India and Air Land

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Was India ready for war?
Shahzad Chaudhry



There has been consistent noise about the military option available to India following the Mumbai attacks in the Indian establishment, media, and, surprisingly, from within the military hierarchy. The effort to appease certain quarters is more than obvious and understood, but for military professionals to join in the rhetoric, especially when they are aware of the futility of appearing bellicose, is surprising.

Considering that General Deepak Kapoor has had to do exactly that as the Indian army chief leaves one to wonder if he himself is seeking reassurance through his own words. However, if General Kapoor happened to be making comments in relevance to the Indian Army Day, he must be given his time.

Manoj Joshi in his article “Was the [Indian] Army Ready for War” (Mail Today, January 17) has taken the wind out of the sails of the many hankering, superfluous notions of ‘Cold Start’ and ‘surgical strikes’. As this author had mentioned earlier in another piece on the subject of Cold Start (see The Friday Times, December 19, 2008), it shall take a while to equip, train, exercise and then reach the capacity to apply in pursuit of such a notion.

Usually, the learning curve is steep, since many old habits need to be first unlearned. But how many of the Cold Start objectives can really be achieved is a rather tenuous issue. Militaries are meant to attack and defend soundly, in the most efficient manner, and achieve the objectives of war in the earliest timeframe. This is what occupies planners, trainers and executioners.

Joshi’s analysis must then be viewed in this light. No army or force is ever equipped to its heart’s desire, such is the nature of funding, availability, limitations of technology, vested interests, and intractable processes of acquisition. A commander usually must do with what he has and prepare his force to fulfil the mission within the constraints. So to be short of one munition or another is of little pain.

What the militaries, however, do well is to consider the consequences of any action they might undertake. In such war-gaming, they predict the likely evolution of the action-reaction process leading to various hypotheses and conduct possibilities. They are equally good at studying the adversary and the environment, and based on accumulative deduction, will recommend to the government what they consider the best course of action. A government may then decide whether it wishes a war on itself or the saner route of negotiation and diplomatic interaction. Usually, thankfully, governments err on the side of safety.

Comparative deductions, in the domain of quantity in particular, are fallacious. It is a most simplistic approach to enumerating threat. Military capabilities in most professional outfits are multi-dimensional; these can help produce effects in many variations in combination with different elements.

Also, most countries and their armies will have the necessary wherewithal to achieve their mission. If a force has an offensive mission, it must be assumed that it is equipped and trained as an offensive element; an army with a predominantly defensive mission will have the means to fulfil its mission well. No commander, therefore, will ever underplay the strength of his adversary. This takes out the consideration of numbers and the balance of forces etc out of the equation.

Simply put, the armies and forces on either side should be assumed to have the ability to perform their mission — shortages or no shortages. Anything else should entail heads rolling.

There may, however, be one consideration when linear comparisons may have relevance. War on land is sequential and is executed in serial application in established and well-recognised cycles. The variations normally occur in beating the other in time and space co-relation; surprise because of any factor makes a battle winnable. Extraordinary and audacious courage will surprise an enemy. Other than this, armies employ fairly conventionally, in a fixed environment, throwing up only the given set of options. These are all well rehearsed and well covered on both sides.

Joshi’s assertion of numerical parity may be better understood through the following explanation. There is always an optimal troop density-to-space ratio that governs the numbers that can be inducted in a geographically defined area; anything less is a vulnerability while anything more is not only waste but disruptive. Congestion reduces the space for manoeuvre, and also offers targets for the other side.

In a typical Indo-Pakistan confrontation, troops-to-space ratios are saturated to the optimal level; where there may be slight gaps, those are covered through other means. Ground-friction is almost at the highest level with thriving population centres and habitats, and where these appear stretched, augmentation comes through natural and man-made obstacles. The wide swathes required for huge manoeuvres by mechanised forces are almost non-existent; and where they exist, the room for manoeuvre is extremely restricted.

That is why most wars in the Indo-Pakistan scenario end up being stalemates with only marginal territory exchange, and entirely unable to achieve the stated objectives.

The two air forces and the navies can also be compared on exactly the same premise: are they equipped, trained and exercised to be operationally prepared to undertake the mission assigned to them? It would be foolish to expect anything else. If a navy has a blue-water role, it has to be under fitment for that role. Similarly, a navy with a more specified role will have the necessary wherewithal for its offensive and defensive mission.

Air forces come into the equation as the primary instruments of modern warfare, which revolves around precision, efficiency in application and ability to engage across a wide and a deeper spectrum of geographical domain through parallel engagement. This is the main difference in land and air warfare: land warfare per se has to be linear and sequential, while air warfare is parallel and across the entire depth.

If one only considers what the Tamil Tigers’ tiny fleet of three ZLIN propeller aircraft did to Sri Lankan morale against a relatively much better equipped Sri Lankan Air Force, all pretensions of a surgical strike come crashing down. That is the nature of air warfare. The huge spaces that are available to it with least restrictive friction enable surprise and manoeuvre which, in combination with firepower and precision, make for a most efficient force application. A force just needs to be suitably equipped — rest is left to the ingenuity of the employing intellect, or the lack of it.

Finally, to the politics of recent pronouncements in India on war readiness: India has a unique problem with the recently instituted Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) system. Acting in rotation, the naval chief is currently the CDS. Given the predominance that armies enjoy as the senior service in all militaries of British antecedence, there remains quite a bit of turf sensitivity. This is traditional, and persistently irritating within a military system.

Was a difference of opinion on going to war with Pakistan a result of these inherent fault-lines? It is possible, though, that it was a very well considered decision to avoid an armed confrontation — educated, sane and professional. Anything else would have been catastrophic — and we are not talking nuclear yet.

The writer is a retired air vice marshal of the Pakistan Air Force and a former ambassador. He can be contacted at shahzad.a.chaudhry@gmail.com

 

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Air power alone?
Ejaz Haider



Former Air Vice Marshal Shahzad Chaudhry’s article “Was India ready for war?” (Daily Times, February 2) makes an interesting distinction between parallel war (the essential quality of modern air warfare) and linear, sequential operations (the limitation of land warfare).

He wrote: “Air forces come into the equation as the primary instruments of modern warfare, which revolves around precision, efficiency in application and ability to engage across a wide and a deeper spectrum of geographical domain through parallel engagement. This is the main difference in land and air warfare: land warfare per se has to be linear and sequential, while air warfare is parallel and across the entire depth.”

One implication of positing the distinction thus is that while land warfare may still be, indeed is, subject to Clausewitzean friction (drag) and the consequent fog of war, “The huge spaces that are available to [air power] with least restrictive friction enable surprise and manoeuvre which, in combination with firepower and precision, make for a most efficient force application”.

In and of itself what AVM Chaudhry has argued is correct. But is the idea of parallel war necessarily air-based? Also, can air power alone win a war, this being the assumption behind the concept, debated since the first Gulf War?

What is parallel war? According to most studies, the concept looks at the adversary as a “system” comprising five components or concentric rings with a key node or centre of gravity. Each ring itself, like a fractal, depicts its own concentric rings and centre of gravity.

This being so, theoretically, parallel warfare becomes a function of simultaneous and coordinated operations against all the key nodes in the system and can only be conducted through an offensive air campaign since air power is the superior medium for prosecuting these operations.

Also, because the concept entails attacking the centres of gravity in the rings, the offensive does not have to go from the periphery to the centre, taking out instead the centre without first the necessary physical or other collapse of the outer rings. Neither is the offensive sequential since it relies on simultaneity. This is unlike land-based operations which have to move in a linear, outer-to-inner rings operational sequence.

There are four main problems with relying solely on an approach that looks at air power as the decisive feature in winning a war.

Much of the debate on parallel warfare has unfolded in a scenario where one state (US) or a combination of states (US plus allies) will have air supremacy. Air supremacy, as opposed to air superiority, is defined by the US Department of Defence as “that degree of air superiority wherein the opposing air force is incapable of effective interference”. In such a scenario, air power with precision munitions and persistent aerial and satellite ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) capabilities can definitely play havoc with the adversary’s command and control systems and other infrastructure.

Or, as Jeffrey R Cooper put it, “...due to the simultaneous parallel operations, the high mobility, the high lethality, and the capability for sustained high tempos of operations, so many enemy units can be defeated in detail simultaneously that the operation may resemble a more classic coup de main executed in a single main-force engagement.”

It is difficult to see how, where air capabilities are more or less matched (a situation roughly of air parity), or even in situations of asymmetry (between air superiority and air parity) where the weaker side can still employ assets intelligently — a point incisively made by AVM Chaudhry — parallel war will be possible, or possible with impunity.

The problem is that it is difficult to configure an air force for an extended and extensive offensive campaign when it is facing another with similar or equivalent capabilities. This in fact was the larger point of AVM Chaudhry’s article in relation to the possibility of the Indian Air Force undertaking any surgical strike missions.

Secondly, when forces are in geographical proximity to an extent where in some case they do not even have to advance to contact (the Line of Control, for instance), one side would always resort to mitigating its disadvantage in one area by opening up another front — whether in physical terms or through the induction into the theatre of a new weapon system.

Roughly matching capabilities breed uncertainty through threat of escalation. The longer and wider the conflict, the greater the fog of war and the lesser the neatness associated with an air campaign relying on air supremacy.

Thirdly, while it is true that air power can be projected right over a state’s centre of gravity, land warfare is not necessarily a function always of linear, sequential battles. History has known advances and engagements along multiple axes and the elements of speed and surprise from the time Hannibal landed in the Po Valley. Khalid bin Waleed was known for flexibility of tactics, forced marches and sudden appearances and disappearances. Napoleon’s corps d’armée is another example of the strength of combined arms and self-sustained fighting units that engaged multiple targets. The model allowed him both flexibility and superiority in numbers (width-depth and concentration/dispersion).

Even on land, the ability to plan and execute non-linear operations is what is most likely to give edge to a commander.

Finally, the modern battlefield requires a very high degree of synchronisation and synergy. It relies on coordination among land-, air-, and sea-based forces depending on the nature of the objective. No single service can have force-multiplication effect beyond a certain point. All three, or in most cases, the land and air forces, have to work in tandem to increase their effectiveness and lethality. The space and opportunity created by one has to be exploited by the other.

This is why it is important to have inter-services coordination and planning, an aspect sorely missing in Pakistan where generals cannot think of warfare beyond a contest of arms on land. But that is another topic!

Ejaz Haider is Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times and Consulting Editor of The Friday Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk

 

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RESPONSE: The future war
Shahzad Chaudhry



Ejaz Haider, in his article “Air Power Alone?” (Daily Times, February 3), has complemented well the missing links in my article “Was India ready for war?” (Daily Times, February 2).

The ‘air power alone’ debate is an old one, initiated immediately after a novel and sustained air campaign of around four weeks in Iraq during the first Gulf War that facilitated General Schwarzkopf’s famous 100-hour annihilating ground war and brought the until then credible Iraqi army and the Revolutionary Guards to their knees.

The second Gulf War, begun in 2003 with expanded objectives and fought on the lines of traditional land-based strategy, continues till date with the United States looking for ways to end its embroilment.

For the ‘traditionalists’, it must be stated that use of air power in this war has been mostly in a supporting role. Long land wars are messy and difficult to extricate from. These types of wars embroil and enmesh, but still need to be fought sometimes. Usually, extrication is difficult and not without compromising on the initial objectives.

Two other clarifications are in order: one, air power cannot hold ground even if it can get the ground vacated — you always need “boots on the ground” to hold ground; and second, to answer Haider’s query, no, wars — and we are talking real wars as in the Indo-Pak mode — cannot be won with air power alone.

That said, let’s for the moment put aside the erstwhile Yugoslavian conflict or the Kosovo experience, though these are but perhaps the most avid examples of how the nature of conflict has changed. And yes, all around, the nature of conflict has changed, even if we do not wish to alter the balance of how we employ force. The weight of emphasis in any future war will be a lot different than what we are used to, and I hope we can imbibe this lesson the soonest for our own benefit, away from defining the dominant strategy that will govern future wars.

Now to the issue at hand.

Nations apply the military instrument with a clear strategic objective: capture of spaces, destruction of opposing forces, or, increasingly in the modern wars, coercion of the adversary into conformal behaviour. The last of these strategic objectives as a contemporary goal of war creates the manifestation of ‘pain and punishment’. At times both space and destruction can be implicit, but this is halfway treatment without real legs; destruction to weaken the adversary is the real motive.

The Arab-Israeli War of 1973 stands witness to this theory, except for Golan. Recent forays into Lebanon and Gaza by Israel also support the contention that universally the occupation of land becomes difficult to sustain. Iraq will soon prove the point, while the jury on Afghanistan is still out.

‘Parallel application’ in air strategy — as proffered by John Warden, the modern day Liddlehart, not sufficiently rewarded by his own country, the US — was the means to an end-state of ‘strategic paralysis’, that being the strategic objective of his notion of the United States’ air power application.

So, parallel application is not a ‘theoretical’ model only; it is the practice in all air forces of any consequence. And, no, you do not need to be an air force like the USAF to be able to practice the concept; any air force can partake of this model to its capacity. The size and the extent can be varied to conform to the needs.

Haider alludes to it well when he talks of the centre of gravity, and its various levels. These ‘centres’ in size and enormity correspond to the objectives defined within the achievable domain of an applying force.

The concept of ‘supremacy’ or ‘superiority’ is a relative function. Each level of this state must be incidental per se since the aim is not to hold conquered air space. The notion is transitional in nature and any attempt to give it permanence in the tradition of conquering land is actually an entirely wasteful activity. Analogous to applying force to achieve a purpose, airspace too is needed by an air force to do something, and when that something is done, it becomes a useless stretch of air.

Historically, this is what the convention has been tied to, a linear cycle of achievement of various stages with an unaccountable quantity being wasted in gaining superiority. The same effort on the back of transitional supremacy or superiority could actually be used to inflict unsustainable ‘pain and punishment’.

In the case of what may be termed as defensive air superiority, the denial of air space to the offending force, one may desire sustainability, but that again must only be on need basis; hence the reason for sound and modern air defence capacity.

But let me refer again to the Sri Lankan example, where despite supremacy in quantifiable terms, particularly within the defence domain, the LTTE Zlins always found a way in. This example may never be trivialised; it is the essence of air warfare. So when Pakistan says that any surgical strike shall be responded to, it has all the assurance of sound professional qualification. The rest is left to the pain threshold for each side to consider.

Is parallel application as a notion restricted to air power alone? I do not think so. In fact, even a street fighter with multiple objectives may employ the concept based on his speed, flexibility, range and lethality, since soon the people around will separate the two warring sides. The variations shall always be in relativity.

That is why nations going to war must have clearly stated strategic objectives, and then make a choice of their most appropriate instrument of application to achieve those objectives. Efficiency and efficacy are the two golden principles in application of force, which act as force multipliers.

The writer is a retired air vice marshal of the Pakistan Air Force and a former ambassador. He can be contacted at shahzad.a.chaudhry@gmail.com