‘Right Sizing’ The Army; Cold Start Or Cold Feet?

The bugle call is sounded, ‘Right Size’ the Army.

‘Right Size’ to fit which politico-military strategy? That is the begging question.

• War on one front or a two front war?
  A limited war or a protracted war?
  A proactive (cold start) or a strategic restraint (cold feet)?
  “Aar par ki Ladai” or limited forays?
  Restricted to the Line of Control (LC) and /or to the Line of Actual Control (LAC)?
  What about the sanctity of the International Boundaries (IB)?
  What is/are the political objective(s) that are sacrosanct?

These are the vital questions that the government of the day needs to put on the table for the military to work out the scenarios and the corresponding force levels for each scenario panning out independently or simultaneously. Without these vital inputs, asking the Army to ‘Right Size’ would only be a rhetorical pronouncement.

Personal proclivities sans in-depth study and vigorous debates can in the end prove to be disastrous.

Often, technology is taken as a substitute to numbers. This is a fallacy. When the computers were first inducted it was thought that here was technology replacing loads of manpower. But that has not been the case.

On the contrary, the sheer magnitude of input needing to be fed to the computers and the colossal volume of data generated required more manpower than was required prior to the induction of computers.

It is now a similar situation with regard to the armed forces. As a result, there are fewer men in an actual combat and more in manning numerous way points of technology.

It would not be out of place to delve into a bit of theory.

What is it in war that will not change and what is it that will change? Undoubtedly, wars are but controlled violence; controlled by the polity and not by the military. As defined by Hedley Bull, war is “organised violence carried out by political units against each other,” and by Colin S. Grey it is “the use that is made of force or the threat of force for the ends of policy.”

Quite evidently, wars were and are a political instrument (violent assertive ‘diplomacy’?) to achieve policy objectives. The pro-Clausewitz lobby asserts that war has this basic ‘nature’—primordial violence, chaotic and prone to escalation—which is unchanging.

On the other hand, the ‘character of war’ is ever changing as societies, political entities and technologies change. It may be that future land warfare be dominated by the revolutionary impact of new military technology and its applications that, through new concepts could produce dramatically more effective forms of land warfare Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)’.

For a military to adopt the path of the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ over the sedate mundane process of ‘evolution’, it will be contingent on the availability of the indigenous cutting edge R&D, the robust defence industrial base and the foresight in military leadership backed by a strong political will. 

That said, it is also true that never at any time was technological superiority the sole factor that decided which side in a war would emerge victorious and which side would go down to defeat. Other things being equal, it was very often the numbers that decided the end result. Iraq and Afghanistan are recent examples. These wise words need to be heeded.

A study of the wars that India has fought since its Independence indicates that the military had not been assigned any clear political objectives. Except, probably, in 1971 where, ironically, by the sheer weight of the military victory a so called ‘political objective’ emerged. In all other cases the military was left to fight till a cease fire was brought about. The cease fires were dictated entirely by the political entity without taking the military into confidence and being unmindful of whether a favourable end situation existed on the ground or not.

The negotiations after the war were also entirely devoid of the military advice. These may be harsh statements but are historically true. As India’s stature grows, the military becomes the ‘hard power’ tool of the government to exercise options of coercive diplomacy, influence operations, and of ‘suasion and plain and simple deterrence’. Along with all the other elements of national power at its disposal it can employ a combination of its soft power and its hard power to imprint ‘smart power’ to secure its interests.

While there is a cry for ‘Right Sizing’ the Army, there also seems to be no hesitation in increasing the size of the Border Guarding and the Central Armed Police Forces. The recent announcement of the ITBP getting an additional of 26 battalions seems so out of place. There is no debate or discussion on the optimal size and the quantum of the CAPF (CRPF, CISF, RAF, Railway Police, etc.) and the Border Guarding forces (BSF, ITBP and SSB); neither are the budget expenditures for these forces are debated in public. The last time when India blundered with the premise that the country did not require an army and that the police are sufficient to deal with all situations resulted in the 1962 debacle. The country does not need another debacle to draw lessons on ‘Right Sizing’.

The increasing sophistication of communication equipment requires a commensurate induction of the expert manpower. The requirement of round the clock surveillance will also draw its share of the manpower.

The army has, suo moto, undertaken an exercise to get a more favourable balance in the ‘teeth-to-tail’ ratio. Earlier a similar exercise in the late 1990’s looked at the Non Field Force (NFF) to achieve the same end result and was to be implemented ruthlessly but also seems to have fallen by the way side, since then. Induction of the technology has bloated the supporting services to a large extent.

However, this is not without reason. The army has equipments in service, in three categories, viz, obsolesce, mid-life and new; and since our dependence on the import of defence is considerable, the maintenance support of these three categories of equipment increases the inventory loads and the manpower to maintain these increases too.

As said before, the increasing sophistication of communication equipments requires a commensurate induction of the expert manpower. The definition of an ‘expert’ suggests that ‘one who knows more and more of less and less’, he is of little use outside his field of expertise which is another reason for bloating of the supporting services of the Army.

A precedent exists on how not to go about cutting on an existing resource without a suitable replacement by way of technology. Around the end of 1998, there was a concerted move in the Army Headquarters to disband Animal Transport Units (AT) of the Army Supply Corps. It was visualised that the loads that were then being carried by the AT would be carried by the utility helicopters which were envisaged to be inducted in the future, by the Army Aviation Corps. In that measure it was a legitimate anticipatory action to disband the AT Units for a future induction of technology.

When the process was about to be implemented, the Kargil War had broken out. There was an immediate call to stop the disbandment and move a substantial portion of the AT to Kargil. These Units did yeoman service in maintaining the troops in the difficult rugged areas which had no motor-able roads or tracks. Their deployment continued long after the war for stocking and maintaining the newly inducted forces which had taken up defences in the entire Kargil sector. However, as a starter, the Army could look at the operational validity of the Horsed Cavalry in modern wars!

Its 18 years down the line but the AT is yet to be replaced by the utility helicopters of the Army Aviation Corps. Thus, it is more than evident that ‘Right Sizing’ the Army is contingent on the detailed guidelines of the government on how and in what form will the armed forces be employed in the future. Although, an important question that needs to be raised is, what is the technology that is available?

A national security strategy doctrine covering all the aspects of a comprehensive national power needs to be enunciated to derive the synergy of all the contributing factors of the nation towards its security. It cannot be a ‘cold start’ being held back by the ‘cold feet’.

This article was first published on www.indiandefencereview.com.