Command and Staff College Quetta (1977-2014) Study by Colonel David Smith (US Army)

[Sanwal!!]

Hi,

We have vietnam---and 2nd ww as well---.

Yes, you are right there are multiple examples in modern history.

 

[Signalian]

Foreword

I say this because I fear that some of my Pakistani friends and classmates may find the judgments made in this study, particularly in the present climate of tension between our two countries, to be overly harsh, unfair, unjust, or simply wrong. I hope this is not the case, as I have tried to be as scrupulously objective as possible. Any criticism I have levied at either the Staff College or the Pakistan Army should be taken as it was intended—constructive criticism aiming to promote positive change in both institutions.

History and Significance

The Staff College is widely considered to be the premier professional military education institution of the Pakistan Army. Although the National Defence University in Islamabad is responsible for training the Army’s senior military officers in the operational and strategic levels of war, it is a relatively young institution spun off from the Staff College, which had that responsibility from 1962 until 1970. In assessing the relative importance of the two institutions, one former Commandant of the Staff College explained, “Many may think that the higher leadership is determined by the NDC [National Defence College, now the National Defence University], not quite so. It is the C&SC [Command and Staff College] that...determines...who goes to NDC.”

Because only about 20 percent of Staff College graduates are selected to attend the NDU, for the remaining 80 percent, their year in Quetta represents the only higher level professional military education they will ever receive. The Staff College’s unmatched reputation in the Army is based on a combination of factors, including its age, its roster of distinguished alumni, and the circumstances surrounding the Partition of British India in 1947.

In 1900, the size of the Indian Army was approximately 150,000 officers and men, with about half its strength comprised of regular British Army units. Yet only six slots annually were reserved at the British Army Staff College at Camberley for officers in the Indian Staff Corps. When Field Marshal Lord Kitchener became Commander-in-Chief in India in 1902, he developed a plan to reorganize and increase the size of the army. With a new and larger requirement for trained staff officers, and knowing that Camberley would not be able to satisfy it, he determined to start his own school to train Indian Army staff officers. Kitchener’s proposal was deemed unacceptable by the Army Council on the grounds that a Staff College in India might foster another “school of thought” in the British Army. Kitchener replied furiously that there was no school of thought in the British Army, except for the opinions of a few senior officers, and refused to back down. Within three years he obtained sufficient funding for his staff college to open temporarily at Deolali while a more permanent institution was constructed at Quetta, a site chosen specifically for its proximity to the northwest frontier of British India. The first course consisted of 24 students, one-third from the regular British units in India and the remainder from the Indian Army. The newly named Indian Staff College moved to Quetta in 1907. Its roster of distinguished faculty members and graduates over the next 40 years boasts eight field marshals and 20 full generals, including such luminaries as Field Marshals Bernard Law Montgomery, Sir Claude Auckinleck, Lord Slim of Burma, S.H.F.J. Manekshaw and Muhammad Ayub Khan, and Generals Lord Ismay, Sir Douglas Gracey, and K.M. Kariappa, the first native-born Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army.

As the deadline for Partition loomed in the spring of 1947, Field Marshal Auckinleck, then the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, recommended a division of the army’s personnel and assets between the two soon-to-be- born states in the proportion of 70 percent to India and 30 percent to Pakistan, roughly the percentage of Hindu and Muslim soldiers in the Indian Army. By July 1947, the division was well underway in the agreed categories of personnel, moveable stores and equipment, and installations, with the overall percentages slightly modified to 64/36. Of the 46 training installations in British India, only seven were in the territory that would become Pakistan. And of these, only the Staff College was considered to be a major asset. Three others were the much smaller schools of military intelligence, air defense artillery, and logistics, and three were minor educational support facilities.29 Although two-thirds of the personnel and moveable stores ultimately departed Quetta, the prized 10,000-volume Staff College library remained intact. A part of the Staff College folklore is that the sole remaining Pakistani member on the faculty, Lieutenant Colonel Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, who later became Commander-in-Chief of the Pakistan Army and ruled Pakistan under martial law from 1969 to 1972, slept in front of the library door for several nights to prevent departing Hindu faculty members from taking any books with them to India.

Mission and Objectives

Like its name, the purpose of the Staff College has changed several times over the years. In the original 1905 charter, the purpose was “to train staff officers for the Indian Staff Corps and the same regulations, entrance requirements, and methods of training as those in force at Camberley were to be adopted.” By the Golden Jubilee in 1955, the purpose had become “to train officers to the standard required of a second grade staff officer up to divisional level of war.” At the Platinum Jubilee in 1980, the purpose had slightly broadened “to train selected officers for war and in so doing fit them for grade 2 staff appointments and with further experience, for command.” Today, the mission has even further expanded “to impart necessary education to selected officers, enabling them to assume grade-II appointments and to inculcate in them personal and professional ethics and abilities to prepare them for higher command and staff roles.”

Organization, Senior Officers, Faculty, and Students.

The Staff College is normally headed by a Commandant in the grade of major general. It is divided into an Administrative Wing and an Instructional Wing, the latter being headed by the Chief Instructor (CI) in the grade of brigadier. The Instructional Wing consists of four Divisions of approximately 100 students each. Each Division is headed by a Senior Instructor (SI), a colonel, who is assisted by 12 to 13 faculty members in the grade of lieutenant colonel. These are known as the Directing Staff, or DS. Each Division consists of between 8 to 10 Syndicates of 10 students who are supervised by one DS. The Pakistani students selected
to attend the Staff College are captains/majors with between 8 and 12 years of service (although lieutenant colonels in specialty branches like engineers occasionally attend), have graduated from their respective arm/service mid-level career course, and have passed a competitive examination. Officers possessing a Bachelor of Arts/Science or its equivalent are eligible to earn a Masters of Science (War Studies) degree from the University of Balochistan while attending the course.

The Commandant is the central figure at the Staff College, exercising a profound influence on the faculty, the curriculum, and student behavior. Nevertheless, he is circumscribed in his ability to institute major changes because the Staff College falls under the general staff oversight of the Inspector General of Training and Evaluation (IGT&E), a lieutenant general, who is a principal staff officer at the Army General Headquarters (GHQ) in Rawalpindi. Only if the Commandant has been able to forge a special relationship with the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), as Major General S. Wajahat Hussain was able to do in the construction of the new Staff College main building in the mid-1970s, is he able to exercise a relatively free hand.34 For example, an initiative by Major General Muhammad Safdar in 1982 to create a small cell at the Staff College to study army doctrine and other conceptual issues was stymied until the COAS overrode the objections of the IGT&E. Another initiative by Major General S.T.H. Naqvi to completely reorganize the traditional operation of the Staff College, upgrade its curriculum, and double its output of graduates, initially found favor with the “progressive” COAS, General Mirza Aslam Beg, but the initiative foundered on his retirement and it was never raised again.

Even on routine matters, the Commandant is occasionally overridden by GHQ. A former Commandant once proposed two relatively non-controversial initiatives. One was to organize a college seminar involving all past Commandants to hear their views on the future direction of the Staff College, and the second was to hire on a contract basis a small number of retired officers to act as mentors for the Directing Staff and assist them in creating new exercises and curriculum. Both were summarily vetoed by the IGT&E.37 Asked why they were rejected, the former Commandant explained that the Pakistan Army is a highly centralized institution and a pernicious cultural factor often influences its decision-making process. Any new initiative at almost any level, he explained, is often considered by more senior officers to be a subtle form of criticism of either their former stewardship (for example, of an institution like the Staff College) or their current oversight responsibilities. This reflexive aversion to criticism, whether it is overt or merely implied, may explain why it took the Pakistan Army nearly 20 years to authorize an official history of the 1965 war with India, another 29 years to publish the results, and then to restrict circulation by making the book available only to Army officers.38 The Army has never addressed its performance in the disastrous 1971 war with India that resulted in the loss of East Pakistan and half the country’s population. No official history has been written, and one probably never will be, because any objective rendering of that event would have to address the poor decision making of many senior Army officers. Such cultural factors may also explain why college traditions are so venerated and why the institution changes so little from year to year and from decade to decade.

The students at Quetta are generally considered to be the very best and brightest of the Pakistan Army, and selection to the Staff College is their first major step toward upward mobility in the Army. Currently, about 700 cadets graduate annually from the Pakistan Military Academy (PMA) in two classes (two classes begin each year, six months apart). Of these officers, approximately half will eventually be selected to attend the Staff College. In earlier years, the selection rate was lower, roughly 35 percent. Expansions to the main Staff College building over the years have increased the capacity of the college to approximately 400 students, approximately 360 Pakistani and 40 foreign—or “allied”—students.

Pakistani students considered for selection are grouped according to their PMA graduating class, or “batch,” and are eligible to take the Staff College competitive examination every year over a five-year window of eligibility. The examination consists of a series of written papers that are designed to gauge a candidate’s professional military knowledge and communication skills. The test is administered in English. The top finishers in the competitive examination do not necessarily attend the Staff College. Instead, they may be offered an opportunity to attend either the British Army, Canadian Army, or Australian Army staff colleges, which are considered to be equivalent educational institutions and operate on similar pedagogical principles and techniques inherited from the British Army. Officers that are not selected to attend the Staff College fall off the path of upward mobility. They will be trained for repetitive assignments in intelligence, logistics, administration, or other functional career tracks, and will likely retire at no higher grade than major or lieutenant colonel. Students at the Staff College are overwhelmingly from the three combat arms of the Pakistan Army: infantry, armor, and artillery. Relatively few students from the Army’s combat support and logistics services are selected, and the number of officers from the Pakistan Air Force and Pakistan Navy has never been more than 1 percent in any year.

Curriculum and Methods of Instruction

The Staff College course is 44 weeks long and is divided into four study terms of 8 to 11 weeks duration. In the first three decades of the study, the course was conducted on a calendar year basis, with students arriving in late January and graduating in December. More lately, the course begins in late June and finishes in May of the following year. The curriculum consists of three major subject areas. The first, Professional Studies, is comprised of purely military subjects like military history, combat and supporting arms doctrines, operations of war, higher operations of war, specialized warfare, sub-conventional warfare,
joint warfare, training, logistics, operational analysis, command and leadership management, and staff officer skills. The second area is Developmental Studies, which consists of strategic studies, writing analytical papers on selected and assigned topics, attending the annual Staff College seminars whose topics vary from year to year, and a study tour of Pakistan (there are separate tours for allied and Pakistani students). The third area is Research Skills, which includes the writing of an individual research paper and a group research paper. These papers form the basis for the award of a Master of Science degree in the Art and Science of Warfare by the University of Balochistan.

Subjects taught at the Staff College use the basic teaching methodology inherited from the British Army and still in use in many Commonwealth countries. For Americans, this is a major change from the methods of instruction they are used to in U.S. Army schools which rely primarily on the “teach, practice, master” style of pedagogy. The most common instructional techniques at the Staff College are the tutorial discussion (TD) and tutorial exercise (TE) in which the syndicate DS assigns readings and facilitates discussion among the students who are expected to have mastered the information through self-study at home or in small group assignments referred to as “sub-syndicate work.” These are supplemented by formal group lectures (L) in the main auditorium and model discussions (MD) and map exercises (ME) in one of four model rooms, so named because the central feature of each room is a very large “sand box” for modeling terrain. DS not assigned to individual syndicates are responsible for preparing and leading these discussions and exercises. Formerly a major part of the course, outdoor exercises (OE) that used to be conducted in large training areas north and west of Quetta have been sharply curtailed in recent years due to the deteriorating security environment in the province of Balochistan, of which Quetta is the capital city and a prime target for terrorist attacks. A normal class day is six to seven hours, but the Staff College expects students to spend at least four hours each night on self-study or group work. The normal work week is six days, five in classes and one day each weekend scheduled for individual study.

Evaluation of Students

The Staff College has evolved a comprehensive method of evaluation that includes both faculty and student inputs. Every syndicate consists of eight or nine Pakistani students and one or two allied students. After each term, the syndicate rosters are “shuffled” so that a student never has the same DS twice, and rarely will he have more than one or two Pakistani students twice in a syndicate during the year. Thus, each student receives four separate evaluations by four different syndicate DS during the year. There is also a peer rating done each term in which students are asked to rank in order on a scale from 1 to 10
each of his fellow students in three specific areas: ability as a leader, ability as a team member, and capacity as a friend. Each student also receives a mid-course evaluation and a final evaluation by the division Senior Instructor. The Staff College year includes five or six major war games, each with a different operational focus and a different geographic setting. Students are assigned to fill various command, staff, and controller positions where their performance is observed by their syndicate DS as well as several non-syndicate DS members who are the exercise “sponsors.” The non-syndicate DS submit inputs to the student final evaluations, as does the Chief Instructor and Commandant, both of whom carefully observe the exercises and are periodically briefed by students holding the senior exercise appointments.

When all of these inputs are collated and weighed, the students are counseled and given suggestions about how to improve their performance prior to the mid-course break. After the final course evaluation, they will be awarded one of five possible grades: B+ (10-15 percent), high B (40 percent), B (35 percent), B low (10 percent), and C (1 percent). These grades become the basis for the Staff College recommendation to the Military Secretary, the senior officer in GHQ responsible for personnel matters, for the student’s next posting. The postings are announced at the end of the course by the Military Secretary in a presentation made to the Pakistan Army students only. No allied students are allowed to hear the results although most subsequently learn informally where their classmates will be assigned. The most prestigious assignment and desired posting is to become a brigade major of an infantry or armor brigade.46 Typically, about half of the students receiving a B+ grade immediately are assigned to this position after graduation, with the remaining half being selected to attend a foreign military staff college or deferred for a few months to complete required periods of regimental service. Another reason the Pakistani students strive for the B+ grade is that it automatically adds four percentage points to an individual’s Officer Efficiency Index, a running average of his previous fitness
reports. Students earning a High B or a B get two percentage point increases while anything lower merits nothing. Thus, nearly every Pakistani student views his year at the Staff College as the single most important event in his military career up to that point.

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/ap_2018-09-18_thequettaexperience.pdf

Thanks for sharing, surprisingly most of the article is correct, but not explained fully and also he has not inculated effects of changes in doctrine and modernization standards of other educational and training institutions like SAMW Nowshera.

@PanzerKiel
He mentions logistics issue repeatedly. My concerns regarding armored offensives by PA in Indian territory and sustaining those through logistics. he does fail to mention that Rommel also thought that logistics was QMG's problem, not his

Cheating Versus Creative Thinking

With only two exceptions, every Student highlighted the ubiquity of cheating at the Staff College. This behavior spanned almost the entire 37 year period of the study and seemed to be so pervasive that it must be considered part of the institution’s culture.

A more likely explanation for cheating, rather than blaming it on Pakistani culture, is the Staff College evaluation system that was described earlier. Many Students perceived it to be the major determinant for the behavior they observed. The 2008-2009 Student concluded that “the Staff College is not primarily a training institution, but a selection (for higher rank) institution that happens to conduct training.” Its true purpose is to select the officers in each class with the most potential for promotion and higher command. “The smarter students understand this and act accordingly,” he explained, “the dumber ones realize only that it is an important year for them in terms of their next assignment and prospects for promotion

Because most Pakistani students realized that the Staff College was a yearlong evaluation period, and because so much was at stake for them professionally, “They opted for the safest possible solution and that was always the chappa.”

The likeliest explanation for why the use of chappa and other forms of cheating have been tolerated for so long may be the simplest: It is immaterial to the evaluation of student potential. Every DS had once been a student at the Staff College. Because he had already seen the practice in every form imaginable, and easily realized which students were using it and which ones didn’t need to rely on it, only when a case was so egregious that it couldn’t be ignored as a matter of military discipline did a student need be punished for its use. Instead, the punishment would be meted out in the final evaluation of the student’s potential for promotion and recommended next assignment. For this reason, many Students eventually concluded that “chappa was really no big deal” because there were so many course requirements where previous solutions were not available or would be of little use.

I remember that the grading method was changed three times to counter the "chaapaa" trend, but chaapa continued in some form or another

@PanzerKiel , the power point presentations have been upgraded nowadays with a lot of creative "shashqa"

Pakistan Army Officers & Nuclear Weapons

During this two-decade period, the general knowledge and attitudes about nuclear weapons expressed by Pakistani students at the Staff College can be summarized as follows:

1. They displayed little knowledge of nuclear weapons effects, and nuclear weapons were viewed simply as a larger form of explosive with no discussion about the strategic implications of their use in South Asia.
2. An Islamic Bomb was inevitable and Pakistan should be the first Muslim state to have it. India was the first regional state to test a nuclear device and it was unfair to expect Pakistan not to seek to match this capability. The United States effort to restrict Pakistani access to nuclear technology was evidence of its unreliability as a security partner. “We all know Israel has them as well” was a commonly expressed thought in this context.
3. Pakistan’s nuclear program was a matter of national survival that should not be questioned. Pakistan, as a sovereign state, had the right to acquire nuclear weapons for its defense. Many referred to nuclear weapons as “a poor man’s air force,” a statement implying that Pakistan could never afford to match India’s growing conventional military might and that in the long run, nuclear weapons were a cheaper alternative.
4. “Ambiguity” was the preferred way to treat the subject, although one PAF officer boasted he would gladly fly a nuclear-armed aircraft on a one-way mission into India if ordered. No one categorically denied that Pakistan had a nuclear capability, but it was clearly not something that should be discussed openly, and particularly not if any foreigners were present.
5. Most students during the 1990s had participated In the Brasstacks crisis with India in 1987 and the Army’s large Zarb-i-Momin exercise in 1989, both generally ascribed by U.S. analysts as having a nuclear component. Nevertheless, there was never any mention of Pakistan using nuclear weapons against India in any future contingency, much less having a formal doctrine for their use.
6. The Pressler sanctions were a constant item of conversation. Students occasionally became emotional when the subject arose: “They said clearly the U.S. had dumped them and sanctioned them only when we didn’t need them anymore. They talked about it in terms like we ‘aggressively’ chose to punish them when we didn’t need them anymore [for Afghanistan].”
7. One Student recalled, “When I got into town [Islamabad] I asked the cab driver to take me to the most important point in town. The cab driver took me to A.Q. Khan’s house [the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb] to show me the most important, most famous place in Islamabad.”

In the last 10 years, other attitudes about nuclear weapons expressed by Pakistani students at the Staff College are summarized in the following points:

Students were willing to talk openly only about the safety and security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, frequently emphasizing that Pakistan’s nuclear command and control procedures were much better than India’s, which they considered to be “a hodge-podge.” In contrast, Pakistan had taken time to think carefully about the issue and had incorporated multiple levels of security in its nuclear weapons storage sites and laboratories. It seemed clear that in contrast to the usual admonition not to discuss the nuclear program with foreigners, this was one area that should be highlighted. “In a small group, they seemed to feel comfortable about talking about the safety and security of their nukes.”

The tactical nuke (Nasr) and the AFSC changed a lot of old concepts since short/medium/long range missiles and nuclear weapon forces were spread among formations (especially southern command).

 

[Signalian]

The top 10 to 15 percent of graduates in each Staff College class—those students identified by the Staff College evaluation system as the best fitted for promotion to general officer rank and senior staff and command appointments— were found to display several traits that were unchanged over the 37-year study period. While not every top finisher possessed every trait, very few lacked more than one. The top finishers were predominately from a self-described military background, were better educated than their peers, had a stronger proficiency in English, and typically graduated from one of the relatively small number of prestigious English-medium military cadet colleges that have flourished in Pakistan since independence. They were more religious than their more secular predecessors, but practiced the moderate and tolerant version of Islam usually described as Sufism. At some time in their military careers they were exposed to U.S. or other Western military values and experiences either by attending military education courses abroad or by serving in international peacekeeping operations. Perhaps as a consequence of this cosmopolitan experience they were generally more self-confident, independent in their thinking, and more willing to consider other points of view.

This does not imply that these officers are more pro-Western or even “less anti-American” than their peers, but only that they tend to be more cosmopolitan in their outlook, more willing to entertain other viewpoints, and more creative in their thinking. These top finishers constitute a small group within the officer corps who will return to the Staff College as members of the Directing Staff, be selected to attend the National Defence University and attend foreign staff colleges for further professional military education, and are virtually guaranteed to be promoted at least to the grade of brigadier. It is from this small group that the senior leadership of the Pakistan Army has been selected in the past, and presumably will be selected in the future.

The vast majority of Staff College graduates, approximately 80 percent, will never receive any additional professional military education. They will not return to the Staff College as Directing Staff, not attend the National Defence University, and not become general officers. These students tend to be less broadly educated than the top-finishers described above, more religious (including some who 100. The Quetta Experience subscribe to more puritanical versions of Islam), have had less exposure to Western military values and international experiences, and are reflexively more anti-Western, perhaps reflecting the attitudes of their lower middle class and working class origins. Although on paper the Staff College syllabus resembles counterpart institutions in Western countries, the actual practices it tends to reward (conventional thinking) and overlook (cheating), when combined with other Pakistani cultural influences, inculcates in the majority of its graduates a preference for orthodoxy and conservative military thinking rather than for flexibility or creativity.

The cheating techniques that have been well documented throughout the study, the ubiquitous use of chappa, the approved solutions to earlier versions of Staff College exercises, do not inhibit the evaluation process, but they stultify military learning by the less well educated students who doggedly pursue the prized “Staff College solution” rather than take the risk of creative thinking.
Admittedly, the top finishers at the Staff College were superb officers who did not need the chappa and often displayed the ability to think creatively. The problem is that an army does not fight with just the top 10 percent of its officer corps. The other 90 percent of Staff College graduates that did rely on it to pass will find to their sorrow that no chappa is available for any future war with India. Exacerbating this deficiency is the cultural deference to seniority and rank that inhibits freedom of discussion, magnifies the influence of the Directing Staff, and makes it almost unthinkable to question senior officer opinions and decisions, Army doctrines, or Pakistan’s highly selective interpretation of its military history.

The Staff College curriculum is weak in joint operations, land-centric in its approach to modern warfare, imparts an outmoded ground forces doctrine, and pays insufficient attention to logistics.

The problems mentioned above are exacerbated by major shortcomings in the Staff College curriculum. The study revealed a near-total absence of effective joint doctrine and training instruction with no change in the amount being conducted over the 37-year study period. A comparison of weekly Staff College training schedules in 1982 and 2010-2011 showed that no more than 41 classroom hours were devoted to joint training in this 30 year period. There are so few students from the Pakistan Air Force and Pakistan Navy at the Staff College that one American student theorized it was possible for a Pakistan Army student never to have had one in his syndicate during an entire year.273

Nearly every Student attending the Staff College, and many other Western students as well, commented on the Pakistan Army’s outdated, World War II ground doctrine and weakness in combat arms integration taught at the Staff College. Even less emphasis is placed on logistics, with fewer than 15 percent of entering Staff College students coming from the logistics arms and services. Major exercises frequently allowed negative cultural biases about India to influence the assessment of Indian military capabilities and to exaggerate Pakistani military capabilities. This situation exists not because Pakistan Army officers are ignorant or haven’t been exposed to more objective thinking about such matters, but because of the pernicious cultural factors mentioned above that inhibit constructive criticism and creative thinking at the Staff College, a situation that almost certainly exists throughout the entire Army.

The culture became that toppers were posted as BMs (Brigade Majors) in brigades spread all around the Army. The toppers going into independent armored and infantry brigades, while others went as BMs into cotemporary brigades. The ones with mid tier grades were posted elsewhere.

However, the now all toppers don't go as BMs, many other posts have sprung up.

 

[Signalian]

These values are reinforced not only through the military education system, but through a comprehensive system of patronage that is distributed through the military’s infrastructure and its vast business empire. It is beyond the scope of this paper to describe this system in detail.296 Suffice it to say that the average officer and soldier receives better pay, better food and housing, better medical care, and better education for his children than the average Pakistani. When they retire, they receive free medical care for life and frequently are given jobs commensurate with their military rank in one of the military’s business enterprises. This system might be thought of as the Pakistani equivalent of cradle-to-grave socialism. What the Army demands in return for this largesse is loyalty, faithful adherence to its values, and strict obedience to its orders.

These attitudes and values are reinforced by the Army’s educational system and its paternalistic training methods. Officer candidates are initially socialized into the system at the Pakistan Military Academy at Abbottabad and the soldiers
at various regimental training centers. Because the soldiers are more likely than officers to be influenced by their various kinship groups in the villages from which they are recruited, their initial training, unlike that imparted in Western military establishments, is designed not to forcibly bend the individual to the will of the institution, but to gradually inculcate the desired attitudes and values over time. Initial training in the regimental training centers is approximately 36 weeks in duration, is done slowly and gently compared to Western military practices, and it typically includes a lengthy period of education and language training in Urdu before more focused military training is begun. This training model is designed to slowly, almost imperceptibly, wean recruits away from the attitudes and values of the previous kinship groups in their place of origin, bring them to an acceptable level of education, teach them the national language, and inculcate in them a strong sense of loyalty to their regiment, the nation, and the Army as an institution.

After this initial training has been completed, the Army uses other methods to reinforce its desired attitudes and values. As far as possible, the Army attempts to segregate itself in the former British colonial style in heavily protected military cantonments away from the influence of other kinship groups and where the housing, utilities, food, medical care, and personal security for their families are superior to that found in almost every other part of Pakistan. The stark difference between the cleanliness and tranquility of the cantonment and the chaos of the cities and poverty of the villages reinforces in the mind of every military member the superiority of the Army as a national institution. Religion is frequently used as a motivating influence in the Army, but since the 1995 Conspiracy, the mullahs allowed to preach in cantonment mosques are carefully vetted and their sermons closely monitored for radical messages.

Although outside observers sometimes find the religious slogans the military uses troubling, a longtime military observer and frequent lecturer at the Staff College in the 1980s and 1990s, Colonel (ret) Abdul Qayyum, explained the Army’s motivation for this technique:

You shouldn’t use bits of Islam to raise military discipline, morale, and so on. I’m sorry to say that this is the way it has always been used in the Pakistan Army. It is our equivalent of rum—the generals use it to get their men to launch suicidal attacks. But there is no such thing as a powerful jihadi group within the army. Of course, there are many devoutly Muslim officers and jawans, but at heart the vast majority of the army are nationalists, and take whatever is useful from Islam to serve what they see as Pakistan’s interests. The Pakistani army has been a nationalist army with an Islamic look. And, as has been previously described, the Army also employs its Military Intelligence Directorate and ISI to closely monitor the reliability of the officer corps, particularly those being considered for sensitive operational assignments and overseas training or assignment, and to regularly “take the temperature” of the soldiers in the cantonments.

A final question can now be posed. Is there any potential for future factionalism in the Pakistan Army? None was noted by the Students in this study and none seems apparent now. This demonstrates the Army’s success in fostering its own institutional attitudes and values to supplant the attitudes and values of the kinship groups from which the officers and soldiers were originally
recruited. In short, both groups emerge with new identities. The process is summarized in the words of a Pakistani officer who explained to Lieven:

You rise on merit—well mostly—not by inheritance, and you salute the military rank and not the sardar or pir who has inherited his position from his father, or the businessman’s money. These days, many of the generals are the sons of clerks and shopkeepers, or if they are from military families, they are the sons of havildars [NCOs]. It doesn’t matter. The point is that they are generals.The history of the Pakistan Army demonstrates that ethnicity, social class, and religious orientation (as long as it is moderate) have very little weight in terms of promotion and assignment to sensitive duties. What matters most is loyalty to the Army as an institution and demonstrated professional military merit. There have been three outright military coups in Pakistan, but none was mounted by an officer other than the man at the very top, the commander-in- chief or chief of army staff. As long as the Army’s discipline and cohesion are maintained, and, despite occasional concerns expressed about the reliability of individual officers and very small groups of disgruntled individuals, there is little reason to believe this situation will change in the future

Military mindset had tilted towards a form of extremism under Zia but it was curbed down under Musharraf in early 2000's. The moderation in religion is now seen as a way of life.

The officers "using" troops to launch suicidal attacks is debatable as its not what it seems. Due to the nature of training of officers and troops against a much bigger foe, i.e. India, many missions undertaken by PA were already suicidal in nature where :
1. 3:1 superiority wasn't always achieved in attacking Indian positions and,
2. while defending, the troops when ordered not to retreat or give up positions fought to the last man.
Both of these tactics are themselves suicidal in nature. many other Ops were undertaken where chances of success were always slim, but were undertaken nonetheless, even rescue Ops.

Secondly, the effect of volunteering comes into play which had become part of culture at one stage. The officer knows the mission is dangerous, troops are outnumbered, weapons and ammunition may not sustain, the chances of coming back in one piece are also thin, and over all success percentage is less. However, the mission is undertaken by asking for volunteers instead of giving orders to walk into death's jaws. The volunteers went ahead with the mission and many never returned. This has curtailed to a large extent now.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

This study has focused only on the top 40 to 50 percent of the Pakistan Army officer corps—those that passed the examination required to enter the Staff College. The attitudes and values of the 50 to 60 percent of the officer corps that were not selected to attend the Staff College are unknown and likely will never become known because of the inability of U.S. interlocutors to gain access to them. Similarly, the attitudes of the largest part of the Army, its junior commissioned officers (JCOs) and enlisted soldiers, are and will remain unknown for the same reason. The attitudes and values of these groups are important because any military organization tempts fate if it becomes alienated from the outlook of the majority of its soldiers, a situation that would irreparably damage its cohesion and discipline. In this regard, the Iranian Revolution is a cautionary tale. But this does not appear to be the case with the Pakistan Army. To the contrary, the views expressed by Pakistani students at the Staff College seem mostly congruent with those of the country as a whole, and almost certainly coincide with the majority of the officer corps and the Army.

Even if it were not so, the Pakistan Army has demonstrated repeatedly over the 67 years of its existence that it is a disciplined, hierarchical organization that is obedient to the orders of its senior leadership. Despite occasional grumbling and several conspiracies involving small numbers of officers, the Army’s discipline has held firm even when its leaders made spectacularly bad decisions that led directly to national catastrophes like the two lost wars in 1965 and 1971, or to embarrassing military failures like the Kargil operation in 1999. As an institution, the Pakistan Army has shown a remarkable congruence in its values and attitudes, in good times and bad, in times of military rule and civilian governance. Therefore, the attitudes and values of the Staff College students that are summarized above can be taken as a reasonably accurate representation of the attitudes and values not only of past military generations of officers, but of the current and next generation as well.

If this statement is correct, the question arises as to what accounts for the relative immunity of the Army officer corps to the demographic, class, and religious influences sweeping through Pakistan and other states in the region? The answer to this question is rooted in the cultural dynamics of the Pakistani state. As scholar Anatol Lieven has correctly observed, “A fundamental political fact about Pakistan is that the state, whoever claims to lead it, is weak, and society in its various forms is immensely strong. Anyone or any group with the slightest power uses it among other things to plunder the state for patronage and favors, and to turn to their advantage the workings of the law and the bureaucracy.

In other words, the structural weaknesses of the Pakistani state are offset to a large degree by the strength of its societal and cultural mores. Power is not based solely on freely given electoral power as it is in Western democracies. It is also rooted in various hereditary clan-based, tribal, religious, or feudal kinship groups.294 This isn’t a one-way street. The system imposes strong social
and cultural obligations on elites and followers alike, on leaders to provide a degree of protection and patronage to their followers, and on followers to obey their leaders unflinchingly. In a country with no economic safety net, such relationships ameliorate what might otherwise be an intolerable situation for the lower strata of society. In this societal context, the Pakistan Army can be viewed as another form of kinship group, but it is one that demands and has gained a level of loyalty among its members transcending the claims of other groups that are based on ethnicity, class, religion, clan, tribal, or feudal loyalty

With officers coming from different cultures and backgrounds, a pivoting point had to be set where all officers had an equal footing during the initial phase of any educational or training course, so one doesn't take from lead from another. Even then the officers with backgrounds from middle class or lower class took the lead most of the times.

@Reichmarshal @PanzerKiel Please something more than just a like or reaction.

Haan G @PanzerKiel , ehsaan kar diya karo hum pe kabhi kuch foj k baray mein explain kar k

I got so pissed off at you when I had to explain the "Dry day" and other Pakistan military concepts, which you could have done so easily

 

[Signalian]

@Reichmarshal @PanzerKiel Please something more than just a like or reaction.

The article is a realistic assessment.

However, do note that how cleverly only negative aspects have been highlighted by the OP, not the positive ones, even if the positive ones start from the very next line.

 

[SSGOPERATOR]

 

[Reichmarshal]

PA prob stems from the fact that 90 % of the officers making to the top have spent 90% of their service as staff officers n have little to no field / combat experience.
They usually serve as ADC when Captains/ major or SO when as maj/ Col......2 -3 years of service almost always guarantees a outstanding report which sets them up for their entire career.
All their field experience comes from exercises or books n the end result is wt we have today in our top brass.

While the ones doing all the slogging in diff operations very rarely make it beyond Col.

N hence wt u have is "kitabi generals" with kitabi experience.

The only way to get around that is like PAF/ PN, PA need to do away with the entry exam for staff collage n all officers due for the staff collage need to be sent to staff collage.....it is their where things need to be tightened n toughened n officers need to be graded according their performances.

As the staff officers have all the time in the world to prepare for the staff collage exam while those in the field are at a huge disadvantage

Plus more weightage needs to be given to field time n performance when it comes to promotions.