Diwali this year has been a good time for the armed forces. All of them have got the hardware the acquisition of which was pending for years. The air force will get its long desired Advanced Jet Trainer, the army will get a new batch of T-90 tanks to give punch to its strike corps, and the navy will get the Israeli Barak anti-missile to defend ships against the growing threat of anti-ship missiles. Certainly all of these purchases are logical and long overdue. By spending money on them the government has agreed with the armed forces that the single service view that motivated these purchases is correct; that the services do need to upgrade their weaponry in those areas where each service headquarters sees its hardware to be deficient. So now each service should have greater success against its single service counterpart in other countries. All this is fine, but the country at the moment is not particularly threatened by any of these foreign armed services. The country is threatened by low intensity warfare through terrorism, and these new purchases do not improve the country’s punch against the terrorists either in India or in Pakistan. So while no one grudges what each service headquarters has seen as its priority, when is the hardware going to be acquired that the country so desperately needs? Dawood Ibrahim, along with Tiger Memon, Hafez Sayed, Sayed Salauddin and Azhar Masood have waged war on India for periods varying from six to ten years. Cross border terrorism is thirteen years old. All these terrorist leaders live openly in Pakistan and have had long and intimate contact with the ISI. Any such individual, in any other part of the world would have been extradited, eliminated or picked up and brought across the border by special forces. All that India has done to stop these individuals waging war against the state is to write Musharraf an occasional letter demanding that he ‘‘give them up’’. The revelations by the US that Dawood has Al-Qaeda links will result in one more letter. Why have the three services not accepted that their ‘‘enemy’’ today are primarily some individuals and not the Pakistan army or navy or air force? Because each of them is unclear as to whose ‘‘enemy’’ these individuals are. In the overall ambiguity of things, none of the three services has accepted these individuals as ‘‘their’’ enemy. So none of them has developed a single service capability to pick these enemies up nor will they see that the hardware necessary to do this job comes from their budget. This is a great tragedy for the country and the soldiers in J&K, who are constantly on the defensive against terrorism with no hope of there ever being an offensive. The only ‘‘weapon’’ useable against these people are the special forces. But today the cream of the special forces, the National Security Guard, has been reduced to a VIP protection force, and its skills are displayed more as some kind of a circus trick before ignorant laymen. Rapelling down from a transport helicopter in broad daylight may awe civilian spectators, but the expert is only too aware that the MI-7 helicopter can’t fly at night and is not worked up with the special forces as an integral team. Meanwhile the air force is raising its own special forces for air field security and protection, so that adds one more special force to the existing para and marine commandos, who will have no transborder capability by night. When the military interaction with the US began in the early nineties, the intention of that generation of Indian military planners was to get the special forces of the two countries together so that India learns how trans-border commando operations are planned. Ten years have passed. No progress has been made, beyond admiring some of the equipment the US special forces carry. What was meant to solve the country’s problems with trans-border terrorists has been reduced to meaningless small unit tactical exercises. The right solution to solve the impasse would have been to remove the operationally fit special forces from single service command and put them under the Integrated Defence Staff (IDS) with integral helicopter and maritime support. The IDS knows this only too well but are too timid to campaign for this step openly and vigorously so long as their confidential reports are assessed in their parent services headquarters. Many of the middle seniority officers in the thinking institutions of the three services see all this very clearly but are too frustrated at their inability to change policy. They have already begun to ask whether there is any hope of some civilian or parliamentary group that might interfere and force ‘‘jointness’’ among the unwilling service community. Thirteen years is enough time for the services to change priorities, acquire new hardware and retrain strike units. So obviously the regenerative system of the armed forces has failed. Dawood Ibrahim knows too much for the Pakistanis to let him go. His running around free along with the other hoods is indication that our system has failed. The services headquarters, the ARTRAC, the higher colleges of learning and tactical schools all bear responsibility. The time has come to sort out the mess with some urgency. There are any number of solutions. One of them would be for the MoD to task the IDS with putting in place a trans border anti-terrorist capability and funding them directly and independently of the services budget. In peacetime, in the services hierarchy, money is power. This step will take the IDS past the crippling roadblock of not having a CDS. Another would be to appoint a commission or task force like the Arun Singh or Subramaniam Committee to go into the reasons why the existing structure has failed to give the country what it needs, while services requirements have been met. The thermal imager story will illustrate why something urgent needs to be done. The effectiveness of thermal imagers (TI) in night operations was common knowledge in the mid eighties. The absence of this gadget became widely known in India only when the infantry had to assault the Kargil peaks by day, and suffered heavy casualties. Many analysts were bitterly critical and this resulted in their urgent acquisition. Today twenty years after these gadgets were invented, the army is happy that their success rate against militants has improved astronomically. Will it take another twenty years before they are put into night flying helicopters?
