Further south, the horizontal landscape of the Thar Desert and Rann of Kutch present the ideal terrain for a fierce Indo-Pak armoured combat. That there is little scope of collateral damage will make it an ideal backdrop for tactical nuclear warfare. But the sandy landmass of Thar and the peat bogs and saline marshland of Kutch have little strategic importance. In sum, as long as India limits her territorial gains in this segment, even an ultra-jingoistic Pak General would find it impossible to justify the use of nuclear weapons for tactical gains.
Success of any military action, needless to say, will depend on the element of surprise. So, timing is all-important. Does our politico-bureaucratic-military establishment have the synergy, clarity of thought and swiftness of decision-making?
Pakistan could deem any breach of its water courses in the north-to-central Rajasthan theatre an existential threat and therefore could rattle the nuclear sabre, but by once again limiting the territorial gains — say an inroad of 50-60 km (even 80 km) abutting Pakistan — India can parry Pakistan’s nuclear brinkmanship.
What we deduce from above is that India can theoretically manage a lightning campaign without providing Pakistan the excuse of infringement to its territorial sovereignty to launch a nuclear attack on India.
Cold Start, A Reality Check
The billion-rupee question is whether India has inbuilt capacity to pull off Cold Start. Chew on these:
- Success of any military action, needless to say, will depend on the element of surprise. So, timing is all-important. Does our politico-bureaucratic-military establishment have the synergy, clarity of thought and swiftness of decision-making?
- The German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke is credited to have said that the first casualty on the first contact with the enemy is the battle plan! Does the Indian Army have a Plan B up its sleeve in case the military campaign goes awry?
- The Sundarji doctrine owes its conceptual framework to AirLand Battle — spelled out in the US Army’s Field Manual FM 100-5 — which formed the basis of US Army’s European war-fighting doctrine from 1982 to the late-1990s. Similarly, Battle Groups are an old NATO concept in which offensive operations were carried out at three levels. And Cold Start is simply a rehash of the lightning war propounded by German officers — Lieutenant Colonel Ernst Volckheim initially and fine-tuned by General Heinz Wilhelm Guderian — and demonstrated by the German Wehrmacht in the Second World War.
Neglect by successive governments has led to the reduction in force levels as well as firepower vis-Ã -vis Pakistan. Since we committed ourselves, with characteristic bravado, to no-first-use policy, we ought to have inflated our conventional deterrence.
Well, I have no pathological dislike for employing borrowed doctrines; after all, why reinvent the wheel? The hitch here is the mismatch between these western doctrines and the preponderant Russian hardware. The old Soviet and Russian machines were made to be in sync with the Russian war doctrine — a massive, turbo swoop down to pulverise its European rivals with the sheer force of numbers. Those machines are meant to work in dustless battlefield, cold climate, etc. India is different.
Neglect by successive governments has led to the reduction in force levels as well as firepower vis-à-vis Pakistan. Since we committed ourselves, with characteristic bravado, to no-first-use policy, we ought to have inflated our conventional deterrence. Capacity building takes years, even decades, through astute planning and acquisition. (And because of the above, we need to crank up designing and producing our own battle equipment.)
Forget the absent strategic culture, there is dearth of defence planning at the strategic level too. Since the advent of the UPA Government, more so with AK Antony at the helm of the defence ministry, there has been nil procurement/upgrade of any major weapon system through competitive tendering. All acquisitions have been pushed through government-to-government and other single-vendor contracts. Conservative estimate puts the cost approximately 25 percent more than it would have cost in competitive bidding! Antony’s narcissistic obsession with his ‘spotlessly clean’ image (he is reported to have told his babus to give the thumbs down to any acquisition at the first whiff of suspicion, never mind if a rival dealer planted the fib) has acutely hamstrung the modernisation of the forces. Burnishing his Mr Clean image further seems to be his only concern.
Pakistan believes that Indias conventional superiority, semblance of international clout and desperate measures can all be nixed through nuclear blackmail.
The fits-and-starts modernisation, paralysis in acquisition especially in procuring self-propelled guns and howitzers, have dwindled the firepower and slackened the mobility.
From what has been going on (Pakistan’s pledge to slow-bleed India through a thousand cuts), it is evident that Pakistan is unimpressed with either of the Indian options (deterrence and pre-emptive action). Pakistan believes that India’s conventional superiority, semblance of international clout and desperate measures can all be nixed through nuclear blackmail. Let us be honest: presently India does not possess the hard and soft power required to arm-twist or influence the military establishment in Pakistan into stanching the terror flow. India obviously needs to do the hard yards to infuse fright in her glare and credibility in her threat. To overcome the power deficit, she has to plug her capability gaps: build military sinews, boost economic power exponentially, strengthen diplomatic muscle, scale up policing and intelligence gathering, shed bureaucratic-military sloth, cultivate political unanimity, sew up communal and other fissures, synergise the functioning of governmental agencies charged with counterterrorism.
The Indian Army and the IAF have conducted several exercises, viz. Divya Astra, Vajra Shakti, Desert Strike, Sanghe Shakti and Brazen Chariots, to assess/validate Cold Start manoeuvres. So, how close or far are we from operationalising Cold Start? I’m afraid, we are years away. This is because of several reasons.
“¦for employing air power instead of betting on short-swift armoured lunges with an eye to barter/extract an indemnity of peace, milk and honey later. The IAF and the Special Forces can be tasked to target the terror nurseries as well as the hideouts of terror-mentors.
The IAF dreams of establishing itself as a continental air force. It has its own independent and grand strategies to stretch its wings. Italian General Giulio Douhet and later British Air Chief Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris had pioneered the idea of strategic bombing in aerial warfare, i.e. bombing the living daylights out of the enemy by battering his centres of gravity (where enemy is most vulnerable, attack there has a good chance of contributing to a decisive outcome). The IAF, despite the depletion in fighter squadron strength, still fancies reigniting the Douhet-Harris firestorm. Close air support, consequently, figures low in IAF’s priority.
It is no secret that the inter-services turf wars are fought with as much loyalty and devotion as the real wars. The Cold Start doctrine was born out of the Army’s womb, not out of tri-services’ (Integrated Defence Staff) labour. No wonder then that, despite the aforementioned combined exercises, the army and the air force are not on the same wavelength. Will the IAF earmark and dedicate a chunk of its combat assets for Cold Start air support? Guess.
Given the mind-boggling logistics involved in mobilising the forces, to speed up mobilisation, it is imperative to shift the garrisons and cantonments closer to the border. The army has just set the ball rolling. Though the Indian Railways is forthcoming (Op Parakram was an exception), it cannot provide the army the stock to validate the mobilisation of inland forces in actual trials.
Lastly, the army has only begun to internalise the Cold Start doctrine.
Please wait...
