Pravin Sawhney
External Affairs Ministry spokesman Vikas Swarup has raised an important issue concerning India’s defence posture. Commenting on US President Barack Obama’s recent call for India and Pakistan to reduce their nuclear arsenal, he said that the US lacked an understanding of India’s defence posture. “India has a no-first use policy and has never initiated military action against any neighbour”, he said.
For one, his remarks are not entirely true; for another, it is unclear if he understood what ‘defence posture’ implies. What defence posture a nation should adopt against adversaries is defined by the political leadership in close consultation with the military leadership, based upon what political objectives are sought to be met by war. To say that defence forces are meant to safeguard territorial integrity is dangerous, since it leaves room for interpretations on the defence posture. India – when it was most needed – has not articulated its defence posture, since the May 1998 nuclear tests.
Consequent to the Pakistan-supported terror attack on Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001, India initiated Operation Parakram, a 10-month military stand-off with Pakistan. Throughout the crisis, India’s political and military leadership were out of sync on the defence posture. For the Army, which was ordered to mobilise its entire 12 lakh strength, the defence posture implied war. For the AB Vajpayee Government, the defence posture was unclear – it intended to go to war but developed cold feet. To save face, India’s National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra sought assistance from his American counterpart Condoleezza Rice to avert an imminent war. However, the Parliament of India was later told that the defence posture for Operation Parakram was coercive diplomacy, which the Government claimed had succeeded. If it had, Pakistan, not India, would have blinked first.
After the crisis, the Indian Army chief, General S Padmanabhan, publicly said, “Whenever there is a situation calling for the Army’s help, the latter’s role should be clearly defined to avoid confusion.” If there was confusion about defence posture within the Indian Army, think what the Pakistan Army would have done: It braced itself for the worst. India’s declaratory nuclear no-first-use policy became meaningless for Pakistan and the world during this crisis.
After Operation Parakram, while the Indian political leadership maintained stoic silence on the defence posture, the Indian Army sent confusing signals. On the one hand, it fenced the military-held Line of Control suggesting a strategic defence posture. On the other, it announced the Cold Start doctrine on the border implying an offensive posture.
Catering to the worst case scenario, the Pakistan Army acquired tactical nuclear weapons and declared a ‘full spectrum deterrence’ defence posture to plug operational gaps of the Cold Start. It also explained that while strategic nukes cater to the strategic and operational levels of war, the tactical level or the immediate battlefields had become vulnerable to India’s Cold Start. To fill this gap, the TNWs had been inducted into the inventory.
While the world was grappling with the fall-out of Cold Start and TNWs given the history of wars between India and Pakistan, the Indian military added more confusion to its defence posture. Declaring the need to protect borders from an aggressive China and a belligerent Pakistan, the Indian Army, in 2009, announced the need to prepare and fight a two-front war. It declared an offensive defence posture against China by raising the 17 Mountain Strike Corps. A naïve media fed stories of how the Indian Army would fight a war, if needed, in Tibet on Chinese soil.
Not to be left behind, the Indian Air Force, claiming to be the only Service providing dissuasive deterrence, raised its combat strength need from 39.5 squadrons to 42 squadrons for the two-front war scenario. Never mind that the Government has not told the Army and the IAF what it desires to achieve in war on two-fronts; the Army and the IAF do not have a combined assessment of the two-front threat; the two Services do not have a common doctrine to combat the two-front scenario; and most importantly, the two have not officially accepted that fighting a two-front war will be a disaster of unimaginable proportions.
Putting it squarely, the Army and IAF represent two domains of war. Even if the IAF were to get 42 combat squadrons there is little it can do. China today has mind-boggling capabilities regarding unmanned combat aircraft and ballistic and cruise missiles, and in the other four domains of war, namely, space, electromagnetic, cyber, and sea. What India needs is a defence posture against all six domains of war against China.
Pakistan, once again catering for the worst case scenario, sought interoperability with the Chinese military in 2009, which today far exceeds that of the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces at the height of the Cold War. Interoperability is the ability of two Armed Forces to operate together in combat environment with ease as one whole. This helps strengthen deterrence, manage crisis, shape battlefields and win wars. The invigorated Pakistan military which will be supported by the Peoples’ Liberation Army in all conventional war domains (land, sea, air, space, electromagnetic and cyber), without showing its hand, is the new military threat facing India. India’s defence posture of a two-front war is no longer relevant.
