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In his address to the nation on the occasion of the 73rd Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, inter alia, announced a much-awaited defence reform: “To further sharpen coordination between the forces …. India will have a Chief of Defence Staff – CDS”.
Even the 1971 War saw poor coordination between the three Services. Ditto for IPKF operations in Sri Lanka. While 1999 Kargil did see some good Army-IAF coordination, this conflict was limited to a small sector. Thus, a CDS – and joint planning staff – are ideas whose time had come a few decades ago.
The post of a CDS, along with a tri-Service joint planning staff HQ, was first formally mooted by the Kargil Review Committee and the associated Group of Ministers (GoM), as a fundamental defence reform to usher much-needed synergy among the Indian Armed Forces. While tri-Service joint planning was established in the form of the HQ Integrated Defence Staff (IDS), the appointment of a CDS continued to be held in abeyance due of lack of consensus among the political leadership and the armed forces.
In the past, war was often a contest between specific units of individual services, and achieving dominance in one or two of the physical domains (land, sea, air) was sufficient for a victory. For example, the armies fought each other on land, and the navies fought each other on the seas — and there was sparse cross-over into the other’s domain.
With the availability of new weapon platforms, this construct has changed, with each armed forces service requiring other services for successfully prosecuting defensive and offensive operations.
Given that the “logical purpose of war is to make the opponent comply with one's will …”, the amount of destruction that can be wreaked in a short period, as also the apparent fore-shortening of time for decision-makers in view of enhanced information flows, contemporary warfare has thus become an intense contest between the operational systems of each adversary.
Systems Confrontation requires “comprehensive dominance” in almost all domains for a victory.
For this, armed forces require a capability for working together, i.e. Integrated Joint Operations (IJO). These are distinct from Joint Operations (JO). The latter lays emphasis on "jointness" within the individual service with vertical linkages, whereas IJO envisions unifying different commanders and fighting forces of different services down to the tactical level. A capability for IJO requires five pre-requisites, namely:
This is where a CDS comes in, with each service in the joint planning staff contributing its expertise to the operational plans, and the CDS formulating a plan that best synergises the individual capabilities of each service.
Many cite the US military’s jointness model to justify the appointment of a CDS. Created by the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defence Reorganization Act of 1986, it was one of the most sweeping reorganisations of the US military, and vastly improved its capability for IJO.
Even at the beginning of WW-I, the US had found it difficult to coordinate operations, acquisition and logistics between the Army and Navy (each branch reported to different Cabinet-level Secretaries).
However, vicious turf wars and inter-service rivalries continued to disrupt coordination, leading an illustrious chief of the US Strategic Air Command General Curtis LeMay to comment that “The Soviets are our adversary; our enemy is the (US) Navy”.
There were even cases where individual services, using the clout of their service chief, moved out their respective forces from a region without the knowledge of the region’s commander. Such mixed lines of command had contributed to problems in the Vietnam War, and the catastrophic failure of Operation ‘Eagle Claw’ (1980 attempt to rescues hostages in Iran).
The 1986 Act, deeply resented by the US military brass over its five year implementation period, completely revamped the US military's operational chain of command. The US’ joint ‘Combatant Commands’ are the outcome of this Act, which mandated that:
The outcome of this Act — and the status of the US military as a leader in IJO — was clearly evident in the 1991 US-led invasion of Iraq, the intervention in Kosovo (1998), 2001-02 invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Similar euphoria on ‘jointness’ and ‘single-point advice’ were expressed when HQ IDS was raised. However, the fact is that efficacy of a CDS — or joint staff — is contingent on the higher defence structure, an enabling environment and associated eco-system. While past decades have seen tremendous improvement in tri-service cooperation, the Indian Armed Forces yet don’t seem fully reconciled to inter-services integration. Besides, the Service Chiefs continue to have an operational role and full control over their forces – along with a reluctance to let go of their forces, support non-integral forces, or let their forces be commanded by other services.
Given his personal and professional equation with the powers-that-be, it is well possible that he would be able to quickly operationalise the post of the CDS.
It therefore remains to be seen how the government will address such issues – as also whether the CDS would be a five-star rank, or a primus inter pares four-star. In sum: to optimally utilise the CDS, India needs to undertake additional military reforms.
However, the political control and institutional constructs in India are not the same as those prevalent in the US, while India’s future threat environment is also far different from the dynamics that had shaped the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986. In sum: reformation of the Indian military cannot be a copycat model — it requires deep, strategic thought, and appropriate institutional structures.
(Kuldip Singh is a retired Brigadier from the Indian Army. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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