AS WE SPEND MORE AND MORE on national defence—the annual expen-diture is about to reach Rs 1,00,00 crore—we have long forgotten to ask “why”. A more important unasked question is whether our armed forces are preparing for the right kind of war?One of the main conclusions from Gen-eral Smith’s cerebral and very readable vol-ume is that most of the world’s armies are configured for wars their nations are never going to fight. This applies in equal measure to India. It is not often that such a grand theme on the utility of force is made in the compelling manner that Smith does. And few are better placed than him to offer a solid as-sessment of the unfolding transformation of the global defence environment.Smith, who retired in 2002, belongs to a generation of Western soldiers who were trai-ned to defeat the large Soviet armies on the plains of Europe but were deployed in their final years in service to fight an entirely diffe-rent set of wars in such places as Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo. His reflections on the changing nature of warfare in the modern age provide a good starting point to rethink the nature of India’s defence doctrine and the organisation of its armed forces. He argues that the “indus-trial wars” of the kind the world fought in the 20th century—the first and second world wars which continue to shape the military thinking in India—are now passe.He suggests that wars today are among people, civil wars between communities. In dealing with these, political and military leaders must recast assumptions about the nature and purpose of the use of force.He identifies six trends in modern war- fare—the growing role of non-state actors as well as multinational forces as combatants, finding new uses for old weapons, the em-phasis on force protection rather than using force at any cost, the prolonged nature of the wars, the focus on winning the minds of people, and, above all, a shift from absolute objec-tives to more flexible ones.While most of India’s defence energy goes into defending its borders, the real problem has been in coping with the proxy war Pak-istan has been fighting on Indian soil. While territorial defence remains an overriding se-curity objective, even in the most recent war in Kargil, the larger lesson of recent con-frontations with Pakistan is that a full-scale conventional war is no longer possible.Just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the utility of large-scale industrial wars, the in-troduction of nuclear weapons into the sub-continent has made it virtually impossible to fight the kind of wars India fought with Pak-istan and China in the past.Smith traces the emergence of the antith-esis to the industrial war in the second half of the 20th century that was reflected in the rise of guerilla warfare and counter-insurgency.India’s armed forces have a rich tradition of fighting wars among people both on its own soil and abroad. Yet neither the civilian nor military leadership in New Delhi has paid much attention to it. If New Delhi wants a force that is more appropriately structured to deal with contemporary threats, it would pay heed to General Smith and begin to dig up its own military history for valuable lessons.
