India’s Defence Preparedness is Up Against The Wall

[dadeechi]

India’s Defence Preparedness is Up Against The Wall
War against Pakistan is simply not a pragmatic option
Posted by

Kishalay Bhattacharjee

Kishalay grew up in Shillong and was a teacher and copywriter before joining broadcast news. Half of his two decades in news, has been in conflict zones. He is former Resident Editor NDTV (North East) where he spent 17 years of his two decade long engagement with video journalism. He was also Chair, Internal Security and Senior Fellow at Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. His debut non-fiction work is Che in Paona Bazaar: Tales of Exile and Belonging in India’s Northeast (Pan Macmillan, 2013) (though he believes the north east doesn’t exist). He was based in Calcutta, not Kolkata. Since that’s a city Mamatadi doesn’t believe exists, he now lives in Delhi and is working on his new book and writes regularly on conflict and politics.

| Sep 24, 2016 in Criticles, Featured | 4 Comments

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• according to the CAG, Indian ammunition reserves won’t last a 10-day war. A professional army should be able to carry on a 30-day intense war. Serving army officers say that the country can’t even afford a three-day war. This is information that’s in the public domain in India so chances are extremely high that it’s not news to Pakistan.
  
  The armed forces should ideally work with 30 per cent cutting edge equipment, 40 per cent current technology and the remaining 30 per cent with obsolete weapons. The Indian Army is packed almost entirely with obsolete technology. In March 2012, the then Army Chief V K Singh (now a minister of state in the government) had put on record in a letter to the Prime Minister that “97 per cent of Army’s air defence inventory was obsolete”. Nothing much has changed since then.
  
  The Army’s air defence corps is meant to provide terminal air defence for important installations through Ground-Based Air Defence Weapon Systems (GBADWS). The system went obsolete by the turn of the century. The shelf life of the missile systems has also expired.
  
  India’s defence preparedness is abysmal. Soldiers do not even have enough bulletproof jackets. In January this year, procurement of 50,000 jackets was ordered, but that has still not been made available. With third-generation weaponry and shortage in vehicles and elementary battle gear, India cannot think of a war, let alone go to war. Not just the Army but even the Air Force is way short of the required strength.
  
  There’s also another question that needs to be considered. Even an incident as dramatically rattling as 26/11 – in which one of the terrorists was not only captured alive, but was also a Pakistani national – didn’t prompt India into a war, so what happened at Uri that the mainstream media has unleashed warmongering upon us all? Even the market that otherwise slides with a sneeze didn’t bother about any war.
  
  India has had a protracted war with terrorism in its eastern borders too, but it never waged a war against any of the neigbouring countries that provided safe havens to Indian terror groups or aided and abetted the attacks.
  
  Till 2010, Bangladesh was the hub for scores of groups and despite decades of Indian persuasion, the Bangladeshi government and its intelligence agencies supported the armed groups. Paresh Baruah, the self-styled commander in chief of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), used to be in the Director General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) safe houses in Dhaka. In 2001, 16 Border Security Force (BSF) soldiers were dragged from the border, tortured and hacked to death in Bangladesh. India didn’t wage a war against Bangladesh, though diplomatic relations was strained.
  
  Myanmar has been home to as many groups as Bangladesh and it has taken several years to even discuss the issue with the military Junta. In 2015, the NSCN (K) had ambushed an army convoy in Manipur, killing 18 Indian Army soldiers. India claimed they sent Special Forces inside Myanmar targeting the terrorist camps that was immediately refuted by Myanmar government. India had nothing to prove the claim either.
  
  Bhutan was the only country where India (though it never admitted this) in 2003 helped carry out a massive operation to clear at least 48 armed camps of Indian separatists. But that was not a strike against any country and officially the operation was carried out by Bhutan.
  
  To counter what India refers to Pakistan’s “proxy-war”, after 26/11, the government in Mumbai had got the army to start a covert operation group, the Technical Services Division (TSD), that the former chief V K Singh had initiated. It ran into trouble and had to be shut down. The Indian Cold Start Doctrine –limited, rapid, armoured thrusts, with infantry and necessary air support – was aimed at Pakistan’s hybrid warfare but never quite started. It did, however, prompt Pakistan into increasing defence expenditure and legitimised its army and government into supporting the dirty war, like the suicide attack in Uri.
  
  What India, however, should do is to enhance its fighting equipment, procure current technology, empower its fighting forces and reinforce existing installations for internal as well as external security threats.
  
  The author can be contacted on Twitter @Kishalay

• 
  http://www.newslaundry.com/2016/09/24/indias-defence-preparedness-is-up-against-the-wall/

 

[The_Sidewinder]

Some points are valid. We do need to ramp up our industrial base. China should be an example. The funny thing about war is , its not won or lost in paper. Its just simply not only about how many days of ammunition one coubtry has or how many soldiers, MBTs, Fighters etc one can field. Its more about:

1) Strategy-Counter Strategy
2) Techtical Masterstrokes
3) Strategic Depth
4) Economy
5) Diplomacy
6) Strenght & Weakness of the adversary faced

Most importantly war is about the willpower & courage of fighting man.


If war was that simple, today Korea would be United, Veitnam would be a capitalist, Hitler would have won WWII. #foodforthought

PS: Israel would seize to exist if we go by the theory

 

[Joe Shearer]

Some points are valid. We do need to ramp up our industrial base. China should be an example. The funny thing about war is , its not won or lost in paper. Its just simply not only about how many days of ammunition one coubtry has or how many soldiers, MBTs, Fighters etc one can field. Its more about:

1) Strategy-Counter Strategy
2) Techtical Masterstrokes
3) Strategic Depth
4) Economy
5) Diplomacy
6) Strenght & Weakness of the adversary faced

Most importantly war is about the willpower & courage of fighting man.


If war was that simple, today Korea would be United, Veitnam would be a capitalist, Hitler would have won WWII. #foodforthought

PS: Israel would seize to exist if we go by the theory

Your point is not clear. None of the six points you have mentioned are of any use without what the Americans had once called Beans, Bullets and Black Oil - food, ordnance supplies and fuel. The Army has reasonably (just reasonably) good logistics systems, although a generation or two old, and already out-dated. The politicians have competed to bring us again to the 1962 kind of situation.