Indian military's officer crisis- RESEARCH

[Capt.Popeye]

Regarding you point on technology, see, India does not have static defence needs like most of Europe and the US mainland so technology itself might supplement the military, no doubt, but it will not address the officer problem. Why? Simply because of the nature of India's defence needs. India needs a great human element to address the insurgency and a potentially sympathetic population to anti-national interest (Maoists, Kashmiris etc) on that plane technology will not help, the officer will help and much research on the post-9/11 military affairs shows that over and over again. Our military has also had to learn this lesson the hard way.

Again I do see a misconception creep in there. The Maoist issue is not just a Law and Order issue. It is much more of both a Governance and Socio-Political issue. Which has nothing to do with the Military. Hence the Military is not even involved in it. The Police are, though they are not even the ideal people to deal with it much less the Army.
Kashmir also is mostly a Police issue again, but for the fact that it is ocurring in a Border State and with fuel from trans-border. That is the only reason why the Army is involved there. The problem is that the Army (willy-nilly) has got pulled in to the matter.

About the institution of NCOs and JCOs, I do not see that as a problem at all. Instead I see the scope for using them as "force-multipliers" to the extent that they can take over some roles of Junior Leadership very effectively. In fact a well trained (and empowered) Subedar or Risaldar Saab in the Paltan can potentially perform as well as (if not better than) a fresh Subaltern in many ways. That needs to be fully explored and exploited. Likewise more power can be delegated to NCOs. The Training and Operational Philosophy can be re-jigged accordingly. I do not see much need for increasing Officer level intakes too much in that case.

 

[jaibi]

Again I do see a misconception creep in there. The Maoist issue is not just a Law and Order issue. It is much more of both a Governance and Socio-Political issue. Which has nothing to do with the Military. Hence the Military is not even involved in it. The Police are, though they are not even the ideal people to deal with it much less the Army.
Kashmir also is mostly a Police issue again, but for the fact that it is ocurring in a Border State and with fuel from trans-border. That is the only reason why the Army is involved there. The problem is that the Army (willy-nilly) has got pulled in to the matter.

About the institution of NCOs and JCOs, I do not see that as a problem at all. Instead I see the scope for using them as "force-multipliers" to the extent that they can take over some roles of Junior Leadership very effectively. In fact a well trained (and empowered) Subedar or Risaldar Saab in the Paltan can potentially perform as well as (if not better than) a fresh Subaltern in many ways. That needs to be fully explored and exploited. Likewise more power can be delegated to NCOs. The Training and Operational Philosophy can be re-jigged accordingly. I do not see much need for increasing Officer level intakes too much in that case.

Capt. I would like to disagree with the first part as to the non involvement of the army, I would say that that is just not possible. Even if the military is not directly involved it can be called in to support like it was against the Sikhs. Secondly, Kashmir too has to have an armed forces monitoring so I do not think it is correct to think that the Police handling the situation is a cause to leave the military off the hook for handling such situations.

http://belfercenter.hks.harvard.edu/files/is3102_pp079-115_byman.pdf

This article makes a case for it as well.

I absolutely agree that the NCOs and JCOs can be effective leaders, however, Capt. the article by Kumar proposes that intake is not the only problem it's the training that the recruits are given which is not up to the mark. So whether they are JCOs, NCOs or regular inductees they need to be trained well by the training institutions.