600,000 men, 3,000 tanks should not be sum total of India’s response

Threatening Pakistan with war is a perfectly justifiable step, for acts which are worth fighting a full fledged war for. Conduct a poll in Parliament even today. or among the strategic community asking them to list three occasions on which the country should declare war on Pakistan, and it is a certified bet that a five-man attack on Parliament will not figure in the list. So the question is, what should figure as the response to the attack on Parliament? The answer is not easy, because if we haven’t discovered an answer to that one, we’ll find it even more difficult to come up with a response to the Jammu attack. Certainly a military response to the Jammu and Parliament attacks are called for. But what is to be?

The answer is something only the armed forces can give, but moblising 600,000 men and 3,000 tanks is a bad answer. It does not form part an escalatory model. The consequences far outweigh the cause. This is plainly discernible to both sides, and just as massive retaliation was a failure during the Cold War, so also, total mobilisation will not stop ‘salami-slicing’. Therefore it is not credible, and hence salami-slicing continues.

An escalatory model requires an Indian reaction at a much lower level, that includes a cross border operation. So why are we reluctant to mount a cross border operation?

Because (I would like to be corrected by my former colleagues) our strategy and our weapon systems do not give us the capability to ‘prevent’ the cross border operation from turning horribly messy. In other words, the cross border operation will not be surgical because we have no surgical capability, and the consequences would escalate into uncontrollable war. But for heaven’s sake, that is exactly what we are threatening the Pakistanis by a total mobilisation at the border. So do we want war or not?

Many of these answers would be discovered with brutal frankness if a politico-military simulation game was played, which is what the Israelis do. But despite any number of entreaties at many official levels, the leadership has refused to move to set up an independent pol-mil simulation centre. The armed forces play enough simulation games but these are mostly tactical, rarely strategic and never politico-military. In 50 years, we have still not built up a ‘red’ team to simulate a hostile leadership, despite offers of free consultancy from well meaning strategic thinkers. This is the reason why our moves on the ground don’t tally with what the political and (lately) the military leaders say.

Perhaps the whole government should read US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Transforming the Military. After 9/11, the US has increased the homeland defence security programme by 47 %, programmes to deny enemies sanctuary by 157 %, long distance power projection by 21 % and programmes to harness info-tech by 145 %. The money has been found by ruthlessly cutting 1,000 short range helicopters and the new destroyer (DD21) programmes. In our case, since the Gulf War demonstrated that a new kind of war has begun, Kosovo confirmed it and Afghanistan reiterated this fact, there has not been one per cent change in the pattern of armed forces funding pre 1991 and post 1991. Who is accountable?

The present leadership need not feel guilty as it has taken over a decade to bring the armed forces to a pass where it is unable to offer any clear options to the country’s external security problems. The present Army is structured and trained to hold ground. For 30 years, this has not been relevant and it is unlikely to be of relevance for another couple of decades. The Navy is structured to win a sea war and that is an unlikely scenario for another decade too. The Air Force has not a single force multiplier and cannot transport commandos at low level on a dark night. What happened to the thinking institutions of the armed forces whose chapter is to think ahead?

In all honesty, the Chiefs of Staff need to institute a joint services commission to enquire into how the Indian armed forces came to a pass where they were unable to respond clearly to blatant cross border violation without dragging the whole country into an unwanted war. They are most welcome to keep the results in-house. Alternatively, they can simulate India’s counter-attack and discover the reasons it will go out of control and also discover what are the systems that will give India massive escalation dominance. They then need to go to the government and tell them frankly how long it will take to restructure our capabilities to punish Pakistan without ending up not knowing who won and who lost.

The whole country is looking for a strategy and can’t find any. Many senior officers are waiting for a government directive but either don’t understand or are unwilling to admit that in all countries, it is the military that helps the political authority to draft the directive that is then re-issued to them.