear), there has been a great deal of debate and even speculation in India on the ability of our special forces to launch such missions. The annals of our military history are full of accounts of the valour and courage of our Armed Forces. We should, therefore, feel confident of their ability to carry them out but we should neither be sanguine nor complacent. We will need to equip them appropriately and adequately to ensure that they continue to succeed in future

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POTENT ASSET too. This calls for such special assets as highly specialised aircraft capable of penetrating deep in enemy territory given to Army Aviation to carry out critically important tasks. They should have the required stealth, avionics and fighting ability to ensure success of their missions. (In fact we need to establish a triservices Special Operations Command).

Lt Gen Aditya Singh PVSM, AVSM (retd)

National asset Army Aviation is already an important asset for the Indian Army on the battlefield. In sheer numbers it holds the largest number of helicopters in its inventory compared to any other organisation in the country. In order to exploit the full potential of all rotary wing aviation assets in the country, it should be nominated as the single-point coordinator for development of all rotary wing aviation to include not only the three armed services but also all non-military and civil organisations operating helicopters. (As corollary, the Indian Air Force should similarly be the coordinator for fixed wing aircraft). It could be entrusted, inter alia, the responsibility of coordinating and harmonising various aspects of management of rotary wing aviation in India - from sharing information and skills related to the best maintenance practices and the latest current technologies to future research and development. On its part Army Aviation should also gear itself up to shoulder the onus of such monumental task, if so called upon to perform. The army should also focus on putting in place an effective and responsive command and control structure which should be able to ensure optimal utilisation of integral as well as additional resources placed at its disposal. Whether it would be beneficial to raise well structured Army Aviation brigades at the level of a field army and / or a corps for the most optimal employment of assets is a matter for the army to decide upon but the fact remains that it should be futuristic and dynamic enough to respond to its envisaged (increased) responsibilities without having to effect any major significant structural change(s) time and again. Thinking of the future roles, missions and management of Army Aviation one cannot ignore the important and larger

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CRAFTINESS

milieu of the development of rotary aviation in India. Aviation industry is definitely at the (pardon the pun) take-off stage in our country. Development of indigenous aviation industry is not only desirable but essential for India to prepare itself for a place at the high table of international community. It is clear that the private sector is willing and competent to enter this field. Military aviation as a whole would benefit immensely if Indian industry were to rise to meet future challenges. There is need to invest in acquiring core competencies associated with the whole gamut of issues from designing to manufacture, from special skills in metallurgy to precision avionics. Army Aviation is certainly a battle winner for the army but it is also an invaluable national asset. A statesman like vision is necessary to exploit its potential so that India wins on all fronts. The writer was the Quartermaster General of the Indian Army before he retired. He is Distinguished Fellow at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. During the Kargil war, he was commanding 28 Infantry Division on the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir. For the role played by him in that war, he was awarded Uttam Yudh Seva Medal. Later he was the Corps Commander of the prestigious 15 Corps engaged in management of the Line of Control and counter terrorist operations in the Kashmir Valley.

Although the use of fraud in any action is detestable, yet in the combat of war it is praiseworthy and glorious. And a man who uses fraud to overcome his enemy is praised, just as much as he who overcomes his enemy by force. Machiavelli 1531 A very informative article on the esoteric but vital subject of Deception and Perception Management by a former Army Commander, well regarded for his erudition and scholarship. He cites some very pertinent and interesting examples from the First Gulf War and describes the various types of Deception operations (‘A’ or Ambiguity increasing types and ‘M’ or Misleading types) and their practise at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. He mentions the former Soviet concept of “Maskirovka” and cites the American concept of Information Operations. He then extrapolates from theory to suggest practical and workable applications in the South Asian context. September 2011 Defence AND security alert

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eception as a battle winning factor goes back more than two millennia. Amongst others Sun Tzu and Chanakya were its exponents and practised it well before the birth of Christ. Military history is replete with examples of how ruses and deception ensured success. This underwent a complete metamorphosis during the Second World War and the landings of D Day as also the subsequent war in Europe, was greatly assisted by over a hundred elaborate and complex deception plans and subterfuges. There is a misconception that transparency of the battlefield on account of RMA has made deception and surprise difficult and thereby reduced its significance. Recent examples of both operation Desert Storm in 1991 as also the invasion of Iraq in 2003 saw elaborate deception plans being put in place with use of latest technology, information warfare, as also age-old ruses and tricks. These examples which are applicable even today, are relevant.

of the ground war. Coalition forces broadcast increasing radio traffic to indicate the presence of several divisions. Along with this there was an elaborate propaganda campaign with hundreds of thousands of leaflets being dropped to convince the Iraqis and asking them to surrender in view of the overwhelming odds. This worked. Defence of Kuwait city was based on the presumption that the main attack would come from the sea. Buildings facing the shore were evacuated and turned into fighting positions and the trench line extended throughout the city along the beach. In total, four armoured divisions and seven infantry divisions were aligned to cover this non-existent threat from the sea.

Air support was provided. The unit played various psychological operation tapes, ranging from the sounds of tanks and trucks to helicopters landing and taking off. The Iraqis believed that they were faced with a military force of at least division strength.

OPERATION DESERT STORM 24 TO 28 FEBRUARY 1991

During operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 there were three different deception efforts by the Coalition forces on the advance toward Baghdad. The first was an attempt to convince Iraq that the attack would come from Jordan. Special Forces attacked Iraqi listening and observation posts along the Jordanian border to try and convince Saddam in this regard. The second

Iraq wars The overall plan of Gen Norman H Schwartzkopf during Operation Desert Storm for the capture of Kuwait was a manoeuvre from the west. This was the obvious approach. The problem was that it was so obvious to even the most amateur of tacticians that it seemed impossible to surprise the Iraqis. Further, military experts on CNN and other news channels were talking about the ‘open flank’ of the Iraqi Army on a regular basis. How could the Coalition entice the Iraqis to look southward and eastward while they unleashed their blitzkrieg from the west? The Coalition forces put in place an elaborate deception plan to draw away Iraqi forces. There was a campaign to convince the Iraqi leadership that the assault would be from the sea east of Kuwait. The US Navy manoeuvred in the waters just off the Kuwait shoreline. Navy Seals conducted beach and island reconnaissance missions. The Marines appeared and disappeared practicing their invasion techniques, all designed to keep the Iraqis nervous. Meanwhile, south of Kuwait, the 1st Cavalry Division aggressively raided into Kuwait from their positions in Saudi Arabia even before the start

Copy of leaflet code-named "The Wave." It depicts a snarling United States Marine in a tidal wave approaching the shore of Kuwait. The Marine holds a bloodstained "Kabar" fighting knife and three Iraqi soldiers are shown running away. In the background helicopters, aircraft and naval ships take part in the invasion. On the reverse was the surrender message. The invasion plan was also designed to support the perception that the attack would come in the east and head directly for Kuwait. Operations in the west were therefore, staggered. To further convince the Iraqis of the concentration of armoured forces in the east, dummy units were created. Task Force (TF) Troy: A 460 man “ghost” unit was made up of five tanks, several wheeled vehicles and elements from the US Marines, British Army and the 4th Psychological Operations Group. This TF was given responsibility for an area of the Kuwaiti front which would normally have been covered by a full division. In order to deceive the enemy the unit relied on the use of deceptive decoys, armoured vehicles, artillery pieces and helicopters, as well as a series of loudspeakers and dummy emplacements to complete the illusion.

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between Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan and unable to move south to help in the defence of Baghdad. The final deception involved the advance of V Corps through the Karbala Gap. Every effort was made to confuse the Adnam Republican Guard Division about exactly where V Corps would attack.

Indian scenario A 113 Carrier with loudspeakers. A part of Task Force Troy during Operation Desert Storm operation was meant to force Saddam to keep his troops in the north. The Coalition let slip evidence that the Turkish refusal to allow US troops to move through their country was a sham and the US 4th Division would attack from Turkey. The plan, if believed, would keep the Nebuchadnezzar Republican Guard Division positioned

There are various examples of deception at the tactical level during 1971 Operations. However cynics contend that this was possible due to the long preparation and build-up and cannot be practised in the current era of short notice and possibly short duration wars. This is a fallacy. Deception at the operational level even today is an essential component. Technology and transparency in fact, (rather than counter), can greatly aid in this regard.

Media power as also the manifestations of Information War (IW) were evident during both Kargil and Operation Parakram in 2002-03. In the latter case there were a host of articles and discussions on the strategy to be followed. These would have been picked up by planners the world over.

Types of deception To fully understand and see how it could be practised in the current context it is necessary to elaborate on the major ‘types’ of deception. These are: ●● Strategic deception: Which disguises basic objectives, intentions, strategies and capabilities. This perforce would be the national level. ●● Operational deception: Which confuses or diverts an adversary in regard to a specific operation, or actions that are to be conducted. As the name

suggests, it is at the operational level. ●● Tactical deception: Which misleads when undertaking active operations at the units and formations level. ●● “A” type deception: “Ambiguity deception” geared toward creating general confusion. ●● “M” type deception: “Misleading deception” designed to mislead an adversary into a specific and preconceived direction. Laws of armed conflict permit these. Ruses are defined in Geneva Protocol I as “acts which are intended to mislead an adversary or to induce him to act recklessly but which infringe no rule of international law applicable in armed conflict and which are not perfidious because they do not invite the confidence of an adversary with respect to protection under

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For the defence forces it is vital that all actions with respect to strategic and operational deception are joint. It should be within the charter of the Headquarters of the Integrated Defence Staff who must provide concerted vision and ensure long-term planning. Actions for the three services must be coordinated before and during periods of conflict in keeping with operational plans that law.” Article 37 then goes on to give examples of permissible ruses: “the use of camouflage, decoys, mock operations and misinformation.” Further examples of legitimate ruses include: surprises, ambushes, feigning attacks, retreats or flights, simulating quiet and inactivity, use of small forces to simulate large units, transmitting false or misleading radio or telephone messages, deception of the enemy by bogus orders purporting to have been issued by the enemy commander, making use of the enemy’s signals and passwords, pretending to communicate with troops or reinforcements which have no existence, deceptive supply movements, deliberate planting of false information, use of spies and secret agents, moving landmarks, putting up dummy guns and vehicles or laying dummy mines, erection of dummy installations and airfields, removing unit identifications from uniforms, use of signal deceptive measures et al. The scope is thus, vast. Along with all this now, is the concept of perception management. An integral component of IW, this in the digital age has acquired a new avatar. The Kargil conflict witnessed how effective use of the media and their agencies galvanised national opinion and response. Suitably used, it can have disastrous effects on any opposition. This is an emerging field and its potential goes beyond the realms of imagination. However IW is a vast field and in this article, the thrust is on deception in the more conventional context.

Currency The Soviet Union used Maskirovka (loosely this word means ‘deception’, although translators also use the words ‘concealment’ and ‘camouflage’) to great effect during the Cold War and was first to develop it as an integrated part of normal diplomatic and military procedure. It also became a formal part of doctrine in Western militaries in the late twentieth century. The US Joint Doctrine for Information Operations

(Joint Pub 3-13, 1998) defines deception as: ‘Those measures designed to mislead the enemy by manipulation, distortion, or falsification of evidence to induce him to react in manner prejudicial to his interests’. The Joint Doctrine for Military Deception (Joint Pub 3-58, 1996) gives a fuller definition: Military deception is defined as being those actions executed to deliberately mislead adversary decision makers as to friendly military capabilities, intentions and operations, thereby causing the adversary to take specific actions that will contribute to the accomplishment of the friendly mission. A later doctrine from the US Air Force (2005) on IW (actually, information operations) refers to ‘influence operations’ as one of the four major components of the information environment (network warfare operations, electronic warfare operations and integrated control enablers are the others). The components of influence operations are psychological operations, military deception, operations security, counter-intelligence, public affairs and counterpropaganda. The Indian Army Doctrine published in 2004 also has a section on deception. However, it mentions “It must be clearly understood that given today’s battlefield transparency, deception, in addition to surprise will be very difficult to achieve in the first instance; retaining the advantage that flows from it for an appreciable period of time will be even more difficult.” It is argued that these very difficulties can be used to great advantage and its mere ‘difficulty’ should not deter. All of these activities have one aim i.e., to influence the mind and behaviour of the adversary in ways beneficial to the perpetrator. As such, the thrust has to be a mind game on managing perception.

The sub-continental context India has unsettled borders with both China and Pakistan. Both countries are

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All three nations have over the years, built up detailed knowledge of terrain, infrastructure, dispositions, strengths, operational plans and so on. It is only the intention and aspects related to timings or extent that can be concealed a deficit at the operational and strategic level. Deception is an art and thus gets neglected in the rush of daily activity. Time and resource constraints also work against it. It is for our military thinkers to overcome this impasse. Each era brings its own interplay and one has to constantly adapt and stay ahead in the mental game.

understood to have elaborate plans for IW and have practised deception in the past. Under the circumstances, a comprehensive and ongoing study in this regard is necessary. Strategic deception or perception management can only be undertaken at the national level as a very large number of agencies are involved. While the core planning may be limited to few, various actions to demonstrate or generate awareness would be across the board and include both, government and non-government agencies. In keeping with State policy, this has to be a continuous and ongoing process and not just limited to periods of tension and conflict. An example of this could be the policy to be followed with respect to the border dispute with China. The government has a policy and various agencies such as the China sub-group, Ministries of Defence, Home, External Affairs, Information and Broadcasting as also others, are involved. Projection of the policy in keeping with current requirements has to be planned in detail. This must be based on facts and the manner of projection, consistent with what is sought for the ongoing situation. Perception could then be managed in a structured manner, specially during periods of tension. This would include actions with the media, infrastructure on the border, movement of troops, deployment of resources et al. Had this been in place, a situation as that which occurred in 2009 could have been better managed. For the defence forces it is vital that all actions with respect to strategic and operational deception are joint. It should be within the charter of the Headquarters of the Integrated Defence Staff who must provide concerted vision and ensure long-term planning. Actions for the three services must be coordinated before and during periods of conflict in keeping with operational plans. For example, it may be difficult to fully conceal offensives planned, however with aerial and

Time has now come for special research in this field. The three services must work jointly, task the DRDO, their public relations departments, intelligence services, schools of instruction and more importantly the operational commands. IW and perception management exercises need to be conducted both, for conventional as also strategic operations and where necessary, structures created. Given the changed times and the democratisation, or instant availability of information, this has to become part of government policy. ground activities, ‘leaked’ reports, false electronic traffic, the enemy could be made to believe that this would be in other sectors, or to a limited extent, or a feint, or come later and so on. Operational deception is essential for any offensive strategy. Given the changed thinking since Operation Parakram, inclusion of options such as ‘Cold-Start’ or ‘Short-Duration Conflict’ make such planning inescapable. More so, as all three nations have over the years, built-up detailed knowledge of terrain, infrastructure, dispositions, strengths, operational plans and so on. It is only the intention and aspects related to timings or extent that can be concealed. Operational art and wisdom dictates that battle must be won at least cost. This can primarily be achieved by guile, hence planned for in detail and resources positioned or created. Deception is also important for defence. Concealment of locations, false positions, obstacles, luring of an enemy into a killing zone, location and move reserves, size and speed of counter

attack and so on fall mainly in the realm of tactical deception and field craft. This too, requires elaborate preparation and resources which must be thought out in advance. Another aspect is the issue of our strategic deterrent in keeping with India’s nuclear doctrine. Its credibility amongst other aspects, is based on ambiguity and perception. More so, as India has chosen the second strike option. A serious level of craftiness and deceit is thus essential. The issue is how much of such planning is being undertaken in the government, all the three services and jointly. The sad answer would be, very little. It is this study of deception in all its manifestations which must get added and undivided attention as battle winning factor. Past examples can be examined and applied to current scenarios. Cases must be honestly war-gamed. Based on these, resources should be created. At the lower tactical level guile is essential to survival and troops use it when engaged in counterterrorist and other such operations. There is however

Conclusion It is the access to and the use of information that is one of the fundamental determinants of superiority. The practice of deception is a natural extension of the acceptance of information and its manipulation as the dominant element in competitive advantage in both peace and war. As an emerging power India has to revisit the aspects of statecraft as outlined by Kautilya and revive this art. Any neglect will be to its peril.

The writer retired on 30 September 2007 as GOC-in-C, Southern Command, the largest and senior-most Command of the Indian Army. Prior to this he had been C-in-C, Andaman & Nicobar Command from January 2005 in the aftermath of the Earthquake and Tsunami of 26 December 2004. In this capacity he was also the Vice Chairman and Operational Head of the Integrated Relief Command responsible for the emergency relief and rehabilitation of the ravaged Islands. He now devotes time to strategic and national security issues, looking after educational establishments and building institutions.

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ARMS BUILD-UP IN ASIA:

here is a massive arms build-up on in Asia. China led the way with her military modernisation that started in 1990. She has purchased US$ 17 billion worth of modern arms from Russia. Then she simply copied and reverse engineered the designs of the Su-27 and Mig-29 fighters and mass produced them as the J-11, J-10 and J-17 aircraft. The Chinese have locally produced and added some US$ 150 billion worth of combat aircraft, naval ships, submarines and tanks to their huge inventories. Thus the total value of Chinese military build-up over the past decade is US$ 150 billion plus 17 billion or 167 billion. Had these all been purchased ex imports – China would have had to pay upwards of US$ 450-550 billion if not more. This would make the actual value of these Chinese acquisitions at least in the range of US$ 467-567 billion. In response to this Chinese military build-up, the reaction of the Asian and other important littoral nations has been as under: • South Korea plans to spend US$ 550 billion over the next 15 years to modernise and upgrade its Armed Forces. Of this US$ 208 billion would be spent on arms. • Japan plans to spend some US$ 289 billion between 2011-2015 to buy new weapon systems for its navy and air force. • Australia has laid out a plan to expend some US$ 279 billion on arms over the next 20 years in response to China’s military build-up. This is the biggest ever expansion of its military since the Second World War.

The Indian context: India is in a two and a half front scenario. Not only does it have to contend with a rising China to the north, it has also to deal with a nuclear armed Pakistan that China and the USA are arming at hugely subsidised rates. There is also the threat of Jihadi Terror and Left Wing Extremism in its rear. In response, India has focused primarily on its economic liberalisation and modernisation since 1990. The simple fact is that in 1990, India’s entire Soviet era capital military stock of combat aircrafts, helicopters, tanks, artillery and naval ships / submarines was due for turnover. This turnover had to be postponed for over two decades due to severe economic constraints. Now our economy has gained traction and is in a position to fund our military modernisation. India today has the fourth largest GDP in the world. Despite this, we have singularly failed so far to convert our growing economic power to military power in a realistic

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INDIA’S INADEQUATE RESPONSE

time frame and have hung on piteously to the coat tails of America to bail us out whenever Pakistan has launched masscasualty terror strikes in this country. This makes nonsense of our well advertised desire to become a regional and global power of consequence. Unfortunately the politico-bureaucratic gridlock caused by the Bofors scam has slowed our weapons acquisition programme to a crawl. So far India has spent US$ 30 billion to buy the Su-30 and Mig-29 fighters, T-90 tanks and Scorpene AIP submarines. Over the next decade it is likely to spend another US$ 100 billion on arms imports. Thus India’s defence expenditure within the next decade plus is likely to be in the range of US$ 130-150 billion. This is far less than the arms expenditure contemplated by South Korea, Japan or Australia in response to the Chinese threat. Arms build-ups can be capability based or threat based. In our case it will have to be based on a combination of both parametres. The urgent need of the hour is to speed up and de-glitch this process. We do not have to tolerate any form of corruption or malpractices. At the same time, over-caution cannot be stretched to such limits that it takes decades to induct any major weapon systems. This opens up huge windows of vulnerability which our adversaries would be tempted to exploit. It also leads to huge cost escalations and time overruns. Any firm that loses a contract can throw a spanner in the works by raising strident accusations of corruption. Most such scandals usually surface at the time of transfer of technology (TOT). We should not be taken for a ride. The Bofors scandal erupted after the 400 guns were purchased off the shelf. The TOT to manufacture a 1,000 medium guns in our country was the first casualty. That was 1987. The gun, by itself was good and proved itself on the battlefield but the Indian Army has not received a single medium gun since then. We are yet to see anyone being punished or even held guilty but our military modernisation process has been set-back by over two decades and badly needed medium guns are nowhere in sight. The same is true of our antiquated Army Aviation fleet as also our AD equipment. The only casualty of this gridlock is our national security and the preparedness of our Armed Forces for conflict. We may have to fine-tune our acquisition

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procedures to see that we are not taken for a ride repeatedly and perhaps firms are blacklisted only when they are found to be guilty. We cannot afford this dysfunctional state of affairs in our critical arms acquisition process. It must be reiterated that the recapitalisation of our entire Armed Forces had become due in 1990. We can aspire to become a true blue regional power and an aspiring super power only if and when we complete our long overdue military modernisation process. Autarky: Creating a defence industrial base. This gets us to the critical issue of autarky. How can a nation which imports 70 per cent of its critical weapon systems have any degree of autarky so essential for a great State status? Frankly, the quick fix of licensed production has only delayed genuine indigenisation in India. We should never have closed the HF-24 line and dispersed our design teams. Post the Soviet collapse when we were desperately shopping for spares in Russia, the Chinese were body shopping for the out of job Soviet aeronautical engineers. We totally missed that opportunity because our bureaucrats felt that no scientist or designer should have a higher pay than the cabinet secretary! Those who throw peanuts only get monkeys in return. We have no dearth of talent. We must create a viable Defence Industrial Base in our country by involving the Private Sector in a very big way. Today we have a major youth bulge and growing unemployment. The raising of a defence industrial base in our own country will create jobs here instead of in America or Europe. The Indian Navy has been relatively more successful at indigenisation because it has adopted a participative and collaborative approach instead of an adversarial role of a disinterested and uninvolved testing agency that focuses only on the critiquing aspect. The army and air force have much to learn from the Indian Navy in this regard. The DRDO has been tall on promise and low on delivery. Part of the fault is in its public sector culture of bureaucracy and redtape that does not help to attract and retain talented individuals. That can only come with privatising this entire defence industry sector at the earliest possible. To begin with we should raise foreign equity levels to 50 per cent or more to draw the needed competencies. It is amazing that despite our prowess in software engineering we do not manufacture our own electronic chips. In the information age this would be the first vital base of our military info-structure which will then be secure. We have the requisite talent. The Arjun was based on the Leopard design. After 30 years of a painful development and learning process marked with much acrimony, it has emerged as a splendid tank and we must optimise this success to the hilt. The Arjun Mk II must replace the T-72. The heavy Centurian had done quite well in the plains of Punjab in 1965 and decisively won the battle of Khem Karan. With its power to weight ratio that is better than the T-90s, there is no reason why the Arjun cannot replace the T-72 even in the Punjab terrain. We must insist on quality assurance and go ahead with our own home grown products. There must however be clear development time lines laid down to finalise our make or buy decisions especially in situations that involve ongoing operations. As far back as the Sri Lanka war we had found our Sten Machine Carbines to be sub-optimal. The round was far too low powered and the carbine very prone to accidental discharge. It was therefore kept safely inside the Kotes and never taken out in combat thereafter. It is amazing that 24 years after this discovery we have still failed to replace this basic and simple weapon. The 5.56 INSAS Rifle similarly has been found to be underpowered for CI / CT operations and prone to breakages of plastic parts like the magazine. We could wait so long for the Arjun because fortunately there has been no war involving tanks. The Infantry however has been in CI / CT operations right throughout and lost many good men. The pace of decisions cannot be the same in such operational situations. Could these small arms not have been given to our civil industry to strike up the right collaborations with the leading players in the field and come up with top of the line products which are needed not only for the army but also for the police and CPOs in very large numbers. We are one of the most combat tested armies in the world. Why have we not created our own ORSA data bases and come out with designs suitable to our operational context and requirements. In war there are no prizes for runners-up. We have great talent. After all the BrhaMos, the Dhruva and our array of ballistic missles are a success story. We need to go more for the joint development model of the BrahMos and the fifth generation fighter type. Contracts why should we not exploit our success in the field of missiles? With the development of DF- 21D Anti-Access (or simply aircraft carrier killer) missile, the Chinese have managed to threaten the very existence of aircraft carriers. Since the Chinese have reactivated the former Soviet Veryag (and reportedly are going for two more) donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t we also need to develop this class of missiles? We also need the ICBM class of missiles with their greater throw-weight and range to strike critical targets in China with MIRVed warheads. There is an urgent need to develop a defence industrial base in India that is built around our private sector with its proven efficiency and innovation track record. Only then will we be able to achieve true autarky.

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interview

Bharat Dynamics Limited is the nodal agency for the manufacture of indigenous missile systems and munitions. Maj Gen Khetarpal, Chairman and Managing Director, BDL gave a wide-ranging interview to DSA. Excerpts from the interview.

DSA:

Firstly, let me congratulate you for receiving one of the largest ever orders for missile systems in March. I understand it is over US$ 3 billion. From this it appears that, BDL is well on its way to a very bright future.

Maj Gen Khetarpal: Yes ... It is with a great sense of satisfaction I would like to say that BDL has signed a historic contract with MoD for supply of the Akash weapon system for the Army. DSA: Apart from Akash SAMs what are the other products of BDL? Maj Gen Khetarpal: BDL is the prime production agency for manufacture of Anti Tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs). The Company is also manufacturing Surface-to-Air Missiles (SAMs) for the Armed Forces and Decoys for the Indian Air Force. The Indian Navy has also placed orders for Torpedos and Counter Measure Systems. We are also associated with other DRDO programmes.

Interview with Maj Gen Ravi Khetarpal VSM, (retd) Chairman and Managing Director

Bharat Dynamics Limited Hyderabad, India. Team DSA

DSA: What are the growth plans of BDL and how is the Company gearing up to achieve them? Maj Gen Khetarpal: BDL achieved a record turnover of Rs. 627 Crore, a growth of over 35 per cent for the financial year 2009-10, which was the highest since inception of the Company in 1970. This year too, we have grown by nearly 50 per cent and have a huge order book position. BDL is now at the threshold of taking a quantum leap in its turnover. Further, many more projects are in the offing. We are in discussions with the Indian Armed Forces and OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) for production of third generation ATGMs and Air Defence Missiles of different ranges. With these projects, BDL will achieve a multi-fold increase in its turnover in the near future and would be well placed to become a NAVRATNA Company. DSA: As we know, the Armed Forces are for modernisation and upgrading their weapon systems. What are the expansion plans of BDL to meet these requirements? Maj Gen Khetarpal: BDL has already set up its third manufacturing unit at Vishakhapatnam to meet the exclusive requirements of the Indian Navy. The Company is also exploring the possibility of acquiring land in 2-3 more locations in AP and in other states for production of new generation missiles and associated equipment. DSA: Apart from licence products in collaboration with foreign OEMs, does BDL manufacture its own products? Maj Gen Khetarpal: The emphasis of the Company so far was on undertaking licence production as per agreements / contracts entered between Government of India and foreign OEMs. BDL had no significant R and D of its own. However, based on current thrust towards indigenisation and R and D, BDL developed a few test equipment for ATGMs and also modified vintage ATGM launchers, which was well received by the Indian Army. BDL has also developed a Counter Measure Dispensing System (CMDS) for a variety of Aircraft. DSA: As a rapidly expanding Company, how are you meeting your Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) goals? Maj Gen Khetarpal: As a responsible Company, BDL has been taking initiatives from time to time which proves that a Company’s business can go beyond “Business”. The Company has also adopted two villages in backward areas of Andhra Pradesh. We repaired school building and focused attention on school-going children in terms of books, uniforms, drinking water facilities and toilets, etc. We also sponsored Midday meals for students of Zila Parishad High Schools located in the backward areas in Medak district of Andhra Pradesh. BDL recently donated money for purchase of a vehicle for distribution of food to students and has sponsored meals though an internationally reputed NGO. For the year 2011-12, BDL has formulated a new CSR policy as per the guidelines given by DPE. More than Rs. One Crore has been earmarked for CSR activities. DSA: Corporate governance is one of the major focus areas of PSEs today. What initiatives has BDL taken in this regard? Maj Gen Khetarpal: To ensure corporate governance and transparency in all areas of functioning, a number of initiatives have been taken by BDL like ‘e’ auction and ‘e’ procurement, placing maximum relevant information on the BDL website, having Independent Directors on the Board, preparing Citizen’s Charter etc. Recently, two Independent External Monitors have also been nominated for BDL and we will soon be coming out with an Integrity Pact to be signed between vendors

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

Maj Gen Khetarpal with Mr A K Antony, Hon'ble Defence Minister, Govt. of India and BDL for high value purchases. DSA: With increasing competition from the private sector, growing orders and demanding customers, how is BDL gearing itself to meet the challenges? Maj Gen Khetarpal: BDL is aware that changing needs of the Armed Forces are becoming more and more complex and sophisticated. We are also aware that consequent to changes to DPP 2011, BDL needs to compete with the private sector and with other world class companies in the same field. In order to meet these challenges, the Company is looking at forming JVs / signing of MoUs with reputed OEMs / PSus and modernising and streamlining the production facilities. We would also need to acquire state-of-the-art technologies to meet the challenges. Actions have already been initiated also to widen the vendor base. With all these actions we, at BDL, are confident of meeting the demands of the customers to their entire satisfaction. September 2011 Defence AND security alert

Industry

Monitor “Prahaar” on the

Fifth-generation fighter unveiled time at the air show in Moscow. prototype of the fifth generation Russia-India fighter was shown to the public for the first by senior staff of the Indian watched envelope gravity low a in bility manoevra its off Still in the design stage it showed experts an Indian version. Air Force and the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited which will jointly develop with Russian first being the resoundingly The second example of a new template of joint development of weapons platforms - the Armed Forces - the fifth Indian successful BrahMos multipurpose missile that is now in operational service with the the Indian users. These of demands the with generation fighter will have more stringent specifications in keeping and weapons navigation between workload the of n distributio for include stealth, extreme agility, a two-pilot cockpit engine. powerful more a and ) peacetime during training al operation for utilised be also can manager (the second seat ted four generations of The experience gained by working jointly with a design bureau that has accumula aircraft inclusive of fighter Indian truly a of ent developm s indigenou for bedrock the expertise could become m. millenniu 21st the of engine and airframe design that will meet the challenges of the second half

Hiccups in Indo

ven though Indi a has given the US military-indu and 2011 the US strial complex a insistence on str bonanza of Rs. 31 ict control on du CISMOA (Comm ,100 crore in orde al-use technology unication as Inte rs between 2004 and the applicatio roperability and Cooperation Agre n of intrusive US Se curity Memoran ement); and LSA laws like the dum Of Agreem (Logistics Supply Nirupama Rao ent); BECA (Bas Agreement) has put it thus: “The ic Exchange an given India cause re is a shared pe underperformed d fo r complaint. Form rception that th and underachiev er Foreign Secret e High Technolo ed especially in focus to jointly ar y gy Co operation Group commercial secto promote cooper has, in a sense, rs.” Rao insiste ation in research lost out on the d an on reciprocity d development, Indian contract and a shift in design, commer for the medium on. If we are to cialisation and multi-role comba be “strategic pa production. Hav t aircraft, the Am rtners” then the Nirupama Rao de ing ericans have so US will have to livered. mething to chew shed some of its Cold War baggag e was the messa ge

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

Cross-mountain artillery lift gadget

iven the slow pace of infrastr ucture developm Himalayas in th ent in the e face of a grow “two-front” war ing Chinese thre against the combi at and a likely ned strength of Pa the Indian Ordn kistan and China, ance Factory Bo ard has dusted cradle on which out an old desig the 105 mm Indian n of a field gun can be air to prepared artil lifted by helicopte lery nests along r tactically importa Line of Actual Co nt approaches to ntrol with China the all along the Him The cradle ensure alayas. s that the underslu ng weapon does of gravity of the not disturb the ce helicopter thus m ntre aking it easier to keeping it within transport the gu a rigid frame. Th n by e earlier method load with wire ca of carrying an un bles tended to ca derslung use a lot of sway helicopter and pu thereby destabilis tting pressure on ing the th e pilot. The rigid the load tends to centreline alignm dampen sway. ent of

-US military trad

horizon

he ripples caused by Pakistan’s te sting of its shor capable multi-ba t-range nuclear rrel missile syste 60-80 km had ha m the Nasr with rdly abated befo a range of re India launche missile intended d its own 150-km for battlefield do Prahaar mination along 155 mm Bofors, th the fourth tier w e 214 mm Pinaka ith the multibarrel rock Smerch with a m et system and th aximum range of e 300 mm 90 km covering territory from th a wide swathe of e international bo Pakistani rder to the outer Headquarters in fringes of the Pa Rawalpindi. ki sta n Army Pakistan has posit ed the Nasr as its answer to the quick as “cold start” ad -reaction doctrin opted after the un e described acceptably slow deployment of th pace of the Oper e Indian Army in ation Parakram re sponse to the atta a nuclear-capabl ck on the Indian e missile and give Parliament. It is n Pakistan's avow weapons, it has ed policy of “Firs sought to raise th t Use” of nuclear e deterrence quot the Prahaar will ient a couple of have a dissuasiv notches. Hopeful e effect of its ow metres of an enem ly, n. It can deliver y target which, if its payload with it is a thermobar ensure the compl in te n ic (fuel-air explos ete destruction of ive) warhead, w the target even if ill it is a near miss.

Basic trainer airc

raft in quagmire

he Indian Air Fo rce has been lim ping along withou after two design t a basic trainer air flaws were discov craft grounded the fle ered in the HPTet in 2009. In wha 32 HAL-created trainer t has now becom procurement team e an occupationa is faced with alleg l hazard the ations of favouriti that won the cont sm shown to the ract. It is alleged Swiss firm by the loser the Ko winner Swiss Pilat rean Aerospace Lt us company had d. that the not included the in its quotation an cost of transfer of d had therefore se te chnology cu red unfair advant This has become age in the biddin a favourite metho g. d of delaying m the Indian Armed uch-wanted equi Forces. Similar all pment for egations in the pa the Ministry of De st have been dealt fence by scrappin with by g the deal and, in 155 mm longer-ra some cases like nge howitzer tw that of the o firms have been that India has still blacklisted and th not got a new 155 e result was mm artillery afte the Bofors scam. r more than a quar Will the same th ter century of ing happen to th e basic trainer? September 2011 Defence AND security alert

land forces

Situational or battlespace awareness is a sine qua non of the modern battlefield which is characterised by hitherto unimaginable levels of transparency. This has to be a major thrust area and must include both the satellites and the terrestrial infrastructure of launch sites, tracking, telemetry and control (TT&C) facilities and the data links that bind the system together. India has a very high degree of core competency in the space sector. The ISR architecture will entail the use of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), Geo-synchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAVs) and Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs).

ilitary capability to protect the nation’s core values and interests is essential to prevent subjugation and preserve own freedom of action. Defence thinkers continue to search for the one singular elixir that will deliver operational success. While technology has thrown up many tantalising possibilities and has offered us the potential to change the way we choose to fight, the silver bullet which can deliver all-encompassing success is as elusive now as it was in the years gone by.

While there may be no proverbial silver bullet to win future conflict, the side that has better situational awareness is more favourably placed to achieve victory. The knowledge of the strength, dispositions, capabilities and likely intentions of friendly and hostile forces will remain a key battle winning factor. This by itself is not a new thought or opinion. As Sun Tzu observed in another age and era: ‘It is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for purposes of spying and thereby they achieve great results. Spies are a most important element in war, because upon them depends an army’s ability to move’1. In Sun Tzu’s time, two and a half thousand years ago, dependence was solely on human intelligence. Today, technology has given us the power to look all across the battle space – a function not possible in Sun Tzu’s era. The ability to look deep into the enemy’s rear is dependant to a large extent on space domination – and the side which dominates space will have the edge in future conflict.

Indian imperatives

■■ Maintaining a high state of operational readiness at all times. ■■ Timely warnings of enemy build-up in our areas of concern. ■■ The ability to engage hostile forces all across the combat zone. Domination of space would be essential to achieve the above. This implies the ability to control the use of space, at times and places of one’s own choosing, while denying an opponent the same ability. 1. Sun Tzu: The Art of War; Edited by James Clavell, Dell Publishing, New York, 1988; p 82. September 2011 Defence AND security alert

Maj Gen Dhruv C Katoch SM, VSM (retd)

Neither today’s conflicts nor the wars of tomorrow will have a clearly definable, two-dimensional battlefield. This has given way to battle space. In the Indian context, it encompasses our landmass and island territories, the high seas, ocean depths, airspace, space, cyberspace and the electro-magnetic spectrum. It also includes the minds of our leadership and the population of the country. The spectrum of conflict cannot be perceived in terms of a neat easily comprehended linear escalator – with peace at one end and war at the other. It will remain a continuum within which lie a range of military and non-military conflict prevention, conflict and post conflict activities. The distinction between these is blurred.

India’s dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir has already led to four major conflicts, the last being Kargil where Pakistan once again suffered a humiliating defeat. But this has not lessened the prospects for future conflict. On India’s border with Tibet, differences with China over territorial claims could once again lead to conflict. With two of our major neighbours then, the casus belli for future conflict exists. This necessitates that our field force must have the capability to take to field at short notice and have the capacity and capability to defend our national interests. In turn, this would imply:

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FUTURE COMBAT MILIEU

dominating space:

the key to battlefield success Space domination

Most measures aimed at information superiority and battlefield transparency are space based with a very heavy dependence on satellites. War fighting capability to win within an acceptable time frame would demand battlefield tempo and simultaneity in actions. The former can be achieved by effectively exploiting situational awareness to enable better and faster decision-action relative to that of our enemies. The aim here is to get inside the enemy’s decision-action cycle by exploiting information and acting upon it before the enemy has time to react. Simultaneity implies the ability to address the enemy all across the battle space, simultaneously. The aim is to overload the enemy’s command set up, denying him the ability to concentrate on one problem at a time, or even establish priorities between problems. This would require improved collaborative planning between components and levels of command and better execution of coordinated action throughout the battle space. The enabling technology is digitisation of command systems, weapon platforms and structures. Military satellites are critical to the above operations.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

land forces

ISR in the modern battlefield cannot be devoted to ‘one run over the target area’ surveillance. It has to be continuous and on line. Thus, the ISR architecture will entail the use of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), Geo-synchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites, Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles (UCAVs) and Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Middle Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites have a large ‘dead time’ (the time over the ocean) and hence are not suitable for supporting land operations This then has to be a major thrust area and must include both the satellites and the terrestrial infrastructure of launch sites, tracking, telemetry, and control (TT and C) facilities and the data links that bind the system together. Own systems need to be protected while capability to destroy enemy systems must be developed. India has a very high degree of core competency in the space sector. This needs to be dovetailed into a defensive framework. For effective and timely force generation and battlefield domination, the force must have real-time ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) capability. In the operational / tactical sense, ISR, via aerial / ground platforms and sensors, means the integration of ISR systems to permit commanders to comprehend the battlefield in real-time. This would permit reduced force generation time tactically as also maintain the battlefield tempo. Technology of course cannot be a stand-alone system and would have to be supplemented by

land forces

FUTURE COMBAT MILIEU Human Intelligence (HUMINT). But an aggressive peacetime ISR would enable both monitoring of the war preparedness of the adversary and his intent. ISR in the modern battlefield cannot be devoted to ‘one run over the target area’ surveillance. It has to be continuous and on line. Thus, the ISR architecture will entail the use of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS), Geo-synchronous Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAVs) and Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Middle Earth Orbit (MEO) satellites have a large ‘dead time’ (the time over the ocean) and hence are not suitable for supporting land operations. GEO satellites, with large coverage, would support ISR requirements of a strategic nature, while LEO satellites would play an effective role in the command and control of interactive systems in the battlefield since it has a low ‘latency’ signature (time delay for a signal from earth to the satellite and back). However, owing to their low orbit, a large number of such satellites would be required. This would derive positive advantage, as it would also cater to offset disruption in the event of a nuclear blast in space aimed at disabling the satellite communication and allied systems. The use of UAVs and UCAVs are going to be major battle winning factors in the years ahead. Their utility has been validated in some of the recent conflicts across the globe, such as the Gulf war where over 330 missions of the Israeli Pioneer UAVs were flown. The conflict in Bosnia too, has validated the concept and employment of UAVs. Over the last few years, the RQ-1 Predator drone has become the primary UCAV for offensive operations by the United States Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. Its utility reinforces the belief that UCAVs would soon become a

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

INDIAN CONSTRUCT

SHAPING THE REGION Lt Gen Arvind Sharma PVSM, AVSM, VSM (retd)

ubiquitous part of the future battlefield. Over the Tibetan plateau, the nature and vastness of terrain again places a very heavy premium on air assets. Control over the air would be an essential prerequisite for successful conduct of ground operations. Air capability to hit at targets at depth would necessitate having a strong and capable air force, superior to that of our potential adversary. Inability to defend our airspace may lead to unacceptable consequences in the ground battle.

Force modernisation Thrust on force modernisation must factor the reality of future conflict wherein space dominance will be an essential component of war fighting strategy. The major concern for India remains China, which will continue to be India’s long term strategic challenge. Military capabilities to address China would ipso facto be adequate to negate hostile designs by other countries on India’s periphery. Chinese capabilities in the field of information warfare, cyber warfare and integrated network electronic warfare are well developed and need to be countered. The thrust of modernising India’s Armed Forces must increasingly start looking towards space based assets. Besides budgetary allocation for space domination, we would also need to review our organisations and war fighting doctrines accordingly.

The writer is the Additional Director, Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), New Delhi, India.

The writer, former Army Commander Eastern Command, highlights the significant role that military diplomacy can play in the current geo-political context. He points out how the USA and China optimally exploit the facet of military diplomacy and how badly we have neglected this potent form of engagement. He highlights the significant success of military diplomacy when in January 2000, the then Indian Army Chief visited Yangon, to break the ice with the Generals ruling Myanmar and resulted in recasting our relations with that country. In the post Laden context, he feels that something similar can be achieved with the Generals in Pakistan. To add further muscle to military diplomacy, more high commissions / embassies should have DA’s posted to them. Today, the US and China have DA’s in approximately 100 countries, whereas we have them only in 39.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

land forces

ilitary diplomacy has been defined in varying terms, but is generally accepted as one of the tools in the conduct of a country’s diplomacy. The Indian Ministry of Defence (MoD) in its Annual Report of 2003-04 defines ‘Defence diplomacy’ as exchange of high level defence related visits, dialogue on security challenges and port calls; and defence cooperation as those activities covered by training exchanges, combined exercises; sourcing, development, production and marketing of defence equipment and other forms of cooperation. China, defines it as ‘foreign affairs work performed by defence institutions and Armed Forces’; it further amplifies that activities would be undertaken in consonance with general foreign and security guidelines set by the political leadership, but would have strategic and military significance. An American assessment states that Beijing uses its Armed Forces as an instrument of diplomacy to enhance China’s national power. The US describes it as an essential tool of foreign policy, not only at national level but also at the theatre strategic level. A comparison with other countries indicates that India has been rather conservative in using military diplomacy, as a tool of its foreign policy. The underlying cause of this conservative approach is perhaps enunciation of the policy of ‘Non-Alignment’ by Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. In his perception of the emerging global scenario, Indian defence forces had no significant role and therefore, did not find a place in our thinking while formulating foreign policy options. Subsequent military coups in our neighbouring countries perhaps fuelled the bureaucratic hypothesis of a coup, notwithstanding the apolitical nature of our defence forces and their unblemished record of six decades. Veteran Lt Gen S K Sinha, noting a recent statement of a senior minister in the UPA-II government, alluding to the possibility of a coup in India, wrote in the Asian Age of 13 April 2011 - “the civilian bureaucracy has been playing on the fears of the political leadership of the man on horseback and with the latter’s lack of knowledge and interest in matters military, has managed to have his way”. Consequently, in exercise of “civilian control”, the defence forces have been systematically relegated in the national warrant of precedence by government orders. Ironically, the defence forces

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INDIAN CONSTRUCT do not form part of any decision making mechanism of our country, including that dealing with internal and external threats! The much touted integration of MoD and the defence forces headquarters is merely cosmetic; military diplomacy is thus a systemic casualty.

Practicing military diplomacy USA, UK, members of NATO, China and Russia are ardent practitioners of military diplomacy. Military diplomacy has been gainfully utilised by the US theatre commanders to pursue its foreign policy goals, as witnessed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The US Chief of CENTCOM is known to frequently interact with the Pakistan Army Chief even on matters of foreign policy, the latter being the mentor of his country’s foreign policy. Military diplomacy practised by China comprises visits, exchange of delegations, seminars, sales of armaments and equipment; strategic level activities which include strategic dialogue, defence consultations, combined exercises and military education exchanges aimed at creating a sphere of influence. China believes that joint exercises with foreign armies also contribute to PLA modernisation, as it provides opportunities to improve its capabilities in areas such as counter terrorism, mobility operations and logistics. Though not explicitly defined, amongst other activities, the Chinese also undertake construction activities in which PLA personnel are employed in the garb of construction workers. While implementing their “String of pearls strategy”, China has developed the ports at Chittagong, Sittwe, Hambantota and Gwadar; they have now also taken on the development of the port at Colombo. In addition, the presence of approximately 11,000 PLA troops in the northern areas of Pakistan, viz. Gilgit-Baltistan, has its own ramifications. The troops are reportedly involved in construction work; this activity in an undeveloped area of Gilgit, can only be in furtherance of their strategy of using military diplomacy, to create a sphere of influence. Besides, there has been a discernible shift in China’s erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir policy of being non-intrusive, to refusal of visa to the General Officer Commanding in Chief, Northern Army and issue of stapled

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

visas to residents of the state wanting to visit China, since Jammu and Kashmir is ‘disputed’. A recent media report states that the International Seabed Authority has permitted China to undertake exploration for poly-metallic sulphides in the Central Indian Ocean. This, in concert with Chinese modus operandi, should commence soon and would be a precursor to a legitimate deployment of elements of the PLA Navy in the Indian Ocean. The above inputs, a part of China’s military diplomacy are a matter of grave security concern for India. In the domain of foreign relations, India has regrettably, failed to create trust and goodwill with its neighbours except with Bhutan; military relations have therefore, also suffered. China seized this opportunity with alacrity and engaged our neighbours in military diplomacy, to our discomfiture. The latter were more than willing as China was an ally to counter ‘Big Brother’ India.

The Indian method An eminent defence analyst, C Raja Mohan, in an article in August 2010 stated that while the civilian bureaucracy and the political leadership in our MoD continue to constrain the Indian military’s engagement with the world, China is consciously promoting it. An affirmation of the above observation was the recent denial of permission to the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) to attend an international conference hosted by the US Pacific Command in Singapore, in the last week of July, where Chiefs of 23 Armies including China were to attend (incidentally, General Deepak Kapoor, the previous COAS, had attended this conference in 2009!). This coupled with disparaging diktats of the government like the ‘gag order on media interaction’ and others, not only erodes the global image of the Indian defence forces, but also affects their morale. Notwithstanding the above, over the past few years, there has been a marginal improvement in our efforts at military diplomacy. There has been an increase in the number of joint training exercises that have taken place between units of the Indian Army and the US Army. Our army personnel have also held training exercises with troops of UK, Russia, China’s PLA and the Mongolian Army. In addition, these

have also been held with Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and Philippines. We have also been imparting training in counter insurgency operations to personnel of the US and the Nepalese Army at our training institutions. We continue with a significant contribution to the United Nations Peace Keeping Operations by providing the required units and officers as observers; an important facet of military diplomacy, as it indicates our willingness to fulfil our obligations in international relations. Our defence industry has been unable to fulfil even our domestic needs and retains the woes of the public sector; the private sector still remains peripheral in our defence industrial base due to archaic security perceptions. It has thus provided an opportunity to our adversary to exploit this aspect of military diplomacy, resulting in rapid proliferation of Chinese weapon systems in our neighbourhood.

The way ahead Our current capability in military diplomacy is rather restricted. It will be in our national interest to give impetus to it in conformity with international global practices; some suggestions are enumerated below. The first and foremost which requires attention is our defence industrial base. Our policy formulations need revision to galvanise the public sector defence industries and encourage private sector participation, as witnessed in developed countries. It would enable us to market munitions and equipment, which would provide us long term benefits, the manner in which USA and China are selling to all and sundry. This is an absolute imperative if we have to counter the Chinese ingress, which has taken place even in our neighbouring countries. The existing government orders prohibit defence officers’ interaction with foreign officers. It is indeed paradoxical that even after an officer has trained in a foreign country for a few weeks / months, he is not permitted any further contact with the foreign officers on return to India. Similarly, if a foreign officer attends a training course in India, his Indian colleagues or members of the teaching faculty cannot communicate with him once he returns to his parent country. Even officers posted as Defence

Attaches (DA’s) to various countries have to sever their links with the country they were stationed in, on reversion to India. These orders are anachronistic in today’s environment which is flooded with social networking systems in multifarious modes of communication and consequential transparency! Whatever knowledge, insight, contacts, networking or influence an officer may have gained professionally cannot be leveraged even in organisational or national interest. These archaic rules need immediate review. Revised orders should allow select officers, who trained abroad or trained foreigners in India and ex-DA’s to maintain formal, informal and social contact with foreign army officers, to be able to leverage these contacts in practice of military diplomacy, in organisational interests. To obviate lapses in execution of this interaction, the immediate superior officer of the select officer, should be in the knowledge loop. Despite sustained diplomatic engagement the major stumbling block in ushering change in South Asia is the strained Indo-Pak relations. It is well known that even when a ‘democratically’ elected government is in place Pakistan Army ‘calls the shots’. Pakistan Army thrives on the bogey of Indian threat and is averse to a rapprochement, notwithstanding the current negative fallout of home grown terrorism. Official dialogue and Track 2 diplomacy with Pakistan have not borne fruit. However, post the Osama bin Laden and PNS Mehran incidents, with changed public perceptions and the environment, it may be an opportune time to introduce military diplomacy in the Indo-Pak dialogue, as soldiers can certainly empathise better. A precedence of military diplomacy succeeding exists when in January 2000, the then Indian Army Chief visited Yangon, to break the ice with the Generals ruling Myanmar and resulted in recasting our relations with that country, which have prevailed to date. Besides, despite the unresolved border with China, we have been actively engaging each other as part of military diplomacy. Why not a similar approach with Pakistan? Achieving a turnaround in the thinking of their army will be arduous and painstaking, as they are loath to accept anything but their own

primacy in Pakistan’s national power structure. A carefully crafted interaction between the Indian and Pakistan Army can break the logjam of many decades. To add further muscle to military diplomacy, more high commissions / embassies should have DA’s posted to them. Today, the US and China have DA’s in approximately 100 countries, whereas we have them only in 39. An increase of DA’s would not only make available military advice to more Ambassadors, but also provide diplomatic exposure to more officers and increase visible presence of our defence forces globally. If we are to make military diplomacy a part of our foreign policy apparatus, a radical shift in the thinking and attitude of our political leadership is warranted wherein soldiers are trusted and respected - a la the USA. Their President, regularly finds time to share the grief of the families of soldiers killed in action! Regrettably, our soldiers are venerated and perfunctorily cared for only till a war lasts. Thereafter, not only are they neglected but to exercise “civilian control” (sic), denigrated by the prevalent system. If the defence forces are to meaningfully contribute to successful military diplomacy, besides a change in the attitude of the powers that be, they must be allocated appointments and coalesced into the National Security establishment.

Conclusion In view of the foregoing, it is evident that our construct of military diplomacy is still in the formative stage and its capacity of influencing nations in the region limited. In order to maximise our potential in the realm of military diplomacy, we need to implement systemic changes in all that bedevils the structure. The writer is a former General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Eastern Army Command. His operational responsibility encompassed borders with China, Myanmar and Bangladesh; all troops including Assam Rifles deployed in the north-eastern states for counter-insurgency operations were part of his command. An infantry officer, in his four decades plus of service in the army, he has dealt with insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir and the north-eastern states.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

land forces

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HONOUR

An educative article that talks of the erosion of the soldier’s izzat and standing in society that is symptomatic of the sad decline in civil-military relations in our country in recent times. The Army Act and other provisions made in the British era confer a host of privileges upon the Armed Forces. Perhaps the only way soldiers can redeem some of their lost privileges is by insisting on them. Most of the service privileges are still in existence. The concerned agencies such as the judiciary, bureaucracy, police etc. do not extend them to soldiers primarily because of ignorance. One can hardly blame them, since most men in uniform are themselves unaware of what they are entitled to.

RESTORING

THE SOLDIER’S IZZAT

Maj Gen V K Singh (retd)

God and Soldier, we alike adore When on the brink of danger, not before The danger past, both are alike requited God is forgotten, and the soldier slighted. – Anon

ld soldiers often lament that the soldier’s izzat is no longer what it used to be. During the British Raj, a soldier was treated with respect not only by his family, community and village but also by government officials. If one examines the records of the Military Department in the National Archives, one will be surprised to find that more than half the correspondence between the Governor General (later the Viceroy) and the Board of Governors of the East India Company (later the Secretary of State) concerned the welfare of soldiers. Except for purely military grievances, every complaint or petition from a soldier went up the chain through the Collector, Commissioner and Governor, right up to the Governor General. All such cases were duly reported to London, including those that were satisfactorily resolved. In fact, the annexation of Oudh in 1856 was one of the major causes of the Indian Mutiny a year later. With the abolition of the office of the Resident, to whom soldiers could go directly, an important avenue for addressing their grievances was removed. This caused considerable dissatisfaction in the Oudh soldiery, which formed the bulk of the Bengal Army, leading to the Mutiny. The British knew that they had to rely on the Indian Army to maintain their hold on the British Empire, not only in India but other colonies in the vicinity. To ensure that the soldier was given due respect (izzat), his special position and status was formalised in various rules and regulations, most of which exist even today. These ‘Service Privileges’ have gradually been eroded and few people in the government are aware of them. Unfortunately, we can only blame ourselves for this state of affairs. Very few officers, even of senior rank, are aware of these privileges and the percentage of enlisted men who know about them is almost zero. Naturally, very few of them insist on enforcement of their rights. As a result, these privileges have all but vanished. This is the primary reason for the change in the status of the soldier and his izzat.

What is izzat? In the army, units and formations are proud of their izzat, based on victories in battle and gallantry awards. There is no greater motivating factor for troops, especially the infantry, than the izzat of the paltan. Like the army or a unit, the soldier too has his izzat, which indicates his station in society. Though the literal meaning of izzat may be respect or honour, it has a wider connotation when used for the soldier. Honour, respect, esteem, regard, appreciation and affection are terms that are often used to express the feelings of the common man towards the soldier, but the word that describes it best is izzat.

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Service privileges Soldiers enjoy certain statutory rights and privileges. Most of these are applicable to serving personnel. However, a few e.g. getting their houses vacated by tenants, are applicable even after retirement. These rights and privileges are given in various Acts and Regulations, as given in the succeeding paragraphs. Army Act 1950, Section 25. This section provides that the salary of a soldier will be paid to him without any deduction, except when provided by another section of the Army Act itself or another Act of Parliament. The Army Act specifies the deductions that can be made from a soldier’s salary e.g. in case of loss or damage due to neglect, by sentence of court martial, when awarded rigorous imprisonment etc. The Income Tax Act also provides for deduction of tax at source. Other than these, all deductions are technically illegal and can be challenged in courts.

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Based on advice from the central government, almost all states have included special provisions for members of the Armed Forces. Under these, a serving or retired soldier, or his widow, can get house that was let out before his retirement vacated Army Act 1950, Sections 28 and 29. Section 28 provides immunity from attachment of pay and property, by any court. In effect, this section protects the pay and property of a soldier from attachment if he defaults on loan re-payments, even if the property in question has been hypothecated or mortgaged. Section 29 provides immunity from arrest for debt. Soldiers who are arrested can claim damages, without payment of court fee. (The banks and finance companies that give loans to soldiers are probably not aware of these provisions. Mercifully, they have never been misused). Army Act 1950, Section 30. Persons attending court martial, including witnesses are immune from arrest. Those who are arrested can be discharged under orders of the court martial. Army Act 1950, Section 31. Reservists are entitled to the rights given in section 28 and 29, when called out for service or training. Army Act 1950, Section 32. This provides for priority in respect of litigation and is one of the most important privileges. If the CO certifies that a soldier has been given leave for defending a suit and specifies the exact duration and dates, the court must decide the case during this period, or record the reasons for its inability to do so and give a copy of this to the soldier. Most courts are unaware of this provision, but readily comply when presented with the certificate. Several years ago, an officer appealed to the High Court when the lower court did not consider his request for priority under this section. The High Court commented adversely on the ignorance of the concerned magistrate and gave directions that he should finally decide

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HONOUR the case during the next hearing or record his reasons for not being able to do so. Indian Soldiers Litigation Act, 1925. Section 6 of this Act provides that if a soldier serving under special conditions e.g. in an operational area, is involved in a court case and is absent, the proceedings will be suspended to protect his interest. Section 9 provides that on receipt of a certificate from the CO that a soldier is serving under special conditions, the court has to postpone the proceedings till the soldier ceases to serve under these conditions. In practice, commanding officers prefer to send the men on leave even if the unit is heavily committed, not wishing to risk the issue of a summons or a contempt notice. Section 10 stipulates that if a decree is passed against the interest of a soldier serving under special conditions, it will be set aside. Courts often give ex parte judgements that are prejudicial to soldiers, who cannot be present on the dates when their cases are heard. This provision should be invoked to set aside such decrees. Code of Criminal Procedure 1973. The CrPC contains several useful provisions that protect troops against civil and criminal action while performing their duties. Section 45 prohibits the arrest of a soldier by civil police for anything done in performance of his official duties without the sanction of the central government. Section 197 (2) protects soldiers acting in discharge of their duties from prosecution. This is an important provision that protects soldiers who are ordered to open fire on civilians during disturbances and riots. Human Rights Groups are vehemently opposed to this provision, which they feel permits soldiers to carry out atrocities. Section 475 stipulates that persons held in civil custody, who can be tried by both civil and military courts, will be delivered to the CO for trial by court martial, by the court. If not in civil custody, the court will make efforts to apprehend the soldier, if requested by the CO. Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 (Rule 1 of Order XXVIII) and Regulations

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a commanding officer’s signature than our own organisations. Pension Act 1871, Section 11. The pension of a soldier is immune from attachment by any court. Indian Stamp Act 1899, Article 53 of Schedule 1. Receipts for pay and allowances of NCOs and OR do not require revenue stamps.

for the Army 534. This deals with the appointment of an attorney. A soldier who cannot obtain leave to prosecute or defend a court case can authorise anyone (not necessarily a lawyer) to do this on his behalf. The authority is to be signed by the CO. This is a very important privilege that is rarely used. Soldiers who cannot be present can authorise their relatives, friends or colleagues to represent them in courts. Except in cases involving detailed knowledge of law, a soldier need not engage a lawyer. Unfortunately, very few soldiers are aware of this provision. Regulations for the Army, Para 535. A Power of Attorney given by a soldier is exempt from court fees. This privilege is almost never used and soldiers are expected to pay stamp duties and court fees like everyone else. Sadly, even within the army most of us are not aware of this provision. It is interesting to note that while the lawmakers sought to exempt soldiers from paying stamp duties in order to reduce their financial burden, military authorities themselves do exactly the reverse. The Adjutant General’s Branch in army headquarters insists that tripartite agreements and surety bonds are affixed with court fee stamps when sanctioning loans. The Army Welfare Housing Organisation (AWHO) insists on affidavits and agreements on stamp paper duly attested buy a notary or magistrate. The latest entrant in the field, the Ex-Servicemen Contributory Health Scheme (ECHS) has gone a step further and wants affidavits on stamp papers attested by a magistrate. Apparently, the lawmakers and courts place a greater premium on the value of

Indian Tolls (Army and Air Force Act, 1901, Section 3. All army personnel are exempt from tolls when travelling on duty. This also applies to their families and followers. It includes tolls on ships, ferries, road bridges and turnpikes. If toll is recovered in contravention of these rules, the person collecting it is liable to pay a fine of fifty rupees. The soldier can claim compensation from the government for the loss. Personnel on casual leave are treated as being on duty. Tolls are now being charged on most national highways. Many of them are not aware of this provision. Some insist that only military vehicles are exempted. This is not correct - the exemption is for the soldier and his family and not the mode and type of transport being used. Vacation of Houses belonging to Soldiers. Rent control is a state subject and laws are passed by respective states. However, based on advice from the central government, almost all states have included special provisions for members of the Armed Forces. Under these, a serving or retired soldier, or his widow, can get house that was let out before his retirement vacated. The house will be vacated if it is needed for the soldier or his family for residential purposes. Where the soldier owns more than one house, this provision will apply for one house only. The provisions have been upheld by various judgements of High Courts as well as the Supreme Court in the case of “Surjit Singh Kalra vs. UOI and Others (JT 1991 (i) SC 417).”

would be vacated. In his judgement, the learned judge observed that one must remember the underlying intention of the legislature when making laws granting special privileges to soldiers. The nature of their calling forces soldiers to remain away from home for long periods and they cannot look after their property, which is often occupied or usurped by relatives or tenants. If the soldier were to always worry about a roof over his head or for his family, he would not be able to give his best to the service. It was to remove this feeling of uncertainty that this particular provision had been incorporated in the Rent Control Act. Hence, tenancy even of long duration should not come in the way of this provision. Arms Act, Section 45 and GOI, MHA letter No. 9/88/49-policy (i) dated 04 July 1950. Under this, commissioned officers are authorised to keep a pistol / revolver without a licence as long as they are in service, in addition to the service revolver / pistol issued to them. These provisions are reproduced in Paragraph 944 and 945 of the Regulations for the Army, Defence Services Regulations. At one time, the officers were permitted to import the pistol / revolver without paying custom duty, but this privilege was later withdrawn. The import of weapons has been banned since 1986, except for use by

sportsmen in shooting competitions. The possession and use of long bladed weapons such as swords, daggers and knives requires a licence. However, soldiers of Gurkha regiments are permitted to keep khukris and those of the Assam regiment dahs without a licence.

Role of the bureaucracy While it is true that the military itself is largely responsible for the denigration in its status after independence, the bureaucracy has also played a prominent part in this matter. Citing the principle of civilian control over the military, bureaucrats have played on the ignorance, naiveté and fears of politicians to systematically downgrade the status of the soldier, slowly but surely. The status of the Army Chief has been lowered several times in the Order of Precedence. In the famous dispute between the Viceroy (Curzon) and the Commander-in-Chief (Kitchener), it was the former who was recalled. Of course, this would be unthinkable today. But things have gone from bad to worse, especially in the last

Many years ago, there was a case in the Bombay High Court concerning a house purchased by an officer that was occupied by a tenant of long standing. The officer filed a civil suit to get the house vacated but lost, since the tenant pleaded that he had been staying there for many years and had no other place to live. The officer then appealed to the High Court that ordered that the house

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HONOUR

Perhaps the only way soldiers can redeem some of their lost privileges is by insisting on them. As already brought out, most of the service privileges are still in existence. The concerned agencies such as the judiciary, bureaucracy, police etc. do not extend them to soldiers primarily because of ignorance. One can hardly blame them, since most men in uniform are themselves unaware of what they are entitled to 30-40 years. When General Cariappa was the Army Chief, the Defence Secretary, Mr H M Patel, once asked all three Service Chiefs to attend a conference that he was to chair. Since the Service Chiefs were senior in rank to a secretary to the government, Cariappa refused to attend himself and sent his Chief of General Staff. He advised the other two Chiefs to follow suit. Unfortunately, they did not follow his advice. In his book, ‘A Soldier Recalls’, Lt General S K Sinha mentions the high level delegation that was sent to Karachi for a conference convened by the UN to delineate the Cease Fire Line. The delegation was headed by Lt General S M Shrinagesh, then GOC-in-C Western Command. The secretaries in the Department of Kashmir Affairs and in the Ministry of Defence were members of the delegation, which also included Maj General K S Thimayya and Brigadier S H F J Manekshaw. Though he was only a Major, Sinha was appointed the Secretary of the delegation. Today, a delegation with the same composition would be led by one of the secretaries, instead of the Army Commander. In recent years, we have seen how a serving Naval Chief was unceremoniously sacked, due to his differences with the civilian bureaucracy. Did anyone consider the effect on the morale of the navy, or of the other two services? This step has irretrievably eroded the izzat of the soldier, sailor and airman.

Give soldier his due It is a fallacy to think that the soldier’s izzat can be restored or enhanced by increasing his pay and perks. Neither can this be done by upgrading military ranks, so that they are on par with those of the civil bureaucracy. One veteran suggested an interesting solution increase the quota of rum that a soldier is permitted to draw while proceeding on leave. This is not as outlandish as it appears - it is a well known fact that in the undivided Punjab of pre-independence India, a soldier’s standing in his village depended on the quantity of rum he could offer his guests who called on him when he went on leave. This was also one of the biggest motivating factors for the youth of the Punjab to volunteer for service in the army. Perhaps the only way soldiers can redeem some of their lost privileges is by insisting on them. As already brought out, most of the service privileges are still in existence. The concerned agencies such as the judiciary, bureaucracy, police etc. do not extend them to soldiers primarily because of ignorance. One can hardly blame them, since most men in uniform are themselves unaware of what they are entitled to. Commanding Officers can play a key role in educating their men and encouraging them to make use of the privileges that affect them, such as priority in court cases, exemption from stamp duties, vacation of houses, exemption from tolls and so on. They must also be ready to take up cudgels on behalf of the men who are denied these privileges by civilian authorities. This will not only ameliorate the hardship faced by soldiers but also enhance their izzat. Retired personnel also play a major part in upholding the dignity of the soldier. There have been cases of general officers and brigadiers accepting second or third rung jobs in small companies. (Usually, officers of flag rank are sent on deputation as managing directors or vice presidents of large PSus). There are also examples of retired JCOs working as drivers, clerks and security guards. Such instances definitely lower the image and esteem of the service. One reason for the personnel taking up such assignments is lack of knowledge of the hierarchy prevalent in the corporate world. After all, how many of us know

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the difference between a managing director, an executive vice president and a CEO? Is the general manager senior or the executive director? What is the status of a consultant or an adviser? As mentioned earlier, the army should first set its own house in order before blaming others for not giving the soldier his due. A man in uniform should not be asked for affidavits attested by a magistrate - a certificate signed by him and countersigned by his commanding officer should be enough. It is easier to take action against a soldier who furnishes incorrect information in a certificate to his commanding officer than in an affidavit attested by a notary public. Until very recently, affidavits were unheard of within the service. They are asked for by civil courts, which have no other method of verifying the statements being made by litigants. The courts accept the signature of a commanding officer under Indian Soldiers Litigation Act, 1925, Section 9; Army Act, Section 32; and Code of Civil Procedure, 1908 (Rule 1 of Order XXVIII). If the courts are ready to accept documents signed by the commanding officer, is there any justification for our own organisations such as AWHO, ECHS etc. to insist on affidavits?

Conclusion There is no doubt that izzat of the soldier has gradually declined in the years after independence. The public makes much of soldiers during wars but forgets them soon afterwards. The Indian Army has always risen to the occasion when called upon to defend the nation’s borders, act against anti-national elements, assist civil authorities in maintaining law and order and in relief operations during natural calamities. Yet, the soldier does not get from his compatriots the respect that he deserves. Is a bit of izzat too much to ask from his compatriots?

The writer served in the Army for 35 years, his last appointment being Chief Signal Officer of the Western Command. In November 2000 he joined the Cabinet Secretariat, (R&AW), where he served up to June 2004, when he retired from government service. He has authored five books including India's External Intelligence - Secrets of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) in 2007.

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INTEGRATION

Brig (Dr) Anil Sharma (retd)

Manish Madaan

Anshu Paliwal

ARMY AIR DEFENCE: OVERCOMING OBSOLESCENCE

A modern day battle will invariably start as a jostling duel between an integrated air defence system and enemy’s effort to suppress or nullify or destroy it. The efficacy of the air defence system to prevail over enemy air power would be a key component in setting the stage for consequent victory. Today a major worry is old vintage of our air defence systems. Normal life span of a weapon platform is 15 to 20 years. However, our guns and missile systems are around 30 years old. They are not only obsolete but also show fatigue due to ageing of components material.

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he growing obsolescence, challenges and complexities of integrated employment of Army Air Defence system in the combat zone and its future requirements have been flagged in terms of voids in technology, equipment profile and organisational restructuring towards creation of an effective deterrent. The aim of this article is to investigate contours of Army Air Defence (AAD) capability and operations in present and short term / midterm future - five to ten years

assets in the battle space.

An integrated air defence system is an array of air defence sensors and shooters deployed in cohesive sync with a Control and Reporting system providing protection to high value

These components are interlinked by means of a Control and Reporting system. Control entails exercising operational control over all the shooters and reporting involves reporting of

The various components of this system are: ●● Detection system or sensors. Comprising AWACS, aerostats, radars and observers. ●● Weapon system or shooters. Comprising aircraft, missiles and guns. ●● Control centres. Comprising control centres at various levels.

all aerial activities by the sensors. The Control and Reporting system forms an integral component of Combat Information and Decision Support System. The threat manifested by various components of enemy air power includes: ●● At the low and medium level i.e. till ranges up to 60 km and altitude up to 5 km, the threat is from the fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, UAVs, precision guided munitions and cruise missiles. ●● At the high and extended level i.e. till ranges up to 90 km and altitude up to 18 km, the threat is from fighter aircraft, UAVs, anti-radiation missiles, tactical ballistic missiles and cruise missiles.

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Major worry is old vintage of our air defence systems. Normal life-span of a weapon platform is 15 to 20 years. However, our guns and missile systems are around 30 years old. They are not only obsolete but also show fatigue due to ageing of components material. This was evident during Operation Parakram. There is little doubt that the current air defence set-up may appear to be quantitatively adequate to face the challenge of aircraft attacks upon field formations, airbases and important installations in India. In qualitative terms it is not so, despite upgrades to radars, aircraft and missiles ●● Beyond these levels is the threat by the ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. Availability of a force multiplier like AWACS with the adversary will further compound the air threat. ●● Furthermore intense electronic warfare environment is prevalent in the air space throughout. The desired air defence weapon systems should therefore have the capabilities as illustrated. ●● Medium range surface to air missiles (SAMs) which would form air defence nodes, capable of destroying ballistic missiles, stealth aircraft and unarmed aerial vehicles (UAVs). ●● Self propelled short range SAMs for providing close air defence protection against multiple targets, to mechanised forces especially against attack helicopters. ●● Self propelled / towed gun missile systems with multiple target

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INTEGRATION handling capability, on-board ballistic computers, electro-mechanical power drives. Suggested parametres for guns and missiles are as follows: ── Fire control radars having multiple bands, frequency agility, multiple target tracking capability with built-in electronic counter counter measures. ── Tactical control radars having long range low level coverage, automated parallax correction and transmission of target coordinates to multiple weapon systems based on predicted threat zone. ── Modular designed identification of friend or foe system which is compatible with all users of air space. ── Digitised satellite communication system with built-in redundancy, frequency diversity and safeguards like firewalls will form the backbone of control and reporting system.

Evolving Indian air threat environment and stagnant AAD capabilities Air threat perceptions in India have remained centred on Pakistan and China. From sixties to eighties, aircraft was the only platform posing threat to ground based targets. Munitions used were guns, bombs - unguided and later on guided bombs and rockets. The attacking aircraft had to fly close to target areas varying from 400 to 1,000 metres depending on weapon and attack profile selected. Gradually precision guided weapons like TV/ laser guided bombs and anti-radiation missiles emerged. These could be launched from standoff ranges (beyond ground based air defence weapon ranges) varying from 4 to 15 km. The interceptor aircraft was considered the best option against these threats. As air launched threat became more sophisticated, our air defence (AD) guns, L-70, 23 mm ZU and Schilka and their radar systems were found to be not up to the mark to operate in intense electronic environment. In seventies and early eighties, India acquired series of Russian missile systems. These were surface to air missiles - SAM 2 and 3 (25 to 40 km range) for the air force, mainly for protection of bases and few strategic vulnerable areas. Army acquired self propelled SAM 6, SAM 8, Strela 10 and shoulder fired Iglas for mobile field formations. Strategic

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vulnerable areas / points (VAs / VPs) in the rear areas mainly depended on guns and aircraft for protection. Russian missile systems, particularly SAM 2 and 3 were old technology with low kill probabilities. Early warning radar cover and control and reporting system (C and R), which is nerve of any successful air defence mission, was archaic. Over a period of time Pakistan air force has modernised and so has Chinese air force. All the missile systems that we have in our inventory, can only engage airborne rockets / missiles flying only around one Mach (speed of sound – approximately 0.3 km/sec), that too if detected and tracked by acquisition and fire control radars. Even rudimentary ballistic missiles like Scud fly at the speed of 3 Mach or more, thus are beyond the engagement capability of our existing AD systems despite upgrades. Another major worry is old vintage of our air defence systems. Normal life span of a weapon platform is 15 to 20 years. However, our guns and missile systems are around 30 years old. They are not only obsolete but also show fatigue due to ageing of components material. This was evident during Operation Parakram. There is little doubt that the current air defence set-up may appear to be quantitatively adequate to face the challenge of aircraft attacks upon field formations, airbases and important installations in India. In qualitative terms it is not so, despite upgrades to radars, aircraft and missiles, However, in the absence of new acquisitions in sight we shall have to depend on it to provide defence against air and cruise missile attack (although inadequate) for the foreseeable future. The existing shortcomings of current air defence cover are summarised as follows: ●● At present, surface to air missile (SAM) defences are confined to relatively short-range defence of point targets. Area defence is almost exclusively the preserve of manned interceptors. ●● Many of the principal long-range 3-D (detecting range, bearing and height of airborne object) surveillance and ground control interception radars (GCI) are ageing. Most of the systems are of 1980s vintage and, despite being

upgraded, would provide inadequate detection capabilities against stealthy cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. ●● The AD surveillance, reporting and defence network is not fully extended nationwide. Defences are concentrated at targets within aircraft range from Pakistan and China. These are ineffective around increased number of strategically and economically vital targets deep within India’s heartland and in the south. ●● India’s surface to air missiles (SAMs) and also manned interceptor aircraft lack any meaningful capability against ballistic and cruise missiles, unarmed aerial vehicles (UAVs) and attack helicopters.

India today faces following threat from airborne objects ●● Aircraft strikes from long ranges. ●● Short range rockets and missiles from 30 to 300 km range. These could also be employed by non-State actors / terrorists as was demonstrated by Hizbullah Mujahideen against Israel in 2006, using Iranian Zalzala rockets with 200 km range. ●● Short range ballistic missile threat from 300 to 1,000 km. ●● Cruise missile (CM) threat (airborne,

land attack and sea based). ●● Intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) threat from 1,000 to 3,000 km range. ●● Medium range ballistic missile (MRBM) threat from 3,000 to 5,000 km. ●● Inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM) capability of China. With recent induction of new Chinese aircraft like JH-7A, J-10 and J-11B, even Su-30 Mk II is no longer the best air superiority fighter or the best strike aircraft. JF-17 aircraft, as and when it enters service will bring in a huge technological upgradation. These aircraft are being developed to enable combat under conditions of informatisation. Moreover, many of these aircraft will also get exported to Pakistan. Latter is already in the process of acquiring latest technological suites for its F-16 and the aircraft from USA and Turkey.

Game of relative numbers As per the open source information, Pakistan air force will likely posses around 425 combat aircraft, out of which 200 aircraft can be modern types like F-16, Mirages and F-7H. Similarly IAF approximately possesses 900 aircraft including 360 modern types like Su-30, Mig-29, Jaguar,

Mirage 2000 and Mig-27. Considering only the modern aircraft at 80 per cent serviceability, Pakistan’s 160 aircraft will get pitted against 288 IAF aircraft. Respective sortie generation capability at the rate of 3 sorties per day will come to 483 and 864. This makes a combat ratio of 1.8 to 1 in India’s favour. By any measure this is inadequate for any attacker or active defence proponent. More so, activation of entire theatre concurrently will distribute own air assets to complement the ground offensive in integrated manner. This would constrain the inherent flexibility of the air arm. Furthermore, China playing its card could also bring down combat edge ratio to 1.44 to 1 (assuming only 700 sorties per day available for western front). Mathematically distributing and assuming equal tactical /operational importance to five of our corps deployed along the border, with each forming 3 to 5 battle groups (including the assets of strike formations) could face 80-90 sorties per day. In this low combat edge asymmetry, Pakistan will be able to bring concentrated air strikes against our pivot and strike formations Battle Groups. Qualitatively with US upgradation package and Chinese accretions like F&H (JH-7) and possibly J-10 in next 3 to 4 years time, PAF will be far more lethal than it is today in terms of all weather capability, navigation, electronic warfare (EW)

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As per the open source information, Pakistan air force will likely posses around 425 combat aircraft, out of which 200 aircraft can be modern types like F-16, Mirages and F-7H. Similarly IAF approximately possesses 900 aircraft including 360 modern types like Su-30, Mig-29, Jaguar, Mirage 2000 and Mig-27. Considering only the modern aircraft at 80 per cent serviceability, Pakistan’s 160 aircraft will get pitted against 288 IAF aircraft. Respective sortie generation capability at the rate of 3 sorties per day will come to 483 and 864. This makes a combat ratio of 1.8 to 1 in India’s favour. By any measure this is inadequate for any attacker or active defence proponent avionics, precision shooting enhanced weapon launch ranges.

Our AAD needs In such lethal air /missile environment strong AAD assets will supplement / augment our current relatively thin air power combat edge. Assuming need for minimum 02 long range (100 km range) anti-ballistic missile SAM groups, 05 medium range (40-50 km) SAM groups, we have none for the former and only 02 of the latter. Similarly short range SAMs (10-20 km), there is a requirement of 06 to 07 regiments, but we have only three. Also self propelled all weather gun / missile units for close AD protection of combat groups will face a shortfall of minimum 03 to 04 regiments. The existing practice of providing manportable SAM (also in limited quantity) or obsolete

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INTEGRATION fair weather guns like ZU 23 mm Twin will not suffice. Vintage wise all these AD systems are more than 25 years old, obsolete and undergoing fatigue due to ageing or geriatricity. Most importantly these can not engage tactical ballistic missile like Hatf 1/3 or long range rockets. Even latest air to surface munitions fired from standoff ranges will not get engaged. In earlier perspective plan AAD was to be equipped with Akash, Trishul, Tungushka (or equivalent), Bofi / Oerlikons (or equivalent) guns and more sophisticated and longer range manportable SAMs. However none of the above have materialised so far.

The Chinese are ahead The Chinese are known to have been fielding integrated AD system in Tibet as also in rest of mainland. The highlights are as follows: ●● It is a three pronged AD system. ●● The first prong is to deny the use of stealth aircraft by the deployment of two metre band and ten metre band radar systems and passive geo-location systems. ●● The second prong is the deployment of advanced short-range missiles and directed-energy weapons, intended to shoot down smart weapons and cruise missiles before they reach their targets. ●● The third prong is the deployment of long-range missiles intended to kill intelligence surveillance reconnaissance systems such as the US E-3 AWACS, E-8 JSTARS, RC-135V/W Rivet Joint, U-2, RQ-4 Global Hawk, as well as low- and medium-orbit satellites used for this purpose. ●● The centrepiece of the airborne component of the air defence system is a mixed fighter fleet comprising Su-30 fighter and the indigenous Chinese J-10. ●● The PLAAF received four battalions of upgraded Russian SA-20 PMU-2 long-range (200 km) SAM systems in July 2007. Another four battalions were expected to be delivered in 2008/2009 and three have been delivered. The SA-20 system reportedly provides limited ballistic and cruise missile defence capabilities.

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●● Concept of air defence has shifted from point defence to “joint anti-air raid campaign doctrine based on a modern, integrated air defence system capable of offensive counter air and defensive counter air” in sync with combined / joint operations. The above AD engagement strategy being time critical necessitates clockwork precision. The efficacy and relevance of semi-automated control and reporting sensors available in our scenario will not work. A fully automated Control and Reporting system with redundancy in communications and means of surveillance is therefore a sine qua non i.e. the fundamental requirement. An integrated AD in the theatre of operations will require the capability to: ●● Provide network enabled, gap free, low level surveillance coverage by radars. ●● Provide theatre AD grid by long and medium range SAMs to all field forces operating in the combat zone. ●● Provide all weather, self propelled AD equipment for field formations. ●● Target missiles and UAVs. ●● To prevent fratricide, there is a requirement of state-of-the-art Identification of Friend or Foe equipment compatible with the entire fleet of equipment being used in the country. ●● To achieve effective integration between the sensors and shooters, an automated control and reporting system capable of real time passage of voice and data communication, having equipment redundancy incorporating all the agencies involved in the AD battle would be a fundamental requirement.

What we should be doing The desired AD weapon systems should therefore, have the capabilities as illustrated: ●● Medium range SAMs which would form AD nodes, capable of destroying ballistic missiles, stealth aircraft and UAVs.

●● Self propelled short range SAMs for providing close AD protection against multiple targets, to mechanised forces especially against attack helicopters. ●● Self propelled / towed gun missile systems with multiple target handling capability, on-board ballistic computers, electro-mechanical power drives. Suggested parametres for guns and missiles are as follows: ── Fire control radars having multiple bands, frequency agility, multiple target tracking capability with built-in electronic counter counter measures. ── Tactical control radars having long range low level coverage, automated parallax correction and transmission of target coordinates to multiple weapon systems based on predicted threat zone. ── Modular designed identification of friend or foe system which is compatible with all users of air space. ── Digitised satellite communication system with built-in redundancy, frequency diversity and safeguards like firewalls will form the backbone of control and reporting system. The stake holders in the military industrial domain, therefore, need to undertake major initiatives such as: ●● Public private partnership.

●● Set-aside dedicated capital expenditure towards research and development. ●● Continuous update requirement of services.

the

●● Identify gaps in technology and seek foreign collaboration where required for the same. ●● Indigenous production. ●● Cater to air defence protection of industrial infrastructure of national importance with an understanding for remuneration with Ministry of Defence.

Conclusion Over a period of time Pakistan air force has modernised and so has Chinese air force. All the missile systems that we have in our inventory, can only engage airborne rockets / missiles flying only around One Mach (speed of sound – approximately 0.3 km/ sec), that too if detected and tracked by acquisition and fire control radars. Even rudimentary ballistic missiles like Scud fly at the speed of 3 Mach or more, thus are beyond the engagement capability of our existing AD systems despite upgrades. With recent induction of new Chinese aircraft like JH-7A, J-10 and J-11B, even Su-30 Mk II is no longer the best air superiority fighter or the best strike aircraft. JF-17 aircraft, as and when it enters service will bring in a huge technological upgradation. These aircraft are being developed to

enable combat under conditions of informatisation. Moreover, many of these aircraft will also get exported to Pakistan. Latter is already in the process of acquiring latest technological suites for its F-16 and the aircraft from USA and Turkey. In the absence of new acquisitions in sight, we shall have to depend on the existing antiquated AD systems to provide defence against air / SSM and cruise missile attacks for the foreseeable future. Thus there is a need to fast-track acquisition of latest AD systems with priority to indigenous or joint production systems as their development and acquisition can be speeded up. In the interim off the shelf procurement has become a fait accompli. Even then fielding of new systems in the next five years is a remote possibility. Overall, flawed strategic decision making, budget allocation and acquisition procedural delays have cost the army/country dearly. It is time to carry out radical transformation, rather than face failure in future missions.

The writer Brig (Dr) Anil Sharma is an honorary Joint Director with Institute for National Security Studies and Director SA in the University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES). Manish Madaan and Anshu Paliwal are Research Associates in the team headed by Brig Sharma for research in Strategic Management.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

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ARM OF DECISION

Brig Gurmeet Kanwal (retd)

Artillery modernisation plans are critical to the army’s performance in the next conventional war that India may have to fight. If there is any field of defence procurement in which the MoD must make haste, it is this one. The artillery recently conceptualised a requirement for a light-weight towed howitzer of 155 mm calibre for employment in the mountains. There has been notable progress on the rocket artillery front. Bharat Electronics Limited is reported to be assembling 28 WLRs. The Regiment of Artillery is now a battle-winning arm on the conventional battlefield. From a supporting arm with the limited role of neutralising large areas of the ground with its inherent dispersion of fire, artillery has graduated to an arm of decision on the modern battlefield. Vision for 21st century battlefields From its original status as a “supporting” arm, artillery has now graduated to a full-fledged combat arm that dominates the battlefield with its inherently destructive firepower. In the post-Pokhran 1998 and post-Kargil 1999 scenario on the Indian sub-continent, artillery is clearly seen to be a decisive arm, indeed even a battle-winning one. Firepower and manoeuvre are two sides of the same coin and both complement each other. However, in tactical situations in which if either one lags behind due to the fog of war, the other must rise to the occasion and compensate if a favourable outcome is to be achieved. It is well known that future conventional wars on the Indian sub-continent will be fought under the nuclear shadow. Hence, it will be extremely risky to plan a battle that involves deep manoeuvre, particularly in the plains. In such a situation, favourable outcomes will be possible only through the massive application of artillery and aerially-delivered firepower. This major restriction on the manoeuvre component of military operations on land will lead to much greater emphasis having to be placed on firepower to achieve military aims and objectives. With its ever-increasing range and lethality, the artillery is now capable of simultaneously fighting the contact, intermediate and deep battles. Its nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles such as Agni will guarantee India’s nuclear deterrence. Its conventionally

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sluggish modernisation armed ballistic missiles such as Prithvi and long-range rockets like Smerch will influence the final outcome of a battle. In short, the integrated and synergetic application of artillery firepower at the point of decision will ensure victory and reduce the army’s casualties. The artillery will be a co-equal partner with the manoeuvre arms in the successful execution of firepower and manoeuvre provided it is equipped with modern guns and rocket launchers without any further delay. Hence, it is imperative that artillery modernisation is undertaken with alacrity so as to generate both qualitative and quantitative firepower asymmetries to achieve unassailable dominance on the future battlefield.

Modernisation plans Modernisation plans of the Regiment of Artillery have stagnated for quite sometime for various reasons, some beyond the control of military leaders. Beginning in January 2008, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) issued three global tenders to revive the long-delayed plans to modernise the Indian Artillery. Tenders were issued for 155 mm guns and howitzers for the mountains, the plains and self-propelled guns for the deserts. Summer and winter trials were expected to be held over the next one year and, expectations ran high that contracts for acquisition and local production would be awarded as early as in the first half of 2010. As none of the contenders have been invited to participate in summer trials so far in 2011, it appears that there will

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A contract for the acquisition of two regiments of the 12-tube, 300 mm Smerch multi-barrel rocket launcher (MBRL) system with 90 km range was signed with Russia’s Rosoboronexport in early-2006. This weapon system is a major boost for the long-range firepower capabilities of the army be further delay in the procurement and modernisation plans of a critically important arm of the Indian Army. It is amazing that despite the lessons learnt in Kargil, modernisation of the artillery has continued to lag behind. The last major acquisition of towed gun-howitzers was that of about 400 pieces of 39-calibre 155 mm FH-77B howitzers with a range of 30 km from Bofors of Sweden in the mid-1980s. This gun had proved its mettle in the Kargil conflict. After two decades during which the 100 mm and 122 mm field guns of Russian origin and the indigenously developed and manufactured 75/24 Indian Mountain Gun joined the long list of equipment bordering on obsolescence but still in service with the army, tenders were floated and trials were held for a 52-calibre 155 mm gun to replace all field and medium guns. Just when a contract for 120 tracked and 180 wheeled self-propelled (SP) 155 mm guns was about to be concluded after years of protracted trials, South African arms manufacturer Denel, a leading contender for the contract, was alleged to have been involved in a corruption scam in an earlier deal for anti-material rifles (AMRs). The other two howitzers in contention, from Soltam of Israel and BAE Systems (the new owners of Bofors of Sweden) reportedly did not meet the laid down criteria and Army HQ recommended fresh trials. Consequently, the programme has been set back by at least three to four years. It has now been reported that BAE Systems is planning to stay away from bidding for the Indian contract.

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ARM OF DECISION The probability of the next conventional war breaking out in the mountains is far higher than that of a war in the plains. With this in view, the artillery recently conceptualised a requirement for a light-weight towed howitzer of 155 mm calibre for employment in the mountains. A light-weight 155 mm howitzer weighing less than 5,000 kg, with a light but adequately powered prime mover, is ideal for the mountains. The gun-train should be capable of negotiating sharp road bends without the need to unhook the gun from the prime mover. In January 2008, the MoD had floated a Request for Proposal (RfP) for 145 pieces of ultra-light 155 mm towed howitzers for use by the Indian Army’s mountain formations. Presumably, these will also be employed by the army’s rapid reaction divisions - as and when these are raised - as these howitzers will be suitable for air transportation. 145 howitzers will equip seven medium artillery regiments and will cost approximately Rs. 3,000 crore. However, many more regiments will be required to fulfil operational requirement. The MoD has initiated the process for the procurement of 145 pieces of M-777 light-weight howitzers manufactured by BAE Systems through the direct Foreign Military Sale (FMS) route from the US government and user trials are being conducted. The MoD has also floated a global tender for the purchase of 400 x 155 mm towed artillery guns for the army, to be followed by indigenous manufacture of another 1,100 howitzers, in a project worth approximately Rs. 8,000 crore. The RfP was issued to eight prospective bidders including BAE, General Dynamics, Nexter (France), Rhinemetall (Germany) and Samsung (South Korea); the bids received are being evaluated. An RfP has also been issued for 180 wheeled self-propelled 155 mm guns for around Rs. 4,700 crore for employment by mechanised forces in the plains and semi-desert sectors. Since the Bofors 155 mm howitzer was introduced into service, the indigenously designed and manufactured 105 mm Indian Field Gun (IFG) and its (not so) light version, the Light Field Gun (LFG), have

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

also joined the list of guns and howitzers heading for obsolescence. Approximately 180 pieces of 130 mm M-46 Russian medium guns have been successfully “up-gunned” to 155 mm calibre with ordnance supplied by Soltam of Israel. The new barrel length of 45-calibre has enhanced the range of the gun to about 40 km with extended range ammunition. There has been notable progress on the rocket artillery front. A contract for the acquisition of two regiments of the 12-tube, 300 mm Smerch multi-barrel rocket launcher (MBRL) system with 90 km range was signed with Russia’s Rosoboronexport in early-2006. This weapon system is a major boost for the long-range firepower capabilities of the army. Extended range (ER) rockets are being introduced for the 122 mm Grad MBRL that has been in service for over three decades. The ER rockets will enhance the weapon system’s range from 22 to about 40 km. A contract worth Rs. 5,000 crore has also been signed for the serial production of the Pinaka MBRL weapon system, another DRDO project plagued by time delays and completed with help from Larsen and Toubro and the Tatas. The Pinaka rockets will have an approximate range of 37 km. Counter-bombardment (US term counter-fire) capability is also being upgraded, but at a slow pace. At least about 40 to 50 weapon locating radars (WLRs) are required for effective counter-bombardment, especially in the plains, but only a dozen have been procured so far. In addition to the 12 AN-TPQ 37 Firefinder WLRs acquired from Raytheon, USA, under a 2002 contract worth US$ 200 million, Bharat Electronics Limited is reported to be assembling 28 WLRs. These radars will be based on both indigenous and imported components and are likely to be introduced soon into service after extensive user trials. The radar is expected to match the capabilities of the Firefinder system and will have a detection range of about 40 km. The indigenous sound ranging system for locating the positions of enemy guns based on the sound of their firing does not appear to be making worthwhile progress and may be shelved in favour of an imported system. In fact, it needs to be considered whether this relic of the two World Wars, that is rather

cumbersome to deploy and maintain, deserves a silent burial as gun and mortar locating radars now provide accurate locations of enemy guns and mortars. The modernisation plans of tube artillery alone are likely to cost

These radars will be based on both indigenous and imported components and are likely to be introduced soon into service after extensive user trials. The radar is expected to match the capabilities of the Firefinder system and will have a detection range of about 40 km Rs. 13,000 crore at FY 2008-09 prices. The major acquisitions will be of initial lots of 400 towed howitzers of 155 mm calibre, with a barrel length of 52-calibre, costing about Rs. 4,000 crore, 140 ultra-light weight 155 mm towed howitzers, with a barrel length of 45-calibre, costing Rs. 3,000 crore and 180 SP 155 mm howitzers costing Rs. 5,000 crore. The “Shakti” project for command and control systems for the artillery, earlier called Artillery Combat Command and Control System (ACCCS), has reached the stage of maturity and is now being fielded extensively in the

plains. Gradually it will be fielded up to the corps level and the two artillery divisions will be equipped with it. Efforts are also underway to add ballistic as well as cruise missiles to the artillery arsenal. The BrahMos supersonic cruise missile (Mach 2.8 to 3.0), with a precision strike capability, very high kill energy and range of 290 km, is being inducted into the army. A ceremonial induction function of the Block-I version was held in July 2007. Since then, the Block-II version has successfully completed trials. It is a versatile missile that can be launched from Tatra mobile launchers and silos on land, aircraft and ships and, perhaps in future, also from submarines. 50 BrahMos missiles are expected to be produced every year. Efforts are afoot to further increase its strike range. BrahMos Aerospace has orders worth Rs 3,500 crore from the army and the navy, which has opted for the anti-ship as well as the land attack cruise missile (LACM) versions. These terrain hugging missiles are virtually immune to counter measures due to their high speed and very low radar cross section and are far superior to sub-sonic cruise missiles like Pakistan’s Babur. Chile, Kuwait, Malaysia and South Africa have shown interest in acquiring this missile.

Conclusion The Regiment of artillery is now a

battle-winning arm on the conventional battlefield and is the sword edge of India’s nuclear deterrence. From a supporting arm with the limited role of neutralising large areas of the ground with its inherent dispersion of fire, artillery has graduated to an arm of decision on the modern battlefield. This is an honour the Indian Artillery has earned by virtue of its performance during Operation Vijay in the Kargil conflict in 1999. It now has a new role that of destruction in defensive as well as offensive operations. Despite the increasing obsolescence of artillery guns, mortars and rocket launchers, the government has been unable to conclude contracts for their replacement even though protracted trials of several 155 mm howitzers have been carried out over the last few years. The failure to modernise the Indian Artillery is likely to have adverse repercussions for national security. No matter how much emphasis is laid on the early resumption and successful conclusion of artillery modernisation plans, it will be inadequate as these plans are critical to the army’s performance in the next conventional war that India may have to fight. If there is any field of defence procurement in which the MoD must make haste, it is this one.

The writer is Director, Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), New Delhi, India.

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The article graphically highlights how the Maoists have become a serious security threat to the Indian nation-State. So far, the army has been reluctant to get involved because such deployment will take it far from the borders it is tasked to defend. But can it afford to stay uninvolved for long? The writer points out that in 1948 itself the Indian Army had been used to crush the Communist insurrection in Telangana. A large number of its regiments recruit extensively from the tribal areas. These recruits and their families are highly vulnerable to Maoist threats and extortion. Some could even be subverted. Maoist documents openly speak of exploiting India’s difficulties if and when it gets engaged in wars with other countries like China and Pakistan. Far from being nationalist, it is allying itself with separatist elements in Jammu and Kashmir and the north-east and actively seeking arms from external sources. It may therefore be prudent for the State to involve the army at this stage itself without waiting for the situation to spin out of control. The writer presents some worrying portents from what has happened in Nepal where the Maoists hijacked popular resentment against the King to seize power. 70

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ENEMY WITHIN

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

ven as the Indian Army maintains unsparing vigil on the borders, running along desert, plains, mountains and forbidding high altitude terrain like Kargil, Siachen Glacier and Arunachal, the heart of India is being corroded by termites in the form of Maoists; its head Kashmir is being unremittingly buffeted by jihadis within and without; its eastern arm Assam and north-eastern states have no respite from insurgency and demographic onslaught from Bangladesh. These inimical forces are linked together and are strengthening their external linkages. As a result, the proxy war arena is no longer confined to the borders with China and Pakistan, but now stretches from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Mumbai to Kolkata.

Col R S N Singh (retd)

The writ of the State has been shrinking at a frightful pace. The very nature of our nation-State that we conceived is under the threat of being compromised by a combination of internal and external inimical forces. The dividing line between external and internal threats is blurring by the day. If the Indian Army does not change its mindset about its role in tackling internal threat, it may end-up being like the Nepal Army, which remained a mute spectator even as the country’s survival as a nation-State entity became tenuous.

The Nepal lesson The role of the Maoists in steering the course of Nepal towards a bottomless pit should not be lost on India. In this, there are too many similarities between India and Nepal. The Maoists first gained legitimacy, when they joined the popular anti-monarchy movement in Nepal. The people as such were not against monarchy as an institution, but had begun to perceive King Gyanendra as the murderer of his brother King Birendra. The Maoists joined the other political parties riding the festering anti-Gyanendra wave. Once, the monarchy was abolished, they inveigled their way to power through the electoral route by a mix of appeal, manipulation and intimidation. It is now five years since the Constituent Assembly came into being, but the Maoists have not abandoned their extortion industry and instruments of violence. They have not allowed the birth of a new Constitution. They are steadfast in their resolve to establish one-party authoritarian rule. All through the period of Maoist insurgency in Nepal, the army was hardly used. And now, the Maoists after undermining every institution have managed to demoralise and circumscribe the Nepal Army without firing a single shot. The Nepal Army has thus been neutralised not by external adversaries, if any, but the enemy within the country. Had the Nepal Army insisted on retrieving the situation, Nepal would not have hurtled down the road to anarchy. All through the Nepal Army’s threat perception had been Kathmandu centric. More than half the army was deployed in and around Kathmandu based on the strategic premise that as long as the capital could be held, no external power in the ultimate analysis could compromise the integrity of the country. It was a case of misplaced threat perception in a drastically altered internal security scenario. The Nepal paradigm may well inflict itself on India. Given the spread of Maoist terror in one-third of the country, their external linkages and the disproportionate influence of their ideologues in the form of doctors, lawyers, media personalities, the time is ripe for the Maoists, as precedence and their strategy suggests, to make deep inroads into the

Indian Army: internal security role

cities by taking up popular issues like ‘corruption’, which strikes strong chord and resonance amongst the people. The Maoists are known to thus ride piggyback the popular wave to disparage and demolish institutions that constitute the very basis of a nation-State. Unfortunately, some of the Maoist ideologues are the closest advisors to Anna Hazare. They insist that this movement is ‘Gandhian’ in import, but they have never unequivocally condemned Maoist violence and terror. Occasionally, when they had done so, their condemnation has been qualified. One of these ideologues was responsible in taking the decision that the Maoists leadership in Bihar should eliminate Inspector Tete instead of Inspector Yadav as originally planned. These ideologues are known to be funded by the Maoists.

Maoists fuelling insecurity and corruption The 231 Maoists affected / controlled districts of India are fountains of corruption, instability and insecurity of the country. The Maoists are running a thriving extortion industry in these districts. The extortion industry in turn is giving

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

land forces

The police and the paramilitary cannot be militarised beyond a limit, as it will have adverse social and administrative consequences. Moreover, it is not desirable in a civilised nation. The army must define the threshold level of internal security problems beyond which it should insist on intervening to restore the balance between external and internal security for safeguarding the integrity and sovereignty of the nation. The Indian Army therefore needs a drastic review of its threat perception and role fillip to corruption due to the Maoist-contractor nexus. The illegal mining and drug industries of the Maoists have international dimensions and are lining the pockets of their influential ideologues and filling coffers of some NGOs, which are fronts of Maoists. Therefore, it is not only the insurgents in Kashmir and north-east who are questioning India’s sovereignty, but the Maoists as well. The preservation of India’s sovereignty from the onslaughts of internal enemies has gone beyond the capability of the police and paramilitary forces. It is the duty of the Indian Army to assert the sovereignty of India under these circumstances.

Army’s role It should be remembered that Indian Army was used to integrate the nation. It was Indian Army, which was used to integrate Hyderabad and Goa to the Indian Union. It was the threat of the Indian Army that made Junagarh, accede to India. It was the Indian Army, which saved Jammu and Kashmir right after independence. It was the Indian Army, which prevented the secession of Nagaland. But for the Indian Army, the map of post-independence

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ENEMY WITHIN India would have looked different. This could happen because there was a clear internal threat perception. The imperative and consequences of these internal threats were understood with clarity. The Indian Army in its own reckoning and by the political masters was considered to be an instrument of nation-building. In the latter years, when the political class consciously disparaged professional military advice and curtailed the internal and nation-building role of army, India was visited by the ignominy of 1962. In the communist insurgency in Telangana that bedevilled India between 1946 and 1951, 3,000 villages had been ‘liberated’ by killing 2,000 people. The Maoist writ ran completely in three districts Nalagonda, Warangal and Bidar. The communists had established ‘communes’ in these districts. The despotic and inequitable governance of Nizam was ascribed as the reason. The Nizam banned the communist party. The insurgency could not be put down by the army and the police of Nizam. Even during that period, ambushing the Nizam’s police parties and army columns was the communist’s main way of obtaining weapons and ammunition. When the Indian government ordered military action to prevent Hyderabad from joining Pakistan in September 1948, a desperate Nizam sought the cooperation of the communists. As is their wont the communists seized the opportunity with great alacrity and joined hands with the communal Razakars. The communists then intensified their terrorist activities. Even after the collapse of Nizam’s army, the communists did not give up their war and continued to operate from their forest sanctuaries. Consequently, some of the infantry units, which had taken part in the Hyderabad operation (Operation Polo), were assigned the task of crushing the communist insurgency. The Indian Army crushed the first left wing insurgency in independent India in 1948. The Indian Army could do it because there were decision makers like Sardar Patel as the Union Home Minister and then C Rajagopalachari. It could be done because there was no television to provide ideologues and

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activists with dubious source of funding to erode or even break the resolve of the State. In contrast to three districts in 1951, Maoists are now impacting on 231 districts in 13 states and they have captured nearly 40,000 sq km area of Indian Territory (Liberated Zones). More than 5,000 people have been killed since 2005, which is almost the same as the number of casualties suffered by the Indian Army since 1989 in Jammu and Kashmir. Now the Maoists are claiming one life very eight hours. 1,700 schools wrecked by them in just last two years. The Maoists described the State as ‘Enemy’ and the conflict as ‘War’. Other wars that India fought in the past were for territory, but these internal wars, which are essentially proxy wars, have to be fought to preserve the very idea of India. Today’s wars are not about territory, but about influence, market, resources, terror, ideology and fundamentalist religious percepts. These wars impact on the very fabric of the Indian Army. The Indian Army has witnessed this phenomenon during the insurgency in Punjab. Certain infantry regiments had passed through a period of disquiet and turbulence. There was certain degree of disenchantment amongst the personnel in these regiments. It took time for the army to recover. The Maoist problem is having a far more sinister impact on the rank and file that is recruited from the Maoist affected districts and has dangerous portends for the Indian Army. LWE organisations have infiltrated a number of educational institutions in the rest of the country. These organisations are functioning under various names. They have even appropriated the memory of Shaheed Bhagat Singh. Then there are many NGOs ostensibly engaged in health and environment sectors, which are actually front organisations entrusted with the task of enlarging the influence of the Maoists. Many of our educated youth, straight out of college, join the army. Even if a small percentage of LWE indoctrinated youth join the army, they could inflict disproportionate damage to the cultural and professional ethos of the Indian Army.

With the enormous IED resources, the Maoists have shown their ability to severely disrupt or even rupture east-west strategic communications. In fact in many eastern parts of India, night trains have been discontinued with. This is the vulnerability, which can cost dearly in the event of hostilities with China or even Pakistan, as these communications not only serve critical logistics links but for switching over forces from one theatre to another as well. This is the classic scenario of the growing indivisibility between external and internal threats The army draws significant chunk of its recruits from the 231 Maoist affected districts. There are regiments, which exclusively comprise tribals. In fact, no other institution employs tribals in such large numbers. Even without the Maoists problem, filling the tribal vacancies was difficult because of low education and health base, but things were definitely on the mend before the Maoists made inroads in these areas. With the growth in influence of the Maoists, the pool of educated and motivated tribal youth is shrinking. For the Maoists, lack of education and awareness amongst tribals is a boon as it is ideally conducive to indoctrination. Therefore, today the Indian Army is competing with the Maoists in attracting youth to its fold. Soon the army may be confronted with the situation, wherein one family member may be a Maoist cadre and another army personnel. The tribals in the army belong to the Hindu and Christian communities. The strong and relatively resilient ethos of the army and tribal affinities subsumed the religious differences. The Maoists are now trying to create fault lines and then exacerbate fissures. Maoists have destroyed the religious harmony in the tribal areas of central India. The killing of the religious leader

Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati in Orissa by the Maoists had communal overtones. Army personnel hailing from the Maoist affected areas are also becoming victims of extortion. An army personnel cannot devote his best if his family back home lives in terror. One senior army officer, commanding his brigade in a Maoist affected region told this writer that one fine morning he found police in the separated family area in his premises, which was there to nab a Maoist, who, as intelligence sources revealed, was to exchange arms in one of the quarters. The Maoist cadre did arrive and was nabbed. There are growing number of cases of jawans coming back late from leave, as much by two or three months, their alibi being that they were abducted by the Maoists. There is no way such claims can be verified. There are also instances of jawans while on leave being compelled by Maoists to take part in operations or sharing their professional training and expertise.

Fifth columnists Amongst all other anti-India outfits, the Maoists could prove to be the most dangerous ‘Fifth Columnists’ during a war between India and external adversaries. In fact, documents reveal that Maoists would relish such a situation of external attacks, as it would facilitate their capture of State power. With the enormous IED resources, the Maoists have shown their ability

to severely disrupt or even rupture east-west strategic communications. In fact in many eastern parts of India, night trains have been discontinued with. This is the vulnerability, which can cost dearly in the event of hostilities with China or even Pakistan, as these communications not only serve critical logistics links but for switching over forces from one theatre to another as well. This is the classic scenario of the growing indivisibility between external and internal threats.

Conclusion Today’s wars are about jihadis, ULFA, Maoists, terrorists, crime and drug syndicates, which are becoming increasingly demanding both in terms of level of training and sophistication and lethality of fighting wherewithal. The police and the paramilitary cannot be militarised beyond a limit, as it will have adverse social and administrative consequences. Moreover, it is not desirable in a civilised nation. The army must define the threshold level of internal security problems beyond which it should insist on intervening to restore the balance between external and internal security for safeguarding the integrity and sovereignty of the nation. The Indian Army therefore needs a drastic review of its threat perception and role.

The writer is the Additional Director, Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), New Delhi, India.

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An emotively charged article where the writer laments a peculiar failing of the Indian Higher Defence system. This results from a latent adversarial relationship between the civil-military interface. He traces the origins of this malaise to the Krishna Menon era. That was the era of Ayub’s coup in Pakistan. This had resulted in the Indian Armed Forces being viewed with suspicion as a coup threat rather than the primary asset of the nation. Fortunately, the shock therapy of the 1962 war had corrected this astounding state of paranoia. The pity is that in the absence of a major war in the last decade or so, this conflictual state of affairs seems to have resurfaced. There is a need to urgently correct this drift and restore synergy in the civil-military interface. 74

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SHED PARANOIA

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Maj Gen (Dr) Sheru Thapliyal, SM (retd)

he recent diktat by the Ministry of Defence that the date of birth of General V K Singh, the Army Chief will be deemed to be 10 May 1950 even when in his matriculation certificate it is 10 May 1951, is an example of how far the politicians and the bureaucrats are prepared to go; even to the extent of ignoring the Supreme Court ruling on the subject. As a disciplined soldier, the Army Chief may not seek justice from the Supreme Court but the manner in which this whole issue has been dealt with is worrisome. It will be highly destructive of the synergy which is so essential to the process of managing our national security.

Emasculation The roots of the problem can be traced back to Field Marshal Ayub's coup in Pakistan. This generated a great deal of fear and suspicion about the Indian Army. This destroyed the synergy of the civil-military interface. This problem was overcome after the 1962 war. Unfortunately today it seems to be resurfacing. During the tenure of the present dispensation this tendency has become endemic. Find some chink in the armour of a service chief so that he becomes defunct for all practical purposes. This ploy was initiated in Pandit Nehru’s time who persuaded General Thimayya to withdraw his resignation which he had submitted in order to register his protest against gross negligence of national defence by the then Defence Minister Krishna Menon who played havoc

deteriorating

civil-military relationship:

the demise of synergy? with time honoured practices of the Armed Forces and slighted the service chiefs at every opportunity. Once in parliament in reply to a question on defence preparedness he said, “most of the problems of services are because of service chiefs. They cannot make up their minds because they have no minds to make up”. Having secured withdrawal of the resignation, Nehru ridiculed Thimayya in parliament where he made out that Thimayya resigned on entirely frivolous grounds. The result was that Thimayya lost complete respect of the army and became a lame-duck chief thereafter. This strategy was repeated later with Gen Rodrigues, Gen Padmanabhan, Gen Deepak Kapoor and Admiral Arun Prakash and the piece de resistance was the sacking of Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat on overhyped grounds.

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In the case of Gen V K Singh the controversy has been deliberately created by the bureaucracy. No doubt the Army HQ is also to blame for not reconciling the date of birth in Military Secretary Branch records with that of the ones in Adjutant General Branch but ultimately it was the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence before sending the dossier to the Appointments Commitee of the Cabinet. It appears they had got the Army Chief’s matriculation certificate from Adjutant General Branch but chose to ignore it in contravention of Supreme Court ruling on the subject. And the reason given in Ministry of Defence letter to the Army Chief is surprising. They are saying that taking the Army Chief’s date of birth as 10 May 1951 will disturb the chain of succession as if that is more important than justice per se. Apparenty there is more to it than meets the eye. The Army Chief has now filed a statutary complaint on this issue with the RM. It is indeed sad that things had to come to such a sorry pass. Why was this issue not resolved before he became the chief? There are countless examples of the politician and bureaucrat acting in unison to browbeat a serving chief. When Gen Padmanabhan was Army Chief, he commented on India’s nuclear response which was perfectly legitimate since it was part of our nuclear doctrine. In that warlike situation such a reiteration would have carried great credibility if it came from the Army Chief, who had merely stated the position spelt out by the government's declaratory nuclear doctrine. Yet he was publicly asked to not air his views on such subjects as if he was a school boy being admonished. A similar response of the Ministry of Defence was repeated when both Gen V K Singh and Air Chief Marshal Naik said that India has the capability to carry out similar operation which US did to take out Osama bin Laden. The Chiefs were asked to interact less with media as if they were school children and not the experienced heads of Armed Forces that numbered some 1.3 million. The other instance is the denial of permission to the Army Chief to attend the Biennial Pacific Army Chief's Seminar in Singapore. This was done at the last minute and it projected a sorry image to the world at large.

land forces

SHED PARANOIA Ministry of Defence has created a Public Relations department under a joint secretary which is meant to project the Armed Forces point of view to the media. In practice it does exactly the opposite; most of the leaks to the media that paint the forces in an adverse light, are disseminated by this organisation. Due to service regulations, Armed Forces serving officers cannot project their views to the media. This is taken advantage of by both the ill-informed TV anchors as also the MoD PR department to run down the Armed Forces.

Adversarial relationship The present dispensation has made it a practice to ignore or reverse the reasoned response of service chiefs. All land scams are due to covert or overt acts of the department of Defence Estates, but the army gets all the criticism because of insufficient knowledge of media. It should be the primary concern of the Defence Ministry to correct this anomalous situation. Unfortunately till date it has never come in the defence of the Armed Forces. Another strange strategy used by the politicians and the bureaucrats is to delay deliberately the operationally required hardware and systems. Perhaps the aim is to keep the Armed Forces barely at subsistence level. In the process they have played havoc with national security. It is for the Minister of Defence to correct the adversarial relationship between Ministry of Defence and service HQ. Unfortunately, we see no signs of that. Ministry of Defence has all the authority but no responsibility whereas Armed Forces have all the responsibility and no authority. That such a system is bound to flounder in a war situation seems to bother no one. The Ministry of Defence has gradually duplicated the service HQs. A parallel file system has been started wherein service HQ proposal is sent to the Minister on a Ministry of Defence file and decision recorded on the same

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

STRATEGIC SIGNIFICANCE

Dr Rajiv Nayan

file. The service HQ never sees the file. The decision is conveyed to them in the form of a letter singed by a minor functionary. Readers would recall that the momentous decision to evict the Chinese from Thagla area in 1962 was conveyed to the Army Chief by a Joint Secretary. The Ministry has eventually become super HQ whose approval is required for everything. Brig J P Dalvi, in his famous book Himalayan Blunder has articulated it so well almost fifty years ago. Unfortunately the situation remains unchanged even today. Brig Dalvi said and I quote: “Both the politician and the civil servant found it convenient to keep the soldier in his place and devise a system, whereby the army is always asking, begging, pleading and justifying. Approval of everything except the times for reveille and retreat is required. After futile correspondence and some pathetic informal pleading, the ministry would accept a proposal and then sponsor the case with finance. Everybody magnanimously promised to do his part as if he was disinterested and benign spectator of events instead of acting as a key link in India’s security system. The Indian people think that the military establishment had a free hand in the direction of military affairs. It would never occur to anyone that professional advice will have to run the gauntlet of civilian scrutiny”. (Brig J P Dalvi in Himalayan Blunder)

The writer is PhD in Sino-Indian Relations and contributes regularly to magazines, periodicals and newspapers on Strategy, Security and Defence related issues. He is now working for a multinational information technology company.

missiles: r ole in the gr ound war fare

Missiles of different types exist in the world. All these missiles perform different battlefield and strategic roles in the military doctrines and defence preparedness of modern nation-States. India has two nuclear weapons countries in its neighbourhood. Some argue that the use of ballistic missiles may increase an additional level of escalation. This may or may not happen. But there is possibility of starting of an unintended nuclear exchange with the use of conventional warhead tipped ballistic missiles. The writer asserts that the missiles other than ballistic may have normal military uses, but it is ballistic missile that provides both hard and soft power to the Indian Armed Forces. Ballistic missile gives an extra technological edge. It helps power projection and provides deterrence value to the Indian nuclear architecture. September 2011 Defence AND security alert

land forces

STRATEGIC SIGNIFICANCE

n the current international system, of course, smaller missile are acknowledged for the battlefield role; yet ballistic and to an extent, cruise missiles capture the imagination of the strategic community. Ballistic missiles, known as offensive rockets, are considered important mechanisms of warfare in the post-Cold War period, too. The end of the Cold War has not ended the relevance of the ballistic missiles in modern warfare. However, these missiles are generally associated with the Weapons of Mass Destruction, especially as a delivery vehicle for nuclear weapons. Many argue usefulness of ballistic and cruise missiles for conventional roles as well. Actually, a panel of governmental experts, established pursuant to UN General Assembly resolution 59/67, to address the issue of missiles in all its aspects, saw problems emanating from the increasing use of missiles and rockets with conventional warheads.

For modernisation of Armed Forces induction of missiles of all kinds are necessary. Without missiles the force may not have enough fire power. In the near future, India seems to rely on outside sources for battlefield missiles. It should have a reasonable procurement policy for it. However, India will have to increase the indigenous component not only for ballistic missiles but also for operational ones The 2002 UN panel categorised missiles with a range of 150 km and more on different bases. The categorisation is as follows: “(a) The nature of the ordnance delivered: conventional, chemical, biological or nuclear; (b) Their method of propulsion: air-breathing or anaerobic, solid or liquid fuelled, or a combination of these; (c) Their launch platform: ground-launched (fixed or mobile), ship-launched, submarine-launched or air-launched; (d) Their type of roles, including: surface-to-surface, surface-to-air, air-to-surface, air-to-air, submarine-to-surface and submarine-to-submarine; (e) Their intended targets: land-attack, anti-ship, anti-submarine, anti-aircraft, anti-satellite or anti-missile missiles; (f) Their trajectory: endo-or trans-atmospheric elliptical (characteristic of ballistic missiles), or variable (characteristic of cruise missiles and other guided missiles).” Many of the operational battlefield missiles are used by air forces or navies of the world. However, there are missiles which are used by army or land forces. But the biggest question emerges: can a ballistic or cruise missile with conventional warheads and ranges with more than 100 km be a weapon of first choice with army? Should India acquire these weapons for conventional uses in normal land warfare?

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Indian missiles

A few countries may have the global ambition and may be developing their weapons for that purpose. India, too, is nurturing global ambitions. But the development of ballistic missiles beyond its assessed and perceived security range may lead to misunderstanding with some friendly countries like the US. India should take an incremental approach and develop upto Agni-5 missiles in the near future. It should continue to conduct tests of the Agnis to refine all the parametres. Already, the international community, especially the US, is reconciled to the development of ballistic missiles for Indian security needs. If at all it wants to develop the ICBM, it should develop an understanding with the friendly countries that the developed missiles may be useful for its fulfilling global responsibilities.

India has different kinds of missiles in its armoury. These include air-to-air missiles, anti-ship missiles, anti-tank missiles, theatre missile system, multiple rocket system and so on. For army, the battlefield missiles such as anti-tank missiles, other tactical missiles and rocket systems are quite common. For years, India imported these missiles from outside, but now it is indigenously developing many of these missiles. Under Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP), India developed and tested five kinds of missiles. Trishul, surface to air missile, can be used to target low flying offensive missiles from a ship and against all known aircraft jammers. Its quickest reaction time, high frequency operation, high manoeuvrability, high lethal capability is expected to help all the three services. Akash is also one of the five missiles developed under the IGMDP. It is a medium range surface-to-air missile with multi-target engagement capability. It has high-energy solid propellant for the booster and ram-rocket propulsion for the later phase called sustainer phase. This system provides higher level of energy in comparison to usual solid / liquid rocket motor. This kind of motor helps the better performance of the missile. The Akash also has phased array radar which may help in multiple target tracking and concurrent deployment of missiles to attack four targets at a time with each battery. The higher mobility of the missile will provide unique battlefield advantage to the Indian Armed Forces in general and the Indian army in particular. Nag, a third generation anti-tank missile with ‘top-attack’ and ‘fire and forget’ capabilities, can hit moving and static targets. It is considered useful for army. One of the Indian defence public sector undertakings is also developing Konkurs-M and Invar (3UBK-20) anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) in partnership with Russia and Milan 2-T ATGM with MBDA, France. India is also developing Astra Missile, long range surface-to-air missile (LR-SAM), BrahMos supersonic cruise missile, short range surface to surface Prahaar and so forth. Multi-barrel rocket system Pinaka, an area weapon system which has been designed to support the existing artillery gun at ranges beyond 30 kms is already in use. However, the pride of place is occupied by the two ballistic missiles-Prithvi and Agni. Prithvi has army and air force versions and now a navy version called Dhanush. All the three versions, with ranges 150 km, 250 km and 350 km with about 1 tonne and 500 kg payloads, are in all the three wings of the Indian Armed Forces. The intermediate range ballistic missile Agni, currently, has three versions. Although the sophistication of the missile is increased in each test, this solid fuel missile’s version is based on the range, not on user as is in the case of Prithvi. Agni-1 has a range of 700 km and is capable of carrying a warhead of 1 kiloton. This single stage solid fuelled missile has tremendous mobility and can be fired from mobile / road launcher. It is expected to give an extra fire power to army. Agni-2 has a range of about 2,000 km. And Agni-3 is supposed to have a range of more than 3,000 km and is capable of carrying 15 kiloton warhead. All the versions of Agni may make the army pack quite a lethal punch.

Strategic and military significance The missiles other than ballistic may have normal military uses, but it is ballistic missile that provides both hard and soft power to the Indian Armed Forces. Ballistic missile gives an extra technological edge. It helps power projection and provides deterrence value to the Indian nuclear architecture. India has now all the three legs of the triad because of the ballistic missiles development. The Indian battlefield missiles are generally imported from outside. India tried to cut down the outside reliance by adopting the policy of indigenous growth. It has had a mixed success. However, the indigenous development of strategic weapons such as ballistic missiles is really commendable. Admittedly, for a decade, the international community has been raising destabilising impact of all kinds of missiles, but it is nuclear warhead capable ballistic missiles which have been target of technology denial regimes like the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). Leave alone the procurement of ballistic missiles, it was and still is difficult to procure even components and technology for building ballistic missiles. The indigenous development of ballistic missiles adds extra confidence to the country in the comity of nations. Unlike Pakistan and many other countries, India did not rely on clandestine route or strategic weapons swapping. So, when Armed Forces want operational battlefield missiles, they may not have much difficulties in procuring them from outside. Here only the Indian government weapon procurement policy and process as well as commercial arrangement could be relevant. And the indigenous sources would provide strategic weapons to the Armed Forces. Does the Indian missiles growth match the global trend? To a great extent, yes. All the three versions of Agni are mobile. Other advanced countries are also shifting their missiles from silo-based to mobile. It is also increasingly relying on solid propellant. The navigation system is improving fast. India is also gradually increasing the range of its ballistic missiles. Some argue that India should also have Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) targeting the US. The Indian policy making community needs to be careful. India should allocate its resources optimally. The wastage of resources should not be permitted. A country, which develops its weapons according to the requirements of its security and strategic objectives, is able to sustain.

The Indian policy making community may have to take care of the use of conventional warheads in strategic weapons. A panel of the UN which had an Indian official apprehended: “… (b) The fact that ballistic and cruise missiles can be armed with conventional or non-conventional warheads. Both variants give rise to distinctive security concerns, both global and regional, which arise not only from their capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction or conventional ordnance but also from the difficulty of distinguishing between a conventionally armed and a non-conventionally armed missile in flight …” India has two nuclear weapons countries in its neighbourhood. Some argue that the use of ballistic missiles may increase an additional level of escalation. This may or may not happen. But there is possibility of starting of an unintended nuclear exchange with the use of conventional warhead tipped ballistic missiles. This may not be in accordance with the Indian war planning. Moreover, the use of ballistic missiles may not be advisable because of its cost. The use of costly ballistic missiles with conventional warhead would be like killing a fly with a tank. The use of air power and other weapons could be more cost effective for the same mission. In the final analysis, we may assert that for modernisation of Armed Forces induction of missiles of all kinds are necessary. Without missiles the force may not have enough fire power. In the near future, India seems to rely on outside for battlefield missiles. It should have a reasonable procurement policy for it. However, India will have to increase the indigenous component not only for ballistic missiles but also for operational ones. For the purpose, it should increase not just budget but also attention to indigenous defence sciences and institutions. Without an advanced growth of indigenous defence science or general sciences India cannot move to a great power status from an emerging power. However, it may outsource or procure some of components or technology from outside. Even advanced countries procure components and technology from foreign sources to economise a defence project.

The writer is a Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi since 1993, where he specialises in export control, non-proliferation and arms control. He was a Visiting Research Fellow at Japan Institute of International Affairs, Tokyo, where he published his monograph Non-Proliferation Issues in South Asia.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

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The writer highlights the war winning potential of the BrahMos cruise missile. BrahMos is among the fastest supersonic cruise missiles in the world, at speeds ranging between Mach 2.5 to 2.8, being about three and a half times faster than the American subsonic Tomahawk cruise missile. A hypersonic version of the missile is also presently under development (lab-tested with Mach 5.26 speed). BrahMos has emerged as the perfect strike weapon with a fine combination of speed, precision, power, kinetic energy and reaction time attributes. In fact, India is the only country in the world to have inducted the supersonic land-attack cruise missile in its army. DRDO has claimed that BrahMos would be able to start deliveries of the 240 missiles ordered by the army in two years from now as per the original schedule. The requirement for rapid induction of the advanced BrahMos systems cannot be overstated especially given that the Pakistan Army is inducting its nuclear-capable Babur land-attack cruise missile, developed with Chinese assistance, to strike at a range over 500 kms, in large numbers into its arsenal. 80

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BRAHMOS ADVANTAGE

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Dr Monika Chansoria

cruisein missiles future conflict

ndia’s rise to strategic prominence in the Indian sub-continent is buttressed by the strides undertaken in the realm of indigenous missiles production and innovation. The past decades have been witness to phenomenal surges in missile technology and intrusions into outer space globally. However, India did not boast of a credible missile programme until 1983, when

a ‘decisive shift’ in missile development plans saw the missile capability of Indian Armed Forces receiving a major fillip from the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). The ensuing launch of the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP) in 1983 aimed to develop a family of strategic and tactical guided missiles based on local design and development. The primary objective remained manufacturing a range of missile systems for the three defence services. Since then, the IGMDP has tasted significant success as far as two of its most significant constituents i.e., the Agni and Prithvi missile systems are concerned. Additionally a host of other systems including the Akash and Trishul SAMs, the anti-tank Nag, along with Sagarika, Shaurya, Dhanush, Pinaka and Prahaar constitute India’s battle missile array.

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BRAHMOS ADVANTAGE

the overall cost effectiveness of cruise missiles has increased. The cost-effectiveness of cruise missiles may alter the fundamental role of airpower. The evidence is that a comparison of the cost-effectiveness of cruise missiles and ballistic missiles will favour cruise missiles because these cost on average only 15 per cent of the cost of ballistic missiles. Furthermore, cruise missiles fly at low altitudes and have the ability to evade enemy radars and air-defence systems Supersonic route Realising a need for indigenous cruise missile technology, India was on the lookout for a long-range weapon option for the Indian Armed Forces that would also be available to the field force commanders with meaningful accuracy to influence the outcome of operations. Supersonic route to develop the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile became the best available option that can be launched from submarines, ships, aircraft or land. The BrahMos developers have come up with successful development of an anti-ship and land attack capability. As a general principle, cruise missiles do not possess defensive capabilities that permit them to withstand an attack. Therefore, the survivability of a cruise missile after it is launched is crucially dependent on stealth in navigation and minimising the interval between the time that enemy air defence systems detect its presence and the time it takes for the cruise missile to arrive at its designated target. This interval is a function of the speed of the cruise missile and the distance at which it is detected. In order to saturate defences, minimising the time available to the defender for engaging the cruise missiles is crucial. Going by an initial assumption that there is one defender and that the cruise missile has perfect lethality, the number of incoming missiles that will saturate defences would ultimately be determined by the number of times that the defender can engage the same. Owing to their ability of making precision strikes on distant targets, conventional cruise missiles are accorded focal significance by the Armed Forces. The twin aspects of precision and range distinctly characterise them while striking high value targets. While the direct objective would be to destroy or neutralise military capabilities, indirectly, the purpose remains dissuasion by means of launching a series of precision

strikes. A momentous increase in the speed of a cruise missile always tends to add to its lethality. BrahMos is among the fastest supersonic cruise missiles in the world, at speeds ranging between Mach 2.5 to 2.8, being about three and a half times faster than the American subsonic Tomahawk cruise missile. An important exception nevertheless remains the Russian Alfa cruise missile, capable of speeds in excess of Mach 4 (four times the speed of sound).

Growing significance It was stated at a public podium by the Chief Controller, DRDO and CMD, BrahMos Aerospace that Gulf War I was a turning point towards the growing significance of cruise missiles and numerous dimensions of firepower in future wars. The need for a systematically planned long-term doctrine for future wars that would be ‘intelligent, autonomous and network centric’ has been emphasised by the Chief Controller. In this reference, BrahMos has emerged as the perfect strike weapon with a fine combination of speed, precision, power, kinetic energy and reaction time attributes. In fact, India is the only country in the world to have inducted the supersonic land-attack cruise missile in its army. Advent of the BrahMos gave the Indian Armed Forces, the much needed capability to undertake deep surgical strikes against the enemy. The high speed of the BrahMos gives it better target-penetration characteristics as compared to slower subsonic cruise missiles such as the Tomahawk. BrahMos is a multi-platform cruise missile enabling it to strike from various types of land, sea and airbased platforms, including mobile and fixed ones. Possession of such weapon systems in the Indian arsenal would successfully prevent any hostile ship close within an operational range of

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

290 kms at sea when used with prior planning. Although BrahMos is primarily an anti-ship missile, it is also capable of engaging land-based targets. Between late 2004 and early 2008, the missile has undergone several tests from variety of platforms including a land-based test from the Pokhran desert in western India, in which the S manoeuvre at Mach 2.8 was demonstrated for the Indian Army and a launch in which the land attack capability from sea was also verified. In a planned launch for the army in January 2009, a new BrahMos Block II version was launched at Pokhran during trial in vertical mode-a configuration likely to be used for land forces based operations. The missile failed to hit the target due to glitches in the homing device. However, in a subsequent test on March 29, 2009, the Indian Army tested the land attack version of BrahMos Block II with advanced seeker software with target discriminating capabilities from a mobile autonomous launcher at the Pokhran test range. According to a statement released by the DRDO, “The missile took off successfully and hit the desired target at bull’s eye meeting all mission parametres.” With the successful completion of this test, the development phase of the Block II version of BrahMos stands complete and is ready for induction in the army. The test-launch in March 2009 was crucial towards the realisation of the army’s objective to induct the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile as a ‘precision-strike weapon’. DRDO has claimed that BrahMos would be able to start deliveries of the 240 missiles ordered by the army in two years from now as per the original schedule. The Indian Navy too, has already inducted the anti-ship Block I naval version into service with its integration on the destroyer INS Rajput. BrahMos has emerged as the main

anti-ship strike weapon and is capable of flying from a sea-skimming height of just 10 metres above the waves to an altitude of 15 kms. While it can achieve a maximum velocity of Mach 2 in the denser air at sea level, this goes up to Mach 2.7 in the rarefied upper atmosphere above 7 kms. Moreover, INS Ranjit is next in line among eight warships that the Indian Navy has planned to equip with the BrahMos fitted with four missile launchers, two on each side of the vessel.

Rare distinction While the first two launch platforms have already been deployed, the submarine-launched system is yet to be tested and the air-launched version is still under development, likely to be deployed on the Sukhoi Su-30 fighter-bomber by 2012. It was reported in January 2009 that two Indian Air Force (IAF) Sukhoi-30 MKI fighter jets were sent to Russia for a retrofit programme that would enable them to launch the aerial version of the BrahMos missile. The aerial version of the BrahMos is reported to be nine metres long and once fitted can auto-launch itself towards the target after being released from the aircraft by the pilot. Once the air-launched version is complete, the BrahMos would have the rare distinction of becoming the only cruise missile with the capability of being launched from land, sea and air. In addition, a hypersonic version of the missile is also presently under development (lab-tested with Mach 5.26 speed). The emergence of the BrahMos as a top-notch weapon system in the world in its category includes research, development as well as establishment of facilities for production. BrahMos has often been compared with other weapon systems of the world in terms of cost. For such a complex weapon system, there are varieties of cost imponderables. Notwithstanding the same, when compared with other weapon systems of its class, BrahMos continues to remain the most cost effective option owing to the technology used; R and D effort; dividends in terms of accuracy, speed, reliability, shoot capability and ease at operation; ease of maintenance and comparison of down time; least collateral damage reducing fear of escalation of war beyond threshold level; universality of missile

as regards to the use from variety of platforms; shelf life; ability to form part of network centric warfare; capability to engage more than one target with salvo option from the same platform; availability of spares backup; number of associated sub-systems required to operationalise the complete weapon system; and, comparison of manpower required to operationalise the system vis-à-vis other systems. Due to an on-board inertial navigation system with three gyroscopes and three accelerometres, BrahMos is a ‘fire and forget’ weapon, requiring no further guidance from the control centre once the target has been assigned and it is launched. Upon completion of assembly, it has a 10-year shelf life, requiring a routine preventive maintenance check once every three years. With decline in the cost of modern technologies, the overall cost effectiveness of cruise missiles has increased. The cost-effectiveness of cruise missiles may alter the fundamental role of airpower. The evidence is that a comparison of the cost-effectiveness of cruise missiles and ballistic missiles will favour cruise missiles because these cost on average only 15 per cent of the cost of ballistic missiles. Furthermore, cruise missiles fly at low altitudes and have the ability to evade enemy radars and air-defence systems. A significant supplement to the BrahMos is the Nirbhay-a subsonic missile using a terrain-following navigation system to reach up to 1,000 kms. Capable of being launched from multiple platforms on land, sea and air, Nirbhay is expected to undertake its first flight in 2012, with systems integration work currently under way. Nirbhay will be a terrain hugging, stealth missile capable of delivering

24 different types of warheads depending on mission requirements.

Conclusion Given the costs and precision viability, both absolute and in comparison with other aerial weapons, cruise missiles have certainly become a key constituent of the weapon assortment of many nations including India. Since cruise missiles are capable of delivering ordnance over great distances with a high degree of accuracy, they are widely being viewed as a strategically significant weapon of the twenty-first century to achieve politico-military goals. Significantly, the tactical capability of cruise missiles implies that it would be exceedingly difficult to defend against these missiles, in part because of the possibility that the defences could be saturated by mass attacks. In India’s case, the requirement for rapid induction of the advanced BrahMos systems cannot be overstated especially given that the Pakistan Army is inducting its nuclear-capable Babur land-attack cruise missile, developed with Chinese assistance, to strike at a range over 500 kms, in large numbers into its arsenal. In the event that future wars will be limited in aims, objectives, application of force levels and time frame, only a joint air and land campaign with massive firepower asymmetry will enable successful achievement of military objectives. The emergence of BrahMos has not only strengthened India’s technological base but also elevated its image worldwide. Thus the contribution of the BrahMos to India’s arsenal is noteworthy in a quest to maximise its firepower potential for a future military engagement. The writer is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, New Delhi, where she heads the China-study project.

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air-mobile

artillery

An innovative and out of the box solution for the application of artillery firepower in the mountains. The writer suggests that given the lay of the land, the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force will have to consider the option of raising an appropriate piece of artillery on a fixed-wing aerial platform for flexibility of deployment in such restrictive terrain. A gunship is what India needs for warfare in the Himalayas. The problem of recoil though will have to be overcome.

rtillery is an integral component of ground forces operations. In Himalayan terrain where future battles are expected not just against Pakistan but against China as well, Kargil has become the benchmark and model for massed application of artillery in support of infantry attack. The Indian Armed Forces used 2,50,000 shells, bombs and rockets to clear about 200 square kilometres of mountainous terrain of Pakistan Army infiltrators from heights that gave the Pakistanis the advantage against Indian troops climbing up to dislodge them.

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Cecil Victor

Trial and error Nonetheless, the Indian Army had to innovate by trial and error before it realised that the best method of employment of artillery in support of ground forces in the craggy desolation of the Himalayas is by direct fire of weapons designed for elevation and high-trajectory usage. Over a two-month campaign it became the norm rather than the exception that the Bofors 155 mm howitzer; the 130 mm medium field gun, the 105 mm Indian field gun and the 214 mm Pinaka multibarrel rocket launchers were used to shoot directly at positions taken up by the Pakistan Army Northern Light Infantry in the nooks and crevices and "sangars" built with rocks. This was backed up by concerted sorties by the Indian Air Force but early attempts to locate targets and accurately deliver the weapons load and the need to stay out of range of the shoulder-fired America-supplied Stinger missiles that took the toll of one aircraft and one helicopter saw acrimony grow between the IAF and the Army. Such saturated bombardment left the Pakistanis mostly dead and injured and the survivors too shaken up to fight even though they held the advantage of high ground. But it took two months to do it. Future wars will give little credit for such luxury of time frame and expenditure of ammunition.

Slow pace One of the reasons why the government of India has accelerated road building all along the Himalayas is to enable the Indian Army to transport its heavy artillery to forward positions where Pakistani and Chinese forces can be engaged effectively and stopped in their tracks. However, the terrain and weather conditions are such that only about half the formation cutting and surfacing has been accomplished and many of the 73 projects are three years behind schedule. Three rail links to Arunachal Pradesh are still in the planning stage and will take a minimum of ten years from drawing board to arrival of train at railhead.

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The combination of air-mobile assets and whatever ground-based artillery that can be transported to points overlooking the Line of Actual Control in its entirety can be designed to dominate the wide open space between the southern bank of the Brahmaputra and the Himalayas. Yet even the best basing strategy for land artillery it will be the air-mobile gun that will provide India with the most flexible and hard-hitting options. More so if the China-Pakistan collusive brotherhood decides to use clandestine infiltration and sub-conventional (terror) tactics to slice off Indian territory a la Kargil or the continuing attempts to grab the Kashmir Valley It needs to be remembered that in its nearly 3,400 km of lateral east-west expanse the Himalayas also cover between 250 to 350 km in the north-south alignment of the topography. While India has very rugged terrain to traverse along its southern reaches, north of the Himalayas China has the advantage of the Tibetan plateau that allows for easy laying of roads, railways and pipelines. On the Indian side rockfalls and landslides are a frequent occurrence.

Deployability difficult While the Indian Army has managed to transport some of its Bofors 155 mm howitzers up to Kargil in the west and Sikkim in the east it has a very limited number of serviceable weapons in its arsenal because nearly a quarter are rendered useless by cannibalisation to maintain the operational fitness of the rest of the guns. While India is in a position to dominate the Gia-Gong gap that gives access to the Tibetan plateau through Sikkim, the two divisions of additional troops

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ORGANIC AIR SuPPORT will need to have firepower to stop the Chinese in their tracks in killing zones located between the southern bank of the Brahmaputra (the Yarlung Tsangpo as the Chinese call it) and the Himalayan foothills on the northern side. That the Chinese troops who came to demand stoppage of work on the Indian side in Ladakh not long ago rode motorcycles gives a pretty clear picture of the state of the landscape. It will not always be possible to congregate the different types of weapons and the kind of firepower that was managed at Kargil.

Containment / dislodgement There are two aspects to the defence of the Himalayas that Kargil has highlighted. One is how to manage the border and dominate the landscape with appropriate weapons. The other is to be able to swiftly neutralise any intrusions and attempts to grab territory like how the Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Pervez Musharraf did in 1999 reassured by the fact that he now had tested and proven nuclear weapons to backup his misadventure. It is not all about counter-bombardment alone as it would be if there is to be containment on the border itself. The dislodgement of entrenched infiltrators in Indian territory in the mountains calls for proper tools for target acquisition and engagement keeping in view the possibility of surface-to-air missiles in the hands of the enemy which would require the attacking aircraft to either stay well out of reach at the point of release of bomb load or be well-protected by chaff and flare dispensers. For artillery on the ground, narrow valleys and convoluted passageways do not allow the luxury of shoot-and-scoot which is what caused high casualties among Indian troops caught in more accurate counter-bombardment backed by better weapons locating radars on the Pakistan side.

Air-mobile option Given the lay of the land the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force will have to consider the option of raising an appropriate piece of artillery on a fixed-wing aerial platform for flexibility of deployment in such restrictive terrain. A gunship is what India needs for warfare in the Himalayas. It has the artillery piece and it has the platforms

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

that can do the job. Now that the most recent buzzword in the strategic circuit is “innovation”, it is time for the government institutions to rise to the occasion. The acquisition of the C-130J and the Globemaster C-17 and the already existing fleet of Ilyushin-76 transport aircraft allow India to make an indigenous effort to create its own gunship by installing the 105 mm Light Indian Field Gun (or better still the ultralight version 155 mm howitzer) on any of the above mentioned aircraft. Variants of the C-130 Hercules have long been used in the gunship role employing a 105 mm artillery piece. The immediate advantage of such an arrangement would be that the Indian Army would be able to come to the assistance of any Indian forward outpost (including Bana Post on the Siachen Glacier which Pakistan had tried desperately to retake several times) that comes under attack within three hours if the aircraft is based at Gorakhpur in UP from where it can also handle threats in other segments of the Line of Actual Control with China.

Indigenous possibility The 105 mm Light Indian Field Gun has the advantage of being an indigenously developed weapon with an, as yet, intact production line. Its weight of 2,100 kg can be clipped by remodelling its base plate to fit aircraft requirements. Its major advantage is that it has a range of more than 17 km and is capable of being depressed by five degrees and traversed (side movement) by 30 degrees from a fixed position. This obviates the need for the platform to descend or dive into danger during bomb release. A slight tilt of the aircraft can increase the degree of depression of the gun enabling an aircraft-mounted gun to dominate a wide segment of mountainous terrain. Given accurate fixation of enemy positions by AWACS or UAVs one aircraft can deliver six rounds in one minute (one round every ten seconds) by regulating its speed over target.

Barrage bombardment Much of the efficacy of land based artillery is the ability to bring down on enemy heads be they hidden in underground bunkers or in tanks

nearly 100 kg of pre-fragmented metal in the form of high explosive (HE) for bunkers and high-explosive squash head (HESH) for tanks and infantry combat vehicles cumulatively within a few seconds. This is done by organising a barrage with a battery of six guns firing simultaneously or in ripples. The same effect can be achieved by “stacking” six gunships armed with 105 mm Indian Field Guns at different heights (like the way air traffic controllers do when dealing with landings in a congested airport) with all firing at the same time on the same target.

More accurate Importantly, each such land-based artillery barrage has to be monitored by an air observation post usually in a helicopter to check on accuracy and relay corrections to the gunners. In counter-bombardment, weapons locating radars with sufficient range need to be co-terminus with the gunnery officer’s position. Thus, if a first shot does not score a direct hit, more shots have to be fired till the shells start landing on the target. All this is done unseen and you have no compulsion to scoot for fear of an enemy counterbombardment. The enemy cannot be seen because of the mountain between gun and target. We were fortunate that by the time they were ready to take Tiger Hill in the Kargil salient in 1999, the guns were in a position to be aimed directly in line of sight of enemy positions and hence the dramatic television footage of the softening up of the target with an artillery barrage (Bofors 155 mm) before the infantry climbed up for the kill. With airborne artillery the placement of each shot can be seen directly by the gunnery officer on board the aircraft. If all the inputs - grid reference, GPS positioning, meteorological data, etc. are correct the chances of a “first round hit” are brighter from an airborne platform than ground-based artillery, particularly in the mountains. It could be argued that much the same results can be obtained by existing air-launched missiles. If that was really true then there would have been no cause for the acrimony between the Army and the Indian Air Force during the Kargil conflict. Only the Mirage-2000 was able to deliver its missiles with any degree of accuracy but it had to take a calculated risk to be able to guide the missile by laser beam up to six kilometres before it

could break off the guidance and peel away so as to stay out of range of the shoulder-fired SAMs in the hands of the Pakistanis. No such constraint exists in airborne artillery. With a range of 17 km an airborne Indian Field Gun can close in on the enemy and from a distance of 10 km (well out of reach of SAMs) blast it effectively, despatching six rounds in a one-minute time frame over target which, given the radius between the target and aircraft, is very possible in most conditions. The onboard chaff and flare decoys would ensure the aircraft safety in a dense air defence ground environment. As a result expenditure of ammunition is reduced drastically.

Advantages of air-mobility For one, a fixed-wing platform can fly over the Himalayas at any point of its choice thereby creating a surprise element that can be disconcerting for the enemy. On the other hand no helicopter can traverse altitudes above 18,000 ft particularly with an under-slung artillery piece. Therefore roads are necessary but not always available. The direction of a fixed-wing platform is constrained by the fact that in most of the transport aircraft the door is on the left side of the aircraft. However, this can be taken care of by proper basing for example a gunship based in Chandigarh can hit targets all along the Pir Panjal range in Jammu and Kashmir while flying at a safe distance (10 km) from the Line of Control because the range of its gun can pick off targets which perforce have to face eastwards to be able to dominate the National Highway to Leh and the Siachen glacier. The whole of the Kargil battlefield could have been dominated by this one weapon platform. Similarly, gunships operating out of airfields deep inside Indian territory can dominate the Ladakh and “Sugar Sector” in UP which is contiguous to the Tibetan plateau; and Arunachal Pradesh where China has the advantage of terrain.

Himalayan killing fields A combination of gunships and deeply-placed Smerch multibarrel 300 mm rocket launchers and the new 150 km Prahaar surface-to-surface ballistic missile can create killing zones in the path of advancing Chinese troops coming in their usual “waves”. China could find it extremely difficult to make the kind of inroads anywhere

along the Himalayan frontiers in the manner it did in 1962. A failure to do so could undermine China’s military dominance in the region and could be construed as an Indian victory given the preponderance of military power that China holds which allows it to deploy forces in ratio of more than 3:1 against India. The combination of air-mobile assets and whatever ground-based artillery that can be transported to points overlooking the Line of Actual Control in its entirety can be designed to dominate the wide open space between the southern bank of the Brahmaputra and the Himalayas. Yet even the best basing strategy for land artillery it will be the air-mobile gun that will provide India with the most flexible and hard-hitting options. More so if the China-Pakistan collusive brotherhood decides to use clandestine infiltration and sub-conventional (terror) tactics to slice off Indian territory a la Kargil or the continuing attempts to grab the Kashmir Valley.

Time to innovate Both, the weapon and the platform, are available. The Defence Research and Development Organisation should require no nudging to suo motu make an attempt at integrating the two more especially now that one of its laboratories, the Bharat Electronics, has mastered the active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar technology. Other sensors for target acquisition and ranging can be obtained off-the-shelf from the world market (Israel has been particularly helpful in this area). The DRDO could also work on improving the kill capacity of each shell possibly by using fuel-air explosive (FAE) technology which size-for-size is believed to equal a nuclear blast minus the radiation damage. A shell-delivered approximately 25 pound fuel-air explosive warhead would pulverise enemy positions even in a near-miss situation. The DRDO has already shown laudable initiative in improving the IAF’s kill capacity by creating a kit for converting a dumb (freefall) bomb into a laser-guided weapon. The writer has covered all wars with Pakistan as War Correspondent and reported from the conflict zones in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in South East Asia as well as from Afghanistan. He is author of “India: The Security Dilemma”.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

land forces

UNIQUE EXPERIMENT

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Nitin Gokhale

As far back as at the time of Operation Bluestar, a palpable need was felt for a six division strong force for internal security tasks. This would prevent the army’s strategic reserves from getting sucked into such long term involvements. Today this has fructified in the over six divisions plus force of the Rashtriya Rifles (RR). This force has rendered yeoman service in Jammu and Kashmir and helped save that state from the depredations of the terrorists sent from across the LoC to create mayhem. The Rashtriya Rifles has allowed other arms and services to get a first-hand battle experience they would otherwise have lacked. This has facilitated the diffusion of combat experience throughout the army and prevented overstrain on infantry units in terms of reduced field-peace profiles. Today the government will have to redefine RR’s role and absorb it as a regular force and not keep it hanging as an ad hoc formation.

or a counter-insurgency force that is the largest of its kind in the world, the Rashtriya Rifles (RR) receives very little attention in discussions and writings on India’s endless war in Kashmir. Staying out of the limelight however does not take away in any way, the immense contribution made by this force in the past two decades in India’s fight against Paskistan’s proxy war in Jammu and Kashmir.

Temporary force? In the 21st year of existence of Rashtriya Rifles, it is useful to look back at the evolution of this unique force and also understand its future roadmap. At the time of Operation Bluestar as also the Sri Lanka Operations, an urgent need was felt for a six division sized force for internal security, so that India’s strategic reserves would not be sucked away into such internal

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

Rashtriya Rifles:

Dedicated CI Force

commitments and would be free to undertake their assigned roles. This capability has now fructified with the six divisions plus of the Rashtriya Rifles. It has been an invaluable tool as it has relieved the tremendous load that was falling on the infantry battalions alone and had placed a great strain on their field-peace profile. This force has also done yeoman service in helping to spread combat experience throughout the Indian army - especially in the other arms and services. It is important, however, to remember that officially the Rashtriya Rifles is still a ‘temporary force,’ since clearance to raise the force was given under the provisions of Union Composite Table, Part II. So, theoretically, if the Union government wants, it can disband the 80,000-strong force with an executive order. However, given the relentless attempts by Pakistan to send highly-trained and heavily-armed terrorists into Kashmir, the chances of such an eventuality in the near future remain low. Moreover, like the Assam Rifles in the north-east, the Rashtriya Rifles in Jammu and Kashmir has emerged as a force that now has unmatched knowledge of the terrain, the people, local dynamics and most importantly intelligence. In other words it has mastered both the physical and human terrain of this vital border state. It is now the spearhead of Indian army’s sub-conventional war doctrine.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

land forces

The Rashtriya Rifles has allowed other arms and services to get a first-hand battle experience they would otherwise have lacked. Officers from Armoured Corps, Artillery, Engineers, Signals or even those from the Ordnance and Supply Corps would not have had the chance to gain real combat experience had it not been for the opportunity provided by Rashtriya Rifles Unique experiment In many ways, Rashtriya Rifles remains a unique experiment in Indian army’s glorious history, mainly because never in the past has such ‘all-arms,’ polyglot composition worked in tandem to produce such magnificent results. After all, this is the only force where infantry soldiers work shoulder to shoulder with personnel drawn from other arms and services. The beginning was not easy though. Rashtriya Rifles was born under very difficult circumstances. The initial proposal was to have a new paramilitary force under the Home Ministry’s control and made up of superannuating soldiers, regular army volunteers on deputation, ex-servicemen and lateral inductees from various paramilitary forces and central police organisations. Although good on paper, this proposal never took-off and since the situation in Kashmir valley was deteriorating fast, the army had to find quick answers. So the top brass under Army Chief Gen S F Rodrigues decided to make Rashtriya Rifles an all-army force. The government was however still reluctant to put its full weight behind the idea. Old timers recall that the dominant thought process in 1990 at the

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UNIQUE EXPERIMENT highest levels in the government was still to push in two reserve divisions of the Army-39 and Army-6 into counter-insurgency operations. The army brass however resisted fiercely. And instead insisted on a specialised counter-insurgency force. Looking back, that decision not to deploy 39 and 6 divisions (the latter Army HQ reserve) was perhaps the most crucial advice that the army gave to the government. Today, those two divisions are free for their conventional role even as Rashtriya Rifles has grown into a 65-battalion (nearly seven divisions!!) force which has honed its CI skills and may now be ready to do dual tasking of guarding the LoC. However it is useful to recall that the initial sanction was for only two sectors headquarters, each comprising three battalions. Under Gen Rodrigues, a crack, proven CI formation - the 8th Mountain Division - raised and then continuously based in Nagaland for over two decades was shifted to the valley. But even that was not enough. So as Gen Rodrigues made way for Gen B C Joshi as COAS, he simply bulldozed his way through both the military and civil bureaucracy to raise more RR units during his short tenure. In fact 30 RR battalions were raised in just one year’s time frame, thanks to the Chief’s personal push and drive. Gen Joshi’s view was: India was going to be involved in an extended counter-insurgency similar to the prolonged deployment in Nagaland and Manipur in the north-east. So a new force - like the Assam Rifles in that region - was needed which could be permanently located in Kashmir to counter the insurgents. So Gen Joshi demanded and got 10 more RR Sector HQs or 30 battalions equivalent to three divisions. His logic: in the bargain the army would have three additional battle-hardened divisions, ready for rear area security during any future war. In nearly 20 years since then, Gen Joshi’s prediction has come true! The RR units are now as battle-hardened, seasoned and effective

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

as any infantry formation. It wasn’t of course all easy in the beginning. The initial RR units had certain inherent weaknesses in their class and composition. Although the logic of keeping the unit composition a mixed one was sound - to avoid charges of bias in a class or regional based units - it created problems in the field. The early RR units have been described as “transit camps,” with troops coming and going at regular intervals. The camaraderie and cohesion usually evident in regular army units was missing among diverse troops. There were also numerous problems of administration and even of indiscipline. However because of the highest quality of leadership displayed by army officers, those initial hiccups were overcome gradually. Care was taken to send the highest quality human resources to the RR. All the soldiers were required to be under 30 years of age to ensure physical fitness of a very high order. It also helped that under the next COAS, Gen Shankar Roy Chowdhury, a new formula was evolved on the basic composition of RR units.

Cohesion and discipline Each regiment was told to raise two RR battalions and provide 60 per cent of the strength for each unit. The rest 40 per cent were drawn from all services and arms. Additionally, the Commanding Officer and his No. 2 were drawn from the same regiment. This ensured basic cohesion and discipline. The new formula also engendered a sense of ownership amongst the regiments. Subsequently, this proportion was changed to 50 per cent each from the infantry and other arms and services. Now as a matter of routine one finds an RR battalion proudly displaying its parent regiment’s name on display boards and signposts. So, across Jammu and Kashmir it is now common to see boards proudly displaying signs such as 36 RR (Garhwal) or 40 RR (Dogra)! Apart from the cohesion now more than evident, on a larger scale, the Rashtriya Rifles has allowed other arms and services to get a first-hand battle experience they would otherwise

have lacked. Officers from Armoured Corps, Artillery, Engineers, Signals or even those from the Ordnance and Supply Corps would not have had the chance to gain real combat experience had it not been for the opportunity provided by Rashtriya Rifles. Over the past two decades, many officers from these arms and services have distinguished themselves in conflict and have in fact earned gallantry awards aplenty. This has facilitated the diffusion of combat experience throughout the army. Today the Rashtriya Rifles has a separate directorate in the Army HQs and is spread over five CI Force HQs, equivalent to a division. While two are in the Valley - CI Force (K), CI Force (V) - the other three, CI Force (U), CI Force (D) and CI Force (R) are located south of Pir Panjal. These 63 battalions of RR form the main CI grid in Jammu and Kashmir thereby relieving regular army units for training and deployment in their original conventional role. Aware of the potential of these battle-hardened RR battalions, top military leadership in Northern Command is now gradually thinking of assigning a new role to these formations. Accordingly, RR battalions deployed in Kashmir’s hinterland where militancy is at low ebb in the

past few years, are now being assigned a role along the Line of Control. By doing this, the top brass is readying the RR units for multi-tasking in the future. If militancy remains confined to encounters along the LoC, as has been happening over the past few months, several RR units located in the hinterland may find themselves without much of a job. If these units are slowly given the experience of guarding the LoC, many more infantry battalions can be freed from LoC deployment and can then be trained or redeployed in high altitude areas along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China in Ladakh or in Arunachal Pradesh. After all, India is planning to raise a full-fledged Mountain Strike Corps in addition to two mountain divisions already under raising in the north-east. All these plans will fructify quickly once the government decides to regularise Rashtriya Rifles and not keep a sword hanging on the army’s head by giving piecemeal extensions. The current formal clearance for RR, it must be emphasised, is only up to June 2013. To implement and fine-tune the new strategy, the government will have to redefine RR’s role and absorb it as a regular force and not keep it hanging as an ad hoc formation. In the past 20 years, the Rashtriya Rifles flag - a

Rifle, green cloth with the Regimental Crest in Silver Zari in the centre and a crest that has two crossed rifles with the Dharma Chakra in the centre, has become an integral part of Kashmir’s landscape. Its motto 'Dridhta aur Veerta' in Hindi is visible all over Jammu and Kashmir country side. No other unit or formation of the Indian Army has done as much to win the hearts and minds of the local people of Jammu and Kashmir. Its contribution to bring back peace and stability in Jammu and Kashmir is immeasurable. The force has been able to create a situation conducive for civil governance in coordination with local population, police and civil administration. The sacrifices made by the troops of Rashtriya Rifles are accurately reflected in the over 4,000 individual decorations, 31 Chief Of Army Staff unit citations and 46 General Officer Commanding-in-Chief unit citations that have been conferred on them. It is a force that needs to be supported and nurtured further to keep the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir under control.

The writer, a journalist with 28 years of experience behind him in various conflict theatres, is currently NDTV's Security and Strategic Affairs Editor.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

land forces

n the 21st century global scenario, it is crystal-clear that information dominance and prowess of information technology for war have given rise to the fifth dimension of warfare after the land, sea, air and space warfare, coupled with well-defined frameworks of network-centric cyber threats and challenges to the entire paraphernalia of national security and war potential of a nation-State like India. Actually, it was the futurist thinker and writer William Gibson who, in 1984, coined the word “cyberspace” in his novel Neuromaneer for the purpose of describing the shadow world of data and artificial intelligence in which new breeds of mischief–seeking rogues could inflict tremendous damage on the power, prestige, safety and security of individual nation-States by penetrating into their information systems and confiscating data of utmost national importance. The term “cyberspace” has found expression in a variety of ways, meaning thereby anything having to do with computers and the intra- and Internet in a schematic scenario of the World Wide Web. In military parlance, “cyberspace” represents that part of the battlefield which requires the employment of information technology-based weapons against the opponents or rivals. It involves the aggressive employment of information means to attain vital national goals. In due course, it prompts a series of network-centric actions undertaken by the parties involved in a conflict situation to undermine, degrade and exploit the information systems of the enemy or rival parties. Conversely, network-centric cyber warfare also consists of all the actions aimed at safeguarding the information systems against all sorts of inimical activities of the adversaries within the domain, range and scope of cyberspace. Cyber warfare operations may be repeatedly launched by the opposing sides in all cycles of conflict situations, peace, crisis, escalation, actual war fighting, de-escalation and post-war scenarios. The prime focus of this article is to highlight how the network-centric direct and indirect forms of cyber warfare could at best be utilised by different arms and services of the Indian Army to confront the present and future information-based threats and challenges produced by our enemies and rivals in a

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INFORMATION DOMINANCE globalised world. Especially when we find that globalisation has broken all the barriers of culture, tradition, trade, investment, technology, international and national money transactions, economy and security, etc. due to the over-arching impact of information revolution.

Cyber warfare techniques as force-multipliers to offensive land operations Land warfare has always been more intractable, fragile and field of larger set of impact phenomena. Resultantly, the ambition for “system of systems” has gained importance to encompass land forces. Network-centric ground forces will accelerate situational knowledge by facilitating accurate, complete, real-time information about allied and inimical forces. The motive is to make a break through the “fog of war” to attain information dominance over the adversary. As a result, the most sweeping outcomes of implementing revolution in military affairs would be realised by the land forces. Their ability to strike with accuracy over great distances signifies that time and space could tend to become less important barriers. Enemy formations within the battle space would be entangled from outside it. We may use cyber warfare techniques as means of causing strategic paralysis of enemy’s command structure, defence forces and operations by breaking into their information systems, both directly as well as indirectly. Direct cyber warfare offensive may change the enemy’s information without involving the intervening perceptive and analytical actions. Changing bar code labels with bogus ones on pallets in deployment staging area may constitute one such burning example of direct cyber offensive. Indirect cyber warfare may change the enemy’s information by generating multitude of phenomena that the enemy must then observe and get compelled to analyse. It is quite likely that any cyber offensive may initially go unidentified, so that counter-cyber offensive will be exceptionally intractable because it will be virtually implausible to track the offender through cyberspace and the consequences of such an offensive will be highly deleterious and psychologically very demoralising.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

In an operationalised cyberspace scenario, Indian Army may resort to information either as a mission or as a battle space. If it thinks of it as a mission, it tends to think about how to use information to do things it was already doing to achieve its goals. If information is taken as a battle space, it is bound to have its own terrain where different peace-time commands and war-time deployment of the Indian land forces might intend to conduct integrated cyber and military operations to accomplish their goals. Information could be broadly sought and used to increase the speed, flexibility and manoeuvrability of the troops to reach deep into enemy’s rear with sustained capability, follow-up and post-combat consolidation. To reap benefits of information / cyber warfare capabilities against the enemy, we need to employ Comprehensive Operation Information Systems (COIS) and Comprehensive Management Information Systems (CMIS) required to brow-beat various pitfalls and uncertainties germinating through the “fog of war”. The network-centric cyberspace systems which are very likely to integrate, synergise and optimise such actions can be broadly classified as follows: ●● Data-bases systems.

and

knowledge-base

●● Intelligence systems. ●● Storage systems.

and

retrieval

data-base

●● Decision support systems. ●● Command and control systems. Through the use of these systems, the superiority of combat force is being replaced by the supremacy of information. The time on the battlefield is compressed and inter-operability and penetrative thrust are becoming faster and faster. Ever increasing magnitude of information gathered from reconnaissance, surveillance, remote sensing, satellite data and target acquisition systems has started posing intractable limits on human intelligence to collect and analyse. This task is now being handled by computers. The use of artificial intelligence for decision-making has also gained ground to achieve national objectives in a digitised world.

Dr Rajendra Prasad

The prime focus of this article is to highlight how the network-centric direct and indirect forms of cyber warfare could at best be utilised by different arms and services of the Indian Army to confront the present and future information-based threats and challenges produced by our enemies and rivals in a globalised world. Network-centric ground forces will accelerate situational knowledge by facilitating accurate, complete, real-time information about allied and inimical forces. The motive is to make a break through the “fog of war” to attain information dominance over the adversary. We may use cyber warfare techniques as means of causing strategic paralysis of enemy’s command structure, defence forces and operations by breaking into their information systems, both directly as well as indirectly. An interesting piece. Network-centric information as a potent weapon and India’s stakes In literal sense, information signifies knowledge such as facts, data or opinions, including numerical, graphic or narrative forms, whether oral or maintained in any medium. Thus, information itself has emerged as the most potent and effective weapon. The oft-repeated terms like “information frontiers”, “information factory”, “informatised army”, “digitised battlefield”, “information police”, “take-home battle”, “cyber warrior”, “logical bombs”, all symbolise the primacy of rapidly expanding technology of computers, networks and digital communications, enhancing the ability of information-capable nation-States and leveraging their military strength and assets.

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

land forces

INFORMATION DOMINANCE

Augus

The Indian military has already understood the importance of intra- and Internet as powerful means of attack, which accelerate the thrust of information offensive to attain information superiority by destroying, degrading and manipulating the enemy’s information,

We may use cyber warfare techniques as means of causing strategic paralysis of enemy’s command structure, defence forces and operations by breaking into their information systems, both directly as well as indirectly information-centric systems, information-based processes and computer-based networks, while denying to the enemy of one’s own information, information systems, information-based processes and computer-based networks. This will involve the use of indomitable viruses to undermine adversary’s capability to wage wars by crashing computers, logistical systems, command and control, electrical energy and water supply systems in civil and military sectors. On the contrary, given the Chinese foray into network–centric cyber warfare actions and the China-Pakistan nexus, India must realise that if no intact security measures are adopted to protect computers and

networks, much of the information assets may be in jeopardy, including its defence research and development projects as well as its emerging potential through perspective planning, programming and budgeting. Such threats are very imminent, especially when India had already witnessed the defacement of government websites, like that of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in 2001 and some most glaring hacking activities in the recent past. Now, hackers are getting more organised and more deleterious than ever before to exert serious blow to India’s polity and diplomacy, national economy and security and so on. According to one study, more than 150 hacker groups have been involved in defacing Indian websites. Some hackers have defaced websites for flaring up propaganda and anti-national messages, etc. Some are aspired to demonstrate their adeptness in creating vulnerabilities. But when it comes to the defacement of websites, Indian and Pakistani hackers have been locking horns to propagandise their respective political ends especially in Jammu and Kashmir by using Internet as a potent means of cyber warfare and most alarmingly cyber terrorism. The fiercest demonstration of cyber warfare offensive between India and Pakistan gained momentum when India carried out its nuclear tests in May 1998. A band of Pakistani hackers, nick-named milWorm, defaced the BARC website and sent anti-India and anti-nuclear overtures. Since then, cyber offensives from both sides have been hiked with alarming rates, especially defacing each other’s websites and committing cyber crimes. India’s Defence Minister A K Antony has also realised the

September 2011 Defence AND security alert

potency of network-centric cyber threats by drawing the attention of the Chiefs of the Indian Army, Navy and Air Force for not firing bullets where they could send viruses through computer networks and asked them to jointly create an impregnable cyber security network which entails safeguarding information, equipment, devices, computers, computer resources, communication devices and information accumulated inside from unauthorised access, usability, exposure, disruption, modification or devastation.

The road ahead Securing the cyberspace is exceptionally intractable strategic challenge that demands integrated and well-intentioned endeavours from the whole society - government, public and private sectors and the individuals. The speed and ambiguity of cyber offensives make it highly complex to draw distinctions among the activities of cyber terrorists, criminals and nation-States. India’s national cyber security requires an honest appreciation of the Chinese thinker Sun Tzu’s dictum which says: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb every battle.”

The writer is Professor in the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies (DDSS) and Dean, Faculty of Science, DDU Gorakhpur University, UP, India.

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Fire retardant Environment friendly ? Energy efficient Zero maintenance Insulated ? Customisable design (size and looks) Highly durable ? ? High impact resistance enhances the life ? High structural load capacity (>8,000 psi) ? Can hold up to 5,000 litres water tank on top ? High wind resistant UV proof Light weight ? Quick erection time: takes 6-7 hrs only to erect 1,000 sq.ft. and 4-5 hrs to dismantle

Usage Disaster relief shelters ? ? Defence personnel in coastal areas ? Defence personnel in high altitude areas ? Defence personnel in deserts and terrains ? Barracks for the police and security forces

Police control rooms Transit camps Eco-tourism Schools in remote areas Primary health centres Pilgrimage shelters Milk booths Old-age homes

PAWITRA INTERNATIONAL PRIVATE LIMITED, NEW DELHI, INDIA An ISO 9001:2008 Certified Company Contact today for your requirements: info@pawitra.com, ceo@pawitra.com or call at: +91-9811079666 www.pawitra.com