“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

Michael Porter

Introduction

As we continue to deal with the Chinese threat in eastern Ladakh, the primacy of land borders seems to be well entrenched in the minds of leaders and planners at the politico-strategic levels. And yet, the time may be ripe to reflect on and question how our security establishment has perceived threats to India’s core interests through the prism of modern continental history. What are the ways in which expansion and development of military capabilities in different domains, and strategies for their employment, have slowly evolved or (in some instances) been thrust upon those charged with the security of the nation. This article will endeavour to briefly look at the evolution of the Continental Strategy as it took shape in Europe, because that is the precursor to our understanding and utilisation of its principles, some inherited, others studied and modified to suit Indian needs, and then trace the development of our land warfare doctrine and its strategies of employment since independence, before concluding with a few pointers on how warfare might be conducted in the future.

Continental Strategy

The Continental School of Strategy developed in Europe in the mid-19th Century as an outcome of the Napoleonic Wars.1 It is from this school of strategy that most doctrines and principles concerning the conduct of land warfare, principally using land power, have been almost universally applied till present times. The American soldier–scholar John M. Collins, identifies the continental school of strategy with modern land warfare in which the key influence is the 19th Century Prussian military philosopher, Carl von Clausewitz.2 It is the European Continental School that has provided modern militaries with concepts such as the levels of war (strategic, operational and tactical) and the theory of Operational Art, whose facets today are being used as the principal means of conducting military operations, as a bridge between strategy and tactics, through a modern reinterpretation of its tenets. India owes much to the theoretical and practical underpinnings of the Continental Strategy School. It is the lessons from this school of military thought, given to us by the British, and learnt by a handful of Indian officers who cut their teeth in the vast theatres and campaigns of World War II, that we put into practice immediately on independence.

Consolidation of Frontiers and Territories (1947-61)

The period post-independence was a turbulent yet experiential one for India’s nascent military leadership, fresh from the jolt of partition, as it was called in to deal with the threatened secession or annexation of princely states, from Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) to Hyderabad, with Junagadh in between. The first joint operation of independent India, Exercise Peace, was successfully conducted in October-November 1947 for the liberation of Junagadh. The most serious threat was to the state of J&K where ‘irregulars,’ trained, armed and led by personnel of the Pakistan Army, attempted to wrest the state by force from the newly formed Union of India. The fighting was sporadic yet extended. Principles of mountain warfare with the aim of securing and preventing key strategic nodes from being overrun, a limited use of air power for transportation and resupply of besieged positions, and combined arms operations (Battle of Zojila, November 1948, being an excellent example) were some of the lessons the Indian Army and Indian Air Force realised in the battles that were waged till December 1948. A hiatus of nation building and limited reorganization followed. The Indian Army started its long tryst with insurgency in the North East in the mid-1950s against the Nagas. The next joint operation, in December 1961, led to the liberation of Goa, Daman and Diu by means of a swift military action by multiple thrusts of Army columns, ably supported by the Air Force and Navy, which quickly overwhelmed the Portuguese. This period saw the realisation at the strategic level of the need to hold and maintain the nation’s land peripheries and tamp down fissiparous tendencies of people who were now citizens of the Union of India. But the real wake-up call and threat to land frontiers was just around the corner.

Three Wars (1962-71)

These nine years, commencing with the opprobrium of strategic defeat at the hands of the Chinese in October-November 1962, limited operational advantage over Pakistan in 1965, and ending with the strategic high of creating a new nation, Bangladesh, in December 1971 through a swift military campaign, are a watershed period for the Indian military’s coming of age. It firmly established the dominance of the Army over the other two services in the minds of all who dealt with national security. The research scholar Arzan Tarapore in a paper written for the Carnegie Foundation in August 2020 states that, “ground forces dominate Indian military strategy. Since its independence, India has fought five wars along its unsettled northern land borders, and its most vexing security threats today - as illustrated by the ongoing Chinese incursions in the northern region of Ladakh - still loom across those same borders. The Indian Army commands a clear and growing majority of military budget allocations and an even larger share of military personnel.”3

This is a fact that came good in 1971 and hasn’t changed much since. It must also be mentioned here that the trial by fire in the 1950s of dealing with insurgency had by now become a well-developed doctrine (though not called as such), and formations of the Army were kept busy in Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram, honing counter-insurgency tactics and assisting the civil administration to keep a firm grip on governance.

Doctrinal Renaissance (1972-1988)

The two decades following the victory in Bangladesh saw the military, especially the Army, move into a phase of expansion (initiated post 1965) through the creation of new theatres, raising and restructuring of formations (such as two additional armoured divisions and the RAPIDs to name a few), and induction of new equipment (tanks and Infantry Combat Vehicles, air defence systems, 155mm artillery, etc.). A series of important studies were ordered at the very highest levels for an understanding of the revolution in military affairs and doctrinal development that was occurring all around. This was mainly due to the military-technical revolution in weapons and tactics that was sweeping the world, as witnessed in the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War, in the American involvement in Vietnam, the Cold War arms race, and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, to name but a few. A discerning study by Generals KV Krishna Rao, ML Chibber and K Sundarji, among others, was to be the mainstay in the shape and size of the Indian military’s land forces for the decades ahead.4 However, the only reliable partner during this period for the supply of military hardware to suit the mechanised warfare doctrine, which the likes of Generals Sundarji,

Joshi and Hanut Singh subsequently espoused for punishing Pakistan through deep, ground-based punitive thrusts supported by air, was the Soviet Union. Thus, the broad array and part philosophy of employment of the Army’s offensive capabilities came to resemble the Russian Operational Manoeuvre Groups (OMG) arrayed against NATO in Central Europe. Capable army officers, schooled abroad in the employment doctrines of the West and Warsaw Pact countries, came home in the early 1980s to an army undergoing a renaissance, more in military equipment than thought, and were immediately put to the task in schools of instruction to write tactical manuals and précis on modern land warfare, which eventually were put to test in a number of large scale exercises - with Brass Tacks I-IV in 1986-87 being a culminating series.

General Sundarji was at the helm of the Army from 1986 to 1988. A strategic thinker and military leader of a calibre comparable to Field Marshal Manekshaw, he enthralled the nation’s strategic community of the time, including Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Minister of State for Defence Arun Singh, into believing his orthodox offensive military doctrine, primarily land power based but using all military instruments, to secure India’s core national interests. He was involved in firming nascent geo-political concepts about the centrality of India in the affairs of South Asia, be it Sri Lanka or other neighbours, and also in militarily dealing with threats from Pakistan and China. His tenure was to have significant effect and long-term strategic consequences for the country’s security concerns, especially for the nation’s political leaders, in their hesitant use of the military instrument of power in the 1990s once Pakistan unleashed its sub-conventional proxy war in J&K. This long but fruitful development phase served, once again, to reiterate the dominance of land power in the formulation of strategies for a conventional and expeditionary use of the Indian military, even as the other two services started to catch the eye of discerning leaders in the exploitation of the nature of the medium they traversed (sea and air), and the quick unobtrusive gains by them that complemented diplomacy. But the continental mindset and primacy of land power remained.

Committal and Costs (1987-1998)

A discerning eye would notice the overlap of a year between the previous phase and this. That’s because 1987 was the year of the Indian military’s (primarily the Army’s) committal to regional security, outside the ambit of the United Nations (UN). We made the plunge in Sri Lanka in July 1987 with the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), and it was an experience in expeditionary geo-politics like no other. It lasted till 1990 and exposed a disconnect between the desire to be a regional arbitrator and the hard reality of actually being one. The execution by the Army, supported by the Navy and Air Force, through the establishment of a Joint Task Force HQ, is a study in the challenges of joint operations in conflict below the threshold of all-out war. It exposed the glaring deficiencies in the understanding of each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and of not having set procedures and staff capable of handling complex and ambiguous operations in which friend and foe changed roles frequently.

The synergy expected at the strategic level between the military and external intelligence agencies, and military leaders and operational commanders entrusted with execution of tasks in Sri Lanka, vis-à-vis actual experiences were eye-openers. Inadequacies in weapons and equipment apart, IPKF’s lessons were abject examples of how not to conduct such operations in future. The few bright spots in this period of good synergy between services and achievement of strategic results were Op Cactus 1988 (Maldives) and Op Chequerboard 1987 (along the McMahon Line in Arunachal).

This period saw India’s military leadership take it’s eye off the ball (figuratively) on conventional deterrence, as Pakistan embroiled the Army in anti-terror ops, first in Punjab and then, in 1989-90, in full force in J&K. The Army adapted to this new challenge and strategies to deal with proxy war were developed. Tailor made forces (Rashtriya Rifles) came into being and were expanded. Conventional deterrence was strengthened through the creation of the third strike corps, while the bogey of a nuclear threat from Pakistan remained, USA’s Pressler Amendment notwithstanding. It was a period of political and economic weakness, muddied by inimical interests, yet partly offset by the opening of the economy and strengthening relations with USA. The period was capped by the conduct of nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in May 1998, and military deterrence was never to be the same again in South Asia.

Trial by Fire and Error (1999-2020)

The current phase is over two decades long, eventful and not given to any certainty of deductions with respect to the primacy and employment of land power in the Indian security domain. The size and shape of the armed forces, their doctrinal rejuvenation, and use as an instrument of statecraft have all undergone extensive scrutiny, analysis and reform. The forces themselves have come of age in sheer numbers, but remain a bit underwhelmed in equipping themselves for 21st Century challenges, creating the right structures, looking at threats anew (from more than one front, if it may be so stated) and having key capabilities (Special Forces, space, cyber) to tackle ambiguous military problems that remain below the threshold of conventional conflict. It all commenced with Kargil and the findings of the review committee post this strategic surprise in 1999, further exacerbated through a poor military response to terror attacks in Srinagar and Delhi in December 2001.6 The Government looked to the military for an answer and found that it really had an ‘all or nothing response,’ which in itself was slow, reactive and allowed the adversary too much leeway.

Op Parakram ended in October 2002 on a rather dismal note, with over 800 (mostly collateral) casualties and very little to show in terms of deterring the export of terror to J&K from Pakistan.7 The Indian Army found itself between a rock and a hard place, as the vaunted might of its conventional forces, especially the offensive component, was perceived to be more a lumbering elephant than a nimble tiger. It had deficiencies in critical war waging equipment as well as ammunition, and most certainly the doctrine of massive conventional retaliation to an enemy provocation in the sub-conventional domain was unworkable. Renewal and rethought was the need of the decade. Thus, very deliberately the Army doctrine of Cold Start (or the Pro-Active Strategy) came to see the light of day, commencing with discussions in 2004-06, followed by a series of field exercises and the eventual taking on board of the Air Force and the Navy, as their synergized application was de-rigueur to the success of this doctrine.8

It remains a work in progress as threats have coalesced from a single adversary in the conventional domain to a sub-conventional threat continuum capped by nuclear sabre rattling, limited to J&K or spilling over to the entire Western Front (as the Army is wont to refer to the geographical border with Pakistan), with some form of collusive support from China. The China factor in the Indian Army’s horizon was somewhere on the periphery at the turn of the century. Today, it very much occupies centre stage as we face a modernised and joint People’s Liberation Army (PLA) along the northern borders, continually creating pressure points along the Line of Actual Control and forcing similar activity from our side. It cannot be described in any great detail over here, for the challenges posed along the land frontiers by China are a study (or several) by themselves. Suffice to say that the use of land power synergistically will be the key issue military leaders would have to face in the period ahead.

The Future of Land Power in India

Yogi Berra, the quintessential American baseball player known for his malapropisms, was probably spot on when he said, “It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” No strategic analyst or military writer would stick his neck out to make any far reaching predictions about military affairs in a region beset by inimical relationships, nuclear armed adversaries and revanchist regimes. From the current force structure of the Indian Armed Forces, dominance and primacy of land power is evident. And yet, we seem to be unable to exploit this vast human resource and war machinery to the maximum. Revenue expenditure on manpower costs remains a drain on the defence budget, with the biggest share of the pie going to the Army. It has dawned on many stakeholders in the national security apparatus that the conventional army is unable to optimally tailor force packaging for immediate retaliation without a change in organisation, equipping and employment philosophies. The study and restructuring initiated in 2018 to create Integrated Battle Groups (IBGs) is but one step to obviate such a lacuna. New doctrinal terms are being coined, with some having been given expression in the new Land Warfare Doctrine, unveiled in December 2018.9 It is felt that, going forward, a debate may be essential on the recommendations for the Indian Army as given by Arzan Tarapore in his paper of August 2020, i.e. first, consider new theories of victory; secondly, consider how to be the supporting element in a joint force; and thirdly, consider new niche capabilities.10

The aforementioned recommendations may seem basic at first glance, but are worth considering in the complex politico-military dilemma we find ourselves in when dealing with Pakistan and China. Maybe a complete relook at the way we employ military components of power, and a reworking of the inter-se priorities/ relationships between them have become necessary. The setting up of the office of the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) and the establishment of the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) are but start points of such a debate and eventual reform. Restructuring our industrial age army cannot be done suddenly. It will need at least a decade, if not more, for new effective organisations to emerge, while the threats are ‘here’ and ‘now.’ It is not an easy task, as numerous previous attempts at reform and transformation have floundered either due to institutional resistance, lack of political and budgetary support, or the suspicion of sister services about motives behind such reforms. The threats that we currently face from China and Pakistan are here to stay. These have to be tackled by deft diplomacy, political and economic farsightedness, and using the military instrument wisely. Ongoing reforms of higher defence must be complemented by inhouse reforms of changes to doctrine, professional military education and the best use of trained manpower than is currently the case.

Conclusion

This essay has been a sprint through the theory of a Continental School of Strategy, and the 73 years of the Indian Army, as it has transitioned through different phases, playing its part in the nation’s rise to eminence and prosperity in a difficult strategic neighbourhood. The last word on the pre-eminence and future of land power in an Indian context has not been written and many such attempts would surely follow. It remains to be seen how the Army jointly gauges the future and finds a force fit that needs no serious tinkering when a grave security challenge presents itself.

Endnotes

  1. Michael Evans, “The Continental School of Strategy: The Past, Present and Future of Land Power,” ix. http://www.defence.gov.au/army/lwsc/Publications/SP%20305.pdf, accessed 14 October 2020.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Arzan Tarapore, “The Army in Indian Military Strategy: Rethink Doctrine or Risk Irrelevance,” https://carnegieindia.org/2020/08/10/army-in-indian-military-strategy-rethink-doctrine-or -risk-irre levance-pub-82426, accessed 15 October 2020.

  4. Vivek Chadha, “An Assessment of Organistaional Change in the Indian Army,” Journal of Defence Studies vol. 9, no. 4 (October 2015).

  5. Indrajit Badhwar and Dilip Bobb, “General Sundarji Leaves Behind a Legacy Most Fiercely Disputed in the History of the Army,” India Today, 15 May 1988.

  6. Report of the Group of Ministers on National Security, 19 February 2001, Sanjeev Miglani, “12 Die in Indian Parliament attack,” The Guardian, 14 December 2001.

  7. Lt Gen HS Panag, “Operation Parakram: the War that wasn’t but could have reined in Pakistan,” 03 January 2019. https://theprint.in/

  8. Walter C. Ladwig III, “A Cold Start for Hot Wars?” International Security, vol.32 no.3.

  9. Land Warfare Doctrine 2018. http://www.ssri-j.com/MediaReport/Document/IndianArmyLand WarfareDoctrine2018.pdf, 15 October 2020.

  1. Tarapore, Op Cit., n3, 18-20.