Daily Times

There has been consistent noise about the military option available to India following the Mumbai attacks in the Indian establishment, media, and, surprisingly, from within the military hierarchy. The effort to appease certain quarters is more than obvious and understood, but for military professionals to join in the rhetoric, especially when they are aware of the futility of appearing bellicose, is surprising.
Considering that General Deepak Kapoor has had to do exactly that as the Indian army chief leaves one to wonder if he himself is seeking reassurance through his own words. However, if General Kapoor happened to be making comments in relevance to the Indian Army Day, he must be given his time.
Manoj Joshi in his article “Was the [Indian] Army Ready for War” (Mail Today, January 17) has taken the wind out of the sails of the many hankering, superfluous notions of ‘Cold Start’ and ‘surgical strikes’. As this author had mentioned earlier in another piece on the subject of Cold Start (see The Friday Times, December 19, 2008), it shall take a while to equip, train, exercise and then reach the capacity to apply in pursuit of such a notion.
Usually, the learning curve is steep, since many old habits need to be first unlearned. But how many of the Cold Start objectives can really be achieved is a rather tenuous issue. Militaries are meant to attack and defend soundly, in the most efficient manner, and achieve the objectives of war in the earliest timeframe. This is what occupies planners, trainers and executioners.
Joshi’s analysis must then be viewed in this light. No army or force is ever equipped to its heart’s desire, such is the nature of funding, availability, limitations of technology, vested interests, and intractable processes of acquisition. A commander usually must do with what he has and prepare his force to fulfil the mission within the constraints. So to be short of one munition or another is of little pain.
What the militaries, however, do well is to consider the consequences of any action they might undertake. In such war-gaming, they predict the likely evolution of the action-reaction process leading to various hypotheses and conduct possibilities. They are equally good at studying the adversary and the environment, and based on accumulative deduction, will recommend to the government what they consider the best course of action. A government may then decide whether it wishes a war on itself or the saner route of negotiation and diplomatic interaction. Usually, thankfully, governments err on the side of safety.
Comparative deductions, in the domain of quantity in particular, are fallacious. It is a most simplistic approach to enumerating threat. Military capabilities in most professional outfits are multi-dimensional; these can help produce effects in many variations in combination with different elements.
Also, most countries and their armies will have the necessary wherewithal to achieve their mission. If a force has an offensive mission, it must be assumed that it is equipped and trained as an offensive element; an army with a predominantly defensive mission will have the means to fulfil its mission well. No commander, therefore, will ever underplay the strength of his adversary. This takes out the consideration of numbers and the balance of forces etc out of the equation.
Simply put, the armies and forces on either side should be assumed to have the ability to perform their mission — shortages or no shortages. Anything else should entail heads rolling.
There may, however, be one consideration when linear comparisons may have relevance. War on land is sequential and is executed in serial application in established and well-recognised cycles. The variations normally occur in beating the other in time and space co-relation; surprise because of any factor makes a battle winnable. Extraordinary and audacious courage will surprise an enemy. Other than this, armies employ fairly conventionally, in a fixed environment, throwing up only the given set of options. These are all well rehearsed and well covered on both sides.
Joshi’s assertion of numerical parity may be better understood through the following explanation. There is always an optimal troop density-to-space ratio that governs the numbers that can be inducted in a geographically defined area; anything less is a vulnerability while anything more is not only waste but disruptive. Congestion reduces the space for manoeuvre, and also offers targets for the other side.
In a typical Indo-Pakistan confrontation, troops-to-space ratios are saturated to the optimal level; where there may be slight gaps, those are covered through other means. Ground-friction is almost at the highest level with thriving population centres and habitats, and where these appear stretched, augmentation comes through natural and man-made obstacles. The wide swathes required for huge manoeuvres by mechanised forces are almost non-existent; and where they exist, the room for manoeuvre is extremely restricted.
That is why most wars in the Indo-Pakistan scenario end up being stalemates with only marginal territory exchange, and entirely unable to achieve the stated objectives.
The two air forces and the navies can also be compared on exactly the same premise: are they equipped, trained and exercised to be operationally prepared to undertake the mission assigned to them? It would be foolish to expect anything else. If a navy has a blue-water role, it has to be under fitment for that role. Similarly, a navy with a more specified role will have the necessary wherewithal for its offensive and defensive mission.
Air forces come into the equation as the primary instruments of modern warfare, which revolves around precision, efficiency in application and ability to engage across a wide and a deeper spectrum of geographical domain through parallel engagement. This is the main difference in land and air warfare: land warfare per se has to be linear and sequential, while air warfare is parallel and across the entire depth.
If one only considers what the Tamil Tigers’ tiny fleet of three ZLIN propeller aircraft did to Sri Lankan morale against a relatively much better equipped Sri Lankan Air Force, all pretensions of a surgical strike come crashing down. That is the nature of air warfare. The huge spaces that are available to it with least restrictive friction enable surprise and manoeuvre which, in combination with firepower and precision, make for a most efficient force application. A force just needs to be suitably equipped — rest is left to the ingenuity of the employing intellect, or the lack of it.
Finally, to the politics of recent pronouncements in India on war readiness: India has a unique problem with the recently instituted Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) system. Acting in rotation, the naval chief is currently the CDS. Given the predominance that armies enjoy as the senior service in all militaries of British antecedence, there remains quite a bit of turf sensitivity. This is traditional, and persistently irritating within a military system.
Was a difference of opinion on going to war with Pakistan a result of these inherent fault-lines? It is possible, though, that it was a very well considered decision to avoid an armed confrontation — educated, sane and professional. Anything else would have been catastrophic — and we are not talking nuclear yet.

The writer is a retired air vice marshal of the Pakistan Air Force and a former ambassador. He can be contacted at shahzad.a.chaudhry@gmail.com