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Thursday, 16 January 2020

The chimera of tri-service commands


By Ajai Shukla
Business Standard, 17th Jan 20













  1. CDS will fighreout these complexity eventually

  2. While in full agreement with the premise that what the Indian military needs is joint planning one cannot but express severe disagreement with the argument - mostly built on seductive but flawed logic - that the theatre command structure is not necessary. To borrow a phrase from the corporate world “structure follows strategy”.

    Not so briefly:

    If the IAF truly believes it is unique in being able to rapidly switch assets from one geography to another it should lead by example and shut down its 5 geographical commands (especially South-Western that the IAF brass managed to squeeze in between Western and Southern Commands) and move to two commands - Central and a NORAD-style Indian Air Defence Command.

    Adm Monty Khanna’s CENJOWS paper on the IAF and theater command - available online - excellently punctures this bit of spurious logic advanced by the IAF and also goes on to address the real “political” issues at the heart of the IAF’s opposition. Of course the thanks the Navy gets for calling a spade a spade (and for sacrificing its Far Eastern Naval Command in the interests of jointness) is to be regarded as an afterthought, a problem that wont be resolved by joint planning alone.

    As the US historical record with its unified commands shows (which currently number 11 not 9 as stated in the piece), inter-services politics have been key in shaping theater commands and continue to this day. Except the US nat sec community has addressed those challenges, however imperfectly, rather than choose to be in denial or circumvent them which is the single biggest danger of accepting the IAF’s flimsy argument. Where the US model, which absolutely should not be copied blindly is highly instructive is for its iterative flexibility and constant evolution. Read more here

    Just as in the US, until and unless the services come to a negotiated political settlement, on everything from warfighting roles to hardware, even joint planning will be a chimera. Worse, like many aspects of the Indian military such planning will only look good on paper.

    And being a real paper tiger when the balloon goes up is just as bad as being a mythical fire breathing creature.

  3. Wg Cdr Nilesh Gandhi(Veteran)17 January 2020 at 04:43

    Excellent article,Sir! May our colleagues, still donning the uniform & those out of uniform read this & discuss it in public domain to bring about awareness & generate meaningful debates

  4. How is it that the Air Force considers employment of air assets involving multiple Air Force,commands to be feasible but the same is not acceptable across multiple “theatre” commands. I think this just a classic parochial argument. To test this assertion, try this logic stream. Would the Air Force be similarly opposed to achieving conformity in the area of jurisdiction between the various single service commands? I am sure everyone would agree that nothing can really justify the current muddle. Once the single service commands are geographically aligned then how much of a leap is it to club them under a single commander with the erstwhile single service commands taking on the nomenclature of air combat component, maritime combat component etc..

  5. The simple argument is ,why does airforce then maintain multiple commands internally? And the shooting down of it's own chopper as well as losing mig21 during feb 2019 engagement is clear proof of IAFs limited and rather limited professional capability. It's better to ignore them as they want to have multie higher ranks


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