mountain strike corps

India Needs To Look Into LAC Lapses To Be Future-Ready

It is time for the government to consider launching a review into the intelligence and operational lapses resulting in the debilitating faceoff with China that erupted last May.

With the complementary withdrawal of Indian and Chinese troops from the bitterly contested Pangong Tso or lake region along the disputed Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh underway, it is time for the government to consider launching a review into the intelligence and operational lapses resulting in the debilitating faceoff that erupted last May.

And though the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s ingress into the adjoining areas still awaits vacation, as does the restoration of the April 2020 military status quo ante along the LAC, a multi-disciplinary commission of inquiry needs establishing, similar to the one which followed the analogous 1999 intrusion by the Pakistan Army into Kargil, to manage the Chinese threat and Beijing’s future duplicity.

The 1962 ambush by China followed the placatory Panchsheel Treaty eight years earlier, much like the slew of five bilateral border treaties and confidence-building measures 1993 onwards aimed at managing the LAC. Thereafter, the Lt Gen Henderson Brooks inquiry into the disastrous border war was never made public, with successive governments incredulously claiming that the report, of which just two copies exist, remains ‘sensitive’ and of ‘current operational value’.

Also Read: Why It Is Imperative That Indians Come to Know What Happened in 1962

However, a cross-section of serving military officers, veterans and defence analysts concede that a ‘lessons learnt approach’ emanating from such a suggested inquiry commission or review committee would assist in future projection of India’s Comprehensive National Power, including military strength, to deal with a formidable foe like China. Such an endeavour would also help restructure tri-service cooperation, intelligence sharing, timely information dissemination and media management, amongst other aspects.

It would also assist in dealing with what is grudgingly accepted in military and security circles, that future Indian Army deployments along the LAC will duplicate those along the Line of Control and the Siachen glacier against Pakistan, as all previous Sino-Indian LAC-related protocols now stand nullified. New unassailable pacts, predicated to overarching distrust of China by India, will need to be concluded to ensure peace between the nuclear-armed neighbours till their 3,488-km-long LAC is eventually demarcated.

Doubtlessly, naysayers will assert that the Indian Army has, in recent months displayed flexibility, speed and steadfastness in its LAC deployments, as well as strategic chutzpah by seizing the commanding Kailash heights on Pangong Tso’s southern bank, which helped determine the February 10 pullback agreement. But many veterans differ, claiming that rushing an additional 50,000 troops to man the LAC, including critical Army Headquarters reserves, was more a rushed ‘battalion approach’ to man the 800-km-long LAC flank in eastern Ladakh, rather than a structured strategy.

For several decades, a resource-strapped and diffident India had followed the path of least resistance against China, sheltering behind multiple border treaties to ensure peace along the LAC with its more powerful neighbour. China, on the other hand, viewed the LAC accords as an abiding tactical measure, aimed at lulling an amenable India into a false sense of security for nearly three decades as it embarked on progressing its economy. It willfully ‘persuaded’ India, including its military into focusing on bilateral economic issues like trade and commerce, furthering diplomatic, political and even defence ties. Resolving the border imbroglio was interminably postponed despite 23 rounds of talks between the respective Special Representatives, but China’s 1959 claim lines in Ladakh, it now transpires, were not forgotten.

A man walks inside a conference room with Indian and Chinese flags in the background. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi/File photo

It’s also known in Indian security circles that its military planners, especially the Army, had set a 2010 deadline to meet the proliferating security threat from Beijing. It was widely accepted at the time that the logistical, infrastructural and materiel inequalities would become too pronounced if this schedule slipped. Alarmingly it did, as was revealed by the frantic procurement of assorted ammunition, missiles, UAVs, varied ordnance and high-altitude kit, worth over Rs 20,000 crore, June 2020 onwards.

Those opposing a review or inquiry into the PLA’s ingress also point to the Army re-orienting its Mathura-based 1 Strike Corps – one of three such ‘sword arm’ formations – to convert it into a mountain strike corps for eventual employment in Ladakh. This envisages two of its infantry divisions being trained in mountain warfare, in what analysts consider a tactical, rather than a wider strategic and holistic approach to higher defence management.

Also Read: When it Comes to China, India Needs to Up its Deterrence Game

The Army also needs to abandon the Second World War concepts of attrition and manoeuvre warfare, familiar to generations of its commanders and ones they feel ‘comfortable’ planning for and executing like in the four wars with Pakistan. It requires desperately to shift focus to futuristic non-kinetic warfare technologies like robotics, artificial intelligence, cyber and network-centric operations to match the PLA capabilities.

The proposed review would especially need to focus on the slip-ups leading to the Chinese incursions despite the three-fold surveillance grid: regular joint foot patrols by the Army and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police supplemented by detailed imagery provided by UAVs and satellites. The federal government would do well to emulate the Kargil Review Committee (KRC) inquiry instituted by the BJP-led government of the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee on July 29, 1999, three days after the Kargil hostilities concluded, to evaluate the lapses that led to the Pakistan Army’s intrusion and the subsequent hostilities in which over 500 Indian Army soldiers died.

Headed by strategic affairs expert K. Subrahmanyam, the four-member KRC interacted with over 100 military and intelligence officers, bureaucrats and even journalists, for nearly five months, before submitting its report that was tabled in Parliament in February 2000 and also made public.

Some of its sensitive portions were redacted, but despite the expurgations, the report was instructive, revealing numerous intelligence collection failures, operational shortcomings and inter-service jointness, amongst other inadequacies. Thereafter, a Group of Ministers (GoM), headed by deputy prime minister L.K. Advani and four task forces led by seasoned officials further reviewed the KRC’s recommendations, precipitating manifold changes in India’s overall security apparatus. Obviously, these need to be reappraised following the PLA’s ingress into Ladakh and should be made public.

This article was first published on The Tribune.

Expediting Border Settlements Is Better Than Not Patrolling Them for Lack of Money

To deal with the Chinese threat, India has chosen an unaffordable option which will harm its citizens even more.

The present sentiment in the country is that India has, once again, managed to ward off the China threat. It indeed is fortunate that the tensions on the borders are coming under control. However, we need to take a more realistic view of the situation than most TV anchors do these days.

The present thinking is that India will significantly ramp up its overall military strength and presence in forward areas to prevent another misadventure by its enemies. The immediate fallout has been a firm commitment to several large-budget purchases of war machines.

The defence ministry has already approved an additional purchase of 33 new fighter jets including 12 Su-30MKIs and 21 MiG-29s along with the upgradation of 59 MiG-29s at a cost of Rs 18,148 crore. The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) also approved acquisitions of various platforms and equipment required by the Indian armed forces for an approximate cost of Rs 38,900 crores. It also cleared the acquisition of 248 Astra Beyond Visual Range air-to-air missiles for the Indian Air Force and the Navy. Design and development of a new Land Attack Cruise Missile with a 1,000 kilometres strike range by the DRDO has also been cleared.

It is also no secret that the Indian Army will now be forced to keep far more forces deployed in the high-altitude areas of Ladakh, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, than those at present. Most analysts agree that two or three divisions will now be additionally deployed in these areas. (How these troops will eventually be treated by the nation can be gauged by a report of the Comptroller and Auditor General, which shows that the Indian troops do not have snow glasses and multi-purpose boots to wear or requisite sanctioned food to eat in high altitude areas in Siachen and Ladakh, exposing them to inclement weather and causing ailments.) In addition, significant assets of the air force will also have to move up. The navy too will have to keep more of its fleet at sea.

IAF IL-76 aircraft flies above Leh, in Ladakh, July 10, 2020. Photo: PTI

This approach calls for a serious review of the government’s present approach to national security in the present economic situation of India.

Where will the money for this come from? It is not a question of national will but one of the national purse.

The Indian economy is presently at its worst. The GDP growth projections for India are grim. The forecast for the current financial year is that the GDP will contract by 6.4%. The finance ministry has already frozen new projects due to lack of money. In a statement, it said, “In-principle approval for such schemes will not be given this financial year. Initiation of new schemes already appraised/approved will remain suspended for one year till March 31, 2021.”

A known threat

The threat from China was always known. Ravi Rikhye in his book Analysis to Fight India’s Ability to Fight a 2-Front War 2018 warns of this possibility in the introduction itself. “In my opinion, the next crisis will be at another point, perhaps Siachen side, and possibly not until 2019 or 2020,” he says.

Also Read: China’s Intrusion in Ladakh Was Not Treachery But Surprise, And It Shouldn’t Have Been One

To this end, India sanctioned the mountain strike corps in 2013 a “non-defensive role” to create capabilities to deter China’s aggressive behaviour along the border. However, the fate of the proposed strike corps is an indicator of what happens when money is not available. The first division was raised in the eastern sector but the second division at Pathankot was never completed. The exercise was stopped due to lack of funds and “rethink within the Army” prompted by the limitations of the border infrastructure.

It is thus clear that India simply does not have the money to guard its borders by military means. However strident and seemingly resolute the present tone of announcements made by the government are, the economic maths just does not add up. It is known to everyone intuitively, not needing help from charts or statistical data.

So, what can be done? Can the borders be guarded well enough by military means that India can afford? Indeed.

An undated photo of Indian soldiers near the China border. Photo: BMN Network/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Border agreements

The answer lies in having borders that are, more or less, not disputed by India’s neighbours. Yes, it means giving up some of the country’s claims. There is an understandable aversion to this. The territory of the nation is always portrayed as sacrosanct, as is our body. Who would willingly give up an eye, or even a finger? However, the nation-state is not the sum of all our bodies. Writing in The Wire, Itty Abraham informs us that countries – including India and China – have given up territory in the past for better relations without any “diminution of the nation-state”. He says:

“It is a dangerous fallacy to see the country as a scaled-up version of the individual body… The more national territory is seen as a body, the less possible it becomes to see any “loss” of land or at sea as anything but a crime against the state, deserving of war.”

Also Read: Territory, Borders, Identities: India’s Conflict With China and Itself

The nation must not squander away its territory. However, it must be accepted that the prime objective of a nation-state is to provide a good life to its citizens. If territorial integrity helps achieve such an objective, the struggle to retain integrity is justified. But if efforts to retain every inch of the territory result in unacceptable hardships to its people, it would not be.

In the past too, Indian has squandered away opportunities to reach a border settlement with Pakistan. A settlement with Pakistan had almost been reached but was scuttled. In an interview to CNN-IBN in 2009, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he should have “moved faster on the Kashmir resolution with Pakistan”. “We had come very close to a non-border, non-territorial solution, and I regret that we didn’t go ahead with it due to certain events at the time.”

To sum up, the Centre’s present approach to raise more and more forces to counter the threat to India’s borders is clearly not working. Every rupee that is now spent on arms will be at the cost of basic welfare of the citizens. And, even then, it is likely that the country will not reach a reasonable level of satisfaction. That makes it a double whammy.

The welfare of citizens can be achieved by shedding the notion that the nation-state must not give away even an inch of territory. In any competition between territorial integrity and the welfare of citizens, the latter must win.

Col Alok Asthana is a veteran, presently a consultant on leadership and innovation. He is author of two books – Leadership for Colonels and Business Managers and Reclaim your Democracy. He can be contacted at alok.asthana@gmail.com

Decoding the Logic Behind the Shelving of India’s Mountain Strike Corps

In what is now an election year, Modi knows he needs to focus on the domestic and can do without the distraction of a border crisis, especially with a superior foe.

The media has reported that the Indian army’s much vaunted mountain strike corps (MSC) has been put in cold storage. An insinuation attributed by the media to unnamed sources has it that the decision to raise the MSC was a result of institutional factors rather than strategic necessity.

According to these sources, the army officer corps saw the MSC as a way of accessing a greater slice of the defence budget. By blaming the army for inflating the threat perception in order to make itself the primus inter pares among the three services suggests, however, that the sources are set on diverting attention away from the implications of the decision for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.

The government, well past its honeymoon period, has been coming in for criticism lately. Its actions following the prime minister’s end-April dash to Wuhan for an ‘informal summit’ with Xi Jinping – the renaming of Taiwan as ‘Chinese Taipei’ on the Air India website, the reins put on the army’s assertive actions on the Line of Actual Control and the visible distancing from the Tibetan government-in-exile – have drawn adverse comment. The perception is that there seems to be that the policy of self-assertion – whose high point was the 73-day standoff with the Chinese at the Doklam plateau last year – is being reversed.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks with Chinese President Xi Jinping as they take a boat ride on the East Lake in Wuhan, China, April 28, 2018. Credit: PIB//Handout via Reuters

Further, the government downsized the defence budget to its lowest proportion this year in terms of gross domestic product since 1962. Mindful of the unforeseeable consequences of a diplomatic or military crisis in an election year, the government apparently has developed cold feet on its policy of standing up to China. It therefore needed to send a signal to Beijing that it is drawing its claws back.

The freeze on the mountain strike corps has been the way it has done so, but to scapegoat a politically hapless army by surreptitiously spreading rumours about it needs calling out.

The MSC had been cleared by the previous UPA government very reluctantly and rather late in its tenure, when, in its second avatar, too weak to fend off the army’s pitch for the MSC any longer, it had sanctioned the corps. The May 2013 Chinese intrusion in the Depsang sector perhaps forced the government’s hand, with its approval coming quick in wake of the intrusion that July. The first division for the corps started being raised in January 2014.

The Modi government took a view of the new raising early in its tenure, with finance minister Arun Jaitley – temporarily double-hatted as defence minister – going about reviewing its necessity. In the event, Manohar Parrikar, who became full-time defence minister after Jaitley, indicated that the decision was a ‘temporary, not permanent freeze’ on its size.

While on the one hand the BJP-led government wanted to project a tough-on-security image, the prime minister had indicated at the combined commanders’ conference that the army should turn to technology rather than compensating for capacity voids with manpower, as it was wont to do. The decision came despite the Chinese intrusion early in the Modi tenure in the Chumar sector, even as the Chinese president Xi Jinping was being hosted by Modi at Ahmedabad.

Even so, the army persisted with its raising, though it was difficult going. Immediately prior to the 73-day stand-off with the Chinese at Doklam last year, the second division of the MSC was reportedly under raising at Pathankot. The army had to dig into its war reserve stocks to equip it, thereby depleting those stocks as the defence public service utilities and ordnance factories could not keep pace. Its vice chief controversially admitted to the parliamentary standing committee that war reserves had fallen short of the stipulated levels.

It appears that the government has finally taken a call and clamped down on further new raisings, affecting the corps gaining its full complement. Hopes are now pinned on the study underway by the army training command on ‘optimisation’, whereby manpower for the completion of the MSC can be created from within existing resources rather than by an increase in recruitment, as was the case so far.

In other words, the MSC is not quite shelved. It can be completed without expanding the size of the army. In any case, the completion date had been projected at 2021, as the MSC was to be set up under the 12th army plan and part of the 13th army plan, part of the long term integrated perspective plan looking out to 2027. Weapons acquisition has been underway for some two years now, with the 145 ultra-light howitzers cleared for purchase at the cost of $750 million under the fast track foreign military sales route in June 2016. In other words, the MSC completion is only postponed.

This begs the question as to why.

The Modi government has been in election mode all through its tenure. Even as it has gained control of over a dozen states, it is hesitant to face national elections, with some of its initiatives, specifically demonetisation and the GST scheme being poorly conceived and implemented. Its strategy of polarisation has been called out for taking India down the Pakistan route with religious majoritarianism potentially undermining governance and the rule of law.

Modi is well aware that the feel-good, high-wattage advertising of India Shining had not worked to preserve the pervious NDA government in power. He is also aware that the social outlays of the UPA government had allowed it to retain power in 2009.

In what is now an election year, Modi knows he needs to focus on the domestic and can do without the distraction of a border crisis, especially with a superior foe. He does not need China in the political strategy underway of internal polarisation as he approaches the 2019 elections. Pakistan serves him well on this score.

Thus, he has temporarily toned down the assertive strategy in relation to China, even as he remains free to revert to it once the elections return him to power. The invitation to Donald Trump to grace Republic Day suggests India continues to take its United States partnership seriously, implying that another turnaround may be at hand once elections are out of the way.

If election compulsions are behind the decision to delay the MSC, placing the army in the line of fire by implying – through ‘sources’ – that the army’s organisational pathologies were behind the move to raise the MSC inflicts collateral damage on the army’s reputation.

The army had advanced a strategic rationale for the MSC, arguing that India faced a ‘two front’ threat. While India had the offensive capability to tame its western neighbour, the army argued that it required a similar capability for tackling its neighbour to the north. The army wished to move from dissuasion to deterrence. While the two defensive divisions that were formed in 2009-10 enabled defensive deterrence or deterrence by denial, an offensive corps would provide the punch for deterrence by punishment.

The UPA reluctantly fell in line not because it agreed with this rationale but because of its well-known institutional weakness. The Modi government’s parliamentary majority gave it the political clout to challenge the army’s MSC rationale but it chose not to because it believed that standing up to China would work to its political advantage.

Now, at the fag-end of its tenure, the BJP’s willingness to call into question the army’s strategic perspective and advance a reason that deflects any blame from itself for going slow on the MSC front marks a new political low. The Modi government’s inability over the past four years to put out an overarching strategic doctrine accounts for its twists and turns in the strategic field, belying its claim to a credible record on defence. It must not be allowed to profit electorally from its false claims.

Ali Ahmed, a former Infantry officer with a PhD from JNU, has worked at a think tank and taught at a central university in New Delhi. Views here are personal.