Kailash Kumar
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Chief of Defence Staff: Can the new superchief call the shots?
The armed forces will finally have a superboss-the Chief of Defence Staff. Whether the new incumbent can transform India's defence apparatus and make the services a more effectively coordinated fighting unit will depend on how categorical his writ is.
Sandeep Unnithan
August 23, 2019
Top guns (From left), The three service chiefs, Gen. Bipin Rawat, Adm. Karambir Singh and Air Chief Marshal B.S. Dhanoa.
The Red Fort is both a powerful metaphor for India's military might and a backdrop for change. The crenellated seat of two empires, Mughal and British, it was from this fort's ramparts that India announced to the world that it had made the transition into an independent republic. It was also from where Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India's most significant defence reform in 72 years. Speaking at the Red Fort on the 72nd Independence Day, Modi announced the institution of the post of a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS).
The CDS would be the government's single-point military advisor, and sharpen coordination between the forces making them even more effective, he said. Even for a government that has made stealth, secrecy and surprise its hallmarks, the announcement came as a bolt from the blue. Few within the mammoth ministry of defence, which has functioned almost without change since the days of the British Raj, saw it coming.
Even the armed forces were taken by surprise. Early last year, in a first across-the-board consensus, the three services agreed to appoint a permanent chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee (CoSC). The proposal sent to the PMO for approval was for a fourth four-star officer who would head the CoSC consisting of the three service chiefs (it is currently held by the seniormost service chief in rotation). The CDS, which Modi opted to announce instead, is a massive step-up from a permanent chairman. The decision was like Article 370, says one senior military official. Everyone expected minor tinkering the government instead went for radical change.
The post of CDS, one of the prime learnings from the Kargil War of 1999, was an unfinished agenda of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. This was something Modi hinted at as he addressed the combined commanders' conference in December 2015, when he spoke of how jointness at the top is a need that is long overdue. It took him nearly four years to make the announcement.
The decision to appoint a superchief of the armed forces comes at an inflection point in India's national security imperatives. The real shift has been in the way the political leadership looks at the military as a coercive tool of hard power against nuclear-armed Pakistan. The governments of Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh were deterred by Pakistan's nuclear arsenal into not retaliating for the 2001 attack on Parliament and the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks in 2008. Modi has signalled space for military conflict even under a nuclear umbrella.
Terror attacks like at Uri and Pulwama were met with cross-border commando raids and the bombing of terror training camps inside Pakistan. Senior military officials who spoke to India today confirmed that the forces are more ready now for war than at any point in recent decades.
After the 2016 Uri attack, the army readied itself for a swift, sharp Cold Start' offensive rapid shallow thrusts into Pakistan. Missile and ammunition stocks were replenished. Three years ago, the operational headquarters of the air force, army and naval commands facing Pakistan sat down and jointly fine-tuned their war plans an exercise carried out for the first time since the 1971 war.
The services examined various contingencies and what their responses would be to each of them. These plans were then vetted by the respective service chiefs who sat in on meetings with their operations staff. This translated into what army chief Gen. Bipin Rawat reportedly told a closed-door meeting of retiring personnel on August 19that the army was ready for a war with Pakistan after the February 14 Pulwama suicide bomb attack.
The first draft of the national security strategy is to be submitted shortly to the government. Prepared by the Defence Planning Committee headed by National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval, the policy (which insiders call a white paper on defence') will address one of the fundamental arming without aiming' flaws in India's military modernisation individual services planning for wars separately and project hardware requirements delinked from budgetary realities.
The government has already signalled a cap in defence spending and is unlikely to spend more than 16.6 per cent of central government expenditure. This year's Rs 4.31 lakh crore ($61.96 billion) defence budget is a modest 6.8 per cent increase over the previous year. The government's focus on socio-economic priorities, balancing the fiscal deficit and worries over a slowing economy will mean a tight leash on defence rupees. Appointing a CDS to accelerate training and cooperation, and prioritise defence spending among the services, is even more key in times of modest budgets. It will, however, only be the first step on the long road to independent India's first major post-independence military reorganisation.
A contentious appointment
India is the world's last major democracy without a single-point military advisor like the CDS. It is also the only major democracy where the Armed Forces Headquarters are outside the apex government structure as attached offices' rather than integrated departments. This model was put in place in 1947 by Lord Hastings Ismay, chief of staff to the last Viceroy of India, Louis Mountbatten.
The defence ministry structure for three commanders-in-chief who would head their respective services, with a central committee for coordination, was only meant to be a temporary arrangement until one better suited to Indian conditions was evolved. But it has continued for over 70 years as a bizarre stovepipes system with each service doing its own force and war planning. There is little integration between the armed forces HQ and defence ministry. In this breach filled with fear and mistrust, the post of CDS has become a most contentious appointment, rife with the possibility of turf battles.
The trouble lies in how the various stakeholders in the defence ministry have perceived the CDS. To the civilian bureaucracy, the post marked the ascendancy of the military. What will become of me? one defence secretary is believed to have asked the service chiefs, only half in jest, while discussing the creation of the new post some years ago. Another defence secretary, in a candid conversation some years ago, said that he was, in fact, the CDS. For the Congress, a powerful CDS stoked Nehruvian-era fears of a coup.
Nehru reportedly rebuffed several suggestions from Lord Mountbatten, the author of Indian military reforms, to create a CDS in the 1950s and early '60s. The deployment of the Indian Peace-keeping Force (IPKF) in Sri Lanka (1987-1991) saw bitter inter-service rivalry. The navy, air force and army failed to work out a common plan to pool resources or for an integrated chain of command under a single military commander.
A repeat of this chaos was witnessed during the Kargil War of 1999. The army alleged that the IAF entered the battle only after 20 days when it could have decisively changed the game if it had come in early. The air force said the army projected impossible requirements for helicopter gunships without knowing their limitations. In short, when it came to the crunch, neither service could operate seamlessly with the other.
This confusion was not lost on the 2000 Kargil Review Committee (KRC), headed by strategic analyst K. Subrahmanyam. The KRC was scathing in its indictment of the entire national security and apex decision-making apparatus, calling it a relic of the British Raj. It recommended a thorough revamp and reorganisation of the entire national security apparatus. An objective assessment of the last 52 years will show that the country is lucky to have scraped through various national security threats without much damage, except in 1962,' the committee observed.
A group of ministers (GoM), set up in 2001 after the KRC submitted its report, undertook the most comprehensive national security reviews in post-independent India. One of the GoM's task forces on defence management headed by Arun Singh, an acolyte of the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi recommended the creation of the post of CDS. Singh, Gandhi's MoS for defence, had a keen grasp of the military.
The four-star CDS, according to him, would be a first among equals, and propel jointness' among the three services, administratively control the nuclear forces and supervise the progressive decentralisation of decision-making'. Delegation of powers to service headquarters was envisaged, with the latter becoming the integrated headquarters of the ministry of defence rather than attached offices. The CDS would also function as the principal military advisor to the defence minister.
Following these suggestions, the NDA government in May 2001 was on the verge of appointing navy chief Admiral Sushil Kumar as the first CDS. A date had even been set for the event, an office and residence identified for the new chief. But the decision almost immediately sparked off angst within the services. The air force, fearing it would be subsumed by the larger Indian army, stepped up its resistance.
There was behind-the-scenes political lobbying by senior retired service officers, dire predictions from among the services. Years later, a bitter George Fernandes, the then defence minister and a most enthusiastic votary of the post, blamed UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi for stalling the move. She, he claimed, had despatched former president R. Venkataraman as an emissary to convince then PM Vajpayee to stall the appointment, just days before it was to be made.
The scuttling of the appointment at the last moment ripped the heart out of the GoM recommendations, says Admiral Arun Prakash, former navy chief. In September that year, the government went ahead and created the Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff (HQ-IDS), the CDS's secretariat headed by a three-star officer. HQ-IDS would function as a stopgap arrangement, a single-point organisation for jointmanship in MoD that would integrate policy, doctrine, warfighting and procurement'.
The Chief of Integrated Defence Staff (CIDS) would report to the CoSC. The post of CoSC was held in rotation by the seniormost of the three service chiefs. But, in the absence of a full-time head, HQ-IDS stumbled around the corridors of South Block, a disembodied military organisation with no full-time head. The KRC had blamed India's antiquated defence structure for loading the service chiefs with the twin tasks of being operational commanders who would fight wars and also national security planners responsible for training and equipping the services. Adding the post of CoSC meant service chiefs had to devote time to a third responsibilityrunning a tri-services coordination body.
A former service chief who was CoSC candidly admits how deeply flawed the two-hatted approach was. I could only devote around 30 per cent of my time to the CoSC, the rest was focused on my service, he says. This year, the ephemeral nature of the post is on full display. The baton of the chairman, CoSC, will change hands three times in seven months. On May 30, retiring navy chief Adm. Sunil Lanba passed it on to Air Chief Marshal B.S. Dhanoa. The air chief will hold the post for just three months before he retires, handing it over to army chief Gen. Rawat on August 30. The army chief will occupy the post for just four months before retiring on December 30.
Serious differences between how the services approached security threats saw the CoSC turn into a battleground for budgetary allocations. In 2012, the army overruled objections from the navy and air force to push its case for a new Mountain Strike Corpsthree divisions that would add over 90,000 soldiers to the army's bloating revenue budget.
In the past 17 years, there has been only one tri-services commandthe Andaman and Nicobar Commandwhich has elements of all three. It was being commanded by a three-star officer from each of the three services in rotation and was to have been a test-bed for what a future tri-services command would look like. However, in 2015, the navy, clearly unhappy with the experiment, reclaimed the command. The CDS appeared to have political backing in the Modi government's first term. Speaking at the 2015 india today conclave, then defence minister Manohar Parrikar said, Integration has to be there and the CDS is a must. How do you work it out? Give me some time and I will do it because three forces integration does not exist in the present structure.
In 2016, a Parrikar-appointed 11-member committee called the creation of a CDS the need of the hour. Headed by Lt Gen. D.B. Shekatkar, it also recommended doing away with the 17 different single-service commands. There would only be three joint theatre commands north, south and west each to be headed by a theatre commander, who would report directly to the CDS. The recommendations did not just worry the three services, it even frightened the defence ministry. The contentious partsCDS and theatre commands were shelved. The MoD accepted only the report's less controversial sections.
In 2017, the armed forces began taking the first steps towards jointmanship. Navy chief Lanba, the chairman, CoSC, brought on board Gen. Rawat and the IAF's Dhanoa. It was the first time the three chiefs had agreed on a common tri-service chief. The CoSC proposed a permanent chairman for the CoSC. This was a recommendation first made by the Naresh Chandra Committee in 2012, appointed to examine the implementation of the KRC and GoM reports. The CoSC did not recommend theatre commands where land, air and naval assets would be led by a single military commander.
This omission was deliberate, senior defence officials say. It was to allay the fears of the air force. The permanent chairman, the CoSC opined, would not head operational commands. He would, instead, devote all his attention to training, planning and running joint exercises. It had been pending with the government for over a year.
Agent of change
The August 15 CDS announcement will now set the government machinery moving. The CDS was always going to be a political calla decision imposed on militaries in the US, UK and France from the top down. Implementing this transformational reform will call for the same resolve Modi demonstrated in the past when he pushed for the national war memorial in New Delhi proposal hanging fire for nearly half a century overriding objections from heritage activists. Army chief Rawat and the IAF's Dhanoa are being seen as possible candidates for the post. But more than the candidate, it will be his role and responsibilities that the military and civilian authorities alike will scrutinise closely.
The MoD will set up a committee to define the CDS's mandate before a formal government notification is issued. It will be important to see what financial powers the new CDS will have. If he controls budgets and resource allocation, then he will be significantly more powerful than just another service chief.
A critical and contentious aspect will be whether the CDS commands troops on the ground, the theatre commands as recommended by the Shekatkar Committee. These integrated commands are being opposed by the navy and air force who fear the army's dominance. But without theatre commands, the CDS runs the risk of becoming a glorified CISC.
The government is yet to enunciate its thinking on the CDS appointment. It is fair to assume that it will borrow from the guidelines for the permanent CoSC chairman post recommended by the collegium of three chiefs the previous year. The chairman would be the single-point military advisor to the government, oversee training, budget and procurements and also head the Strategic Forces Command, which manages India's nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. He will also look after budget and procurements as well as head the three new tri-services institutions that have been set up nascent commands for Cyber, Space and Special Forces.
Anit Mukherjee, assistant professor in the South Asia programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore and a long-time tracker of India's defence reforms, feels the government will make the CDS head the IDS and use it as a fulcrum for defence policy. If that happens, it may not be such a bad thing. Except maybe the services need to make a joint staff experience necessary for upward mobility like what the Goldwater-Nichols Act did for the US army. In short, civilians will have to be more hands-on delineating the contours of defence policy-making instead of leaving the implementation of this decision entirely to the military, he says.
The 2001 GoM tasks the CDS with enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the planning process through intra- and inter-service prioritisation of acquisitions and projects. A 2017 study by then MoS defence Subhash Bhamre found that barely 10 per cent of 144 schemes for buying defence equipment contracted in the preceding three years fructified in the stipulated time of 18-25 months.
The average time taken by 133 of these schemes52 monthswas more than twice the stipulated period. It traced some of this delay to the lack of inter-service coordination. Individual services, the study found, did not do enough to streamline their requirements. Perspective plans of the services were individualistic and lacked the desired levels of integration. This service-specific approach strained the limited defence budget and, as a result, critical capability requirements could not be attained.
This bottleneck, the report states, could be cleared at the very beginning at what is called the pre-Acceptance of Necessity (AoN) stage if the HQ-IDS was given executive powers. The IDS, the organisation the CDS will head, could then evolve an integrated plan and accord inter-service prioritisation based on budgetary projections. The IDS could, for instance, take a call on what was more critical third aircraft carrier for the Indian Navy or 110 fighter jets for the IAFand allocate budgetary resources accordingly.
A key recommendation of the 2001 GoM report was for the CDS to ensure jointness'. Besides integration of the three services, the CDS has to propel the integration of the armed forces with the civilian bureaucracy. Shekatkar says integration or bringing the armed forces HQ into the MoD should be a major priority. To start with, you need to appoint lieutenant-generals as additional secretaries and major generals and equivalent as joint secretaries.
All this, however, will take years to fructify. The CDS is not a magician with a wand. Acceptability and evolution of the post will take time, there will be a transition period, says Lt Gen. Vinod Bhatia, head of the MoD tri-service think-tank, Centre for Joint Warfare Studies (CENJOWS).
Theaterisation of the commands, senior defence officials say, is the next logical step to make the CDS more effective. Without an integrated system and a CDS, combat power (consisting of men and materiel) accretions by individual services remain fiefdoms without the ability to use their awesome power as a single, war-fighting machine, says military analyst Brig. Xerxes Adrianwala (retd).
But integrating all the three services into one common war theatre' is a process that is several years down the line. It will involve extensive changes to the current command structure. The Southern Command, which has all three services present in strength, could be the first to be theaterised.
This will involve the creation of a joint HQ with common intelligence, communication, surveillance and air defence systems. Service chiefs will become force creators' and force providers' in charge of planning, training and managing defence budgets. An empowered CDS could then be just the silver bullet India's dysfunctional defence apparatus needs.
https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/...90902-enter-the-superchief-1590316-2019-08-23
The armed forces will finally have a superboss-the Chief of Defence Staff. Whether the new incumbent can transform India's defence apparatus and make the services a more effectively coordinated fighting unit will depend on how categorical his writ is.
Sandeep Unnithan
August 23, 2019
Top guns (From left), The three service chiefs, Gen. Bipin Rawat, Adm. Karambir Singh and Air Chief Marshal B.S. Dhanoa.
The Red Fort is both a powerful metaphor for India's military might and a backdrop for change. The crenellated seat of two empires, Mughal and British, it was from this fort's ramparts that India announced to the world that it had made the transition into an independent republic. It was also from where Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India's most significant defence reform in 72 years. Speaking at the Red Fort on the 72nd Independence Day, Modi announced the institution of the post of a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS).
The CDS would be the government's single-point military advisor, and sharpen coordination between the forces making them even more effective, he said. Even for a government that has made stealth, secrecy and surprise its hallmarks, the announcement came as a bolt from the blue. Few within the mammoth ministry of defence, which has functioned almost without change since the days of the British Raj, saw it coming.
Even the armed forces were taken by surprise. Early last year, in a first across-the-board consensus, the three services agreed to appoint a permanent chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee (CoSC). The proposal sent to the PMO for approval was for a fourth four-star officer who would head the CoSC consisting of the three service chiefs (it is currently held by the seniormost service chief in rotation). The CDS, which Modi opted to announce instead, is a massive step-up from a permanent chairman. The decision was like Article 370, says one senior military official. Everyone expected minor tinkering the government instead went for radical change.
The post of CDS, one of the prime learnings from the Kargil War of 1999, was an unfinished agenda of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. This was something Modi hinted at as he addressed the combined commanders' conference in December 2015, when he spoke of how jointness at the top is a need that is long overdue. It took him nearly four years to make the announcement.
The decision to appoint a superchief of the armed forces comes at an inflection point in India's national security imperatives. The real shift has been in the way the political leadership looks at the military as a coercive tool of hard power against nuclear-armed Pakistan. The governments of Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh were deterred by Pakistan's nuclear arsenal into not retaliating for the 2001 attack on Parliament and the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks in 2008. Modi has signalled space for military conflict even under a nuclear umbrella.
Terror attacks like at Uri and Pulwama were met with cross-border commando raids and the bombing of terror training camps inside Pakistan. Senior military officials who spoke to India today confirmed that the forces are more ready now for war than at any point in recent decades.
After the 2016 Uri attack, the army readied itself for a swift, sharp Cold Start' offensive rapid shallow thrusts into Pakistan. Missile and ammunition stocks were replenished. Three years ago, the operational headquarters of the air force, army and naval commands facing Pakistan sat down and jointly fine-tuned their war plans an exercise carried out for the first time since the 1971 war.
The services examined various contingencies and what their responses would be to each of them. These plans were then vetted by the respective service chiefs who sat in on meetings with their operations staff. This translated into what army chief Gen. Bipin Rawat reportedly told a closed-door meeting of retiring personnel on August 19that the army was ready for a war with Pakistan after the February 14 Pulwama suicide bomb attack.
The first draft of the national security strategy is to be submitted shortly to the government. Prepared by the Defence Planning Committee headed by National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval, the policy (which insiders call a white paper on defence') will address one of the fundamental arming without aiming' flaws in India's military modernisation individual services planning for wars separately and project hardware requirements delinked from budgetary realities.
The government has already signalled a cap in defence spending and is unlikely to spend more than 16.6 per cent of central government expenditure. This year's Rs 4.31 lakh crore ($61.96 billion) defence budget is a modest 6.8 per cent increase over the previous year. The government's focus on socio-economic priorities, balancing the fiscal deficit and worries over a slowing economy will mean a tight leash on defence rupees. Appointing a CDS to accelerate training and cooperation, and prioritise defence spending among the services, is even more key in times of modest budgets. It will, however, only be the first step on the long road to independent India's first major post-independence military reorganisation.
A contentious appointment
India is the world's last major democracy without a single-point military advisor like the CDS. It is also the only major democracy where the Armed Forces Headquarters are outside the apex government structure as attached offices' rather than integrated departments. This model was put in place in 1947 by Lord Hastings Ismay, chief of staff to the last Viceroy of India, Louis Mountbatten.
The defence ministry structure for three commanders-in-chief who would head their respective services, with a central committee for coordination, was only meant to be a temporary arrangement until one better suited to Indian conditions was evolved. But it has continued for over 70 years as a bizarre stovepipes system with each service doing its own force and war planning. There is little integration between the armed forces HQ and defence ministry. In this breach filled with fear and mistrust, the post of CDS has become a most contentious appointment, rife with the possibility of turf battles.
The trouble lies in how the various stakeholders in the defence ministry have perceived the CDS. To the civilian bureaucracy, the post marked the ascendancy of the military. What will become of me? one defence secretary is believed to have asked the service chiefs, only half in jest, while discussing the creation of the new post some years ago. Another defence secretary, in a candid conversation some years ago, said that he was, in fact, the CDS. For the Congress, a powerful CDS stoked Nehruvian-era fears of a coup.
Nehru reportedly rebuffed several suggestions from Lord Mountbatten, the author of Indian military reforms, to create a CDS in the 1950s and early '60s. The deployment of the Indian Peace-keeping Force (IPKF) in Sri Lanka (1987-1991) saw bitter inter-service rivalry. The navy, air force and army failed to work out a common plan to pool resources or for an integrated chain of command under a single military commander.
A repeat of this chaos was witnessed during the Kargil War of 1999. The army alleged that the IAF entered the battle only after 20 days when it could have decisively changed the game if it had come in early. The air force said the army projected impossible requirements for helicopter gunships without knowing their limitations. In short, when it came to the crunch, neither service could operate seamlessly with the other.
This confusion was not lost on the 2000 Kargil Review Committee (KRC), headed by strategic analyst K. Subrahmanyam. The KRC was scathing in its indictment of the entire national security and apex decision-making apparatus, calling it a relic of the British Raj. It recommended a thorough revamp and reorganisation of the entire national security apparatus. An objective assessment of the last 52 years will show that the country is lucky to have scraped through various national security threats without much damage, except in 1962,' the committee observed.
A group of ministers (GoM), set up in 2001 after the KRC submitted its report, undertook the most comprehensive national security reviews in post-independent India. One of the GoM's task forces on defence management headed by Arun Singh, an acolyte of the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi recommended the creation of the post of CDS. Singh, Gandhi's MoS for defence, had a keen grasp of the military.
The four-star CDS, according to him, would be a first among equals, and propel jointness' among the three services, administratively control the nuclear forces and supervise the progressive decentralisation of decision-making'. Delegation of powers to service headquarters was envisaged, with the latter becoming the integrated headquarters of the ministry of defence rather than attached offices. The CDS would also function as the principal military advisor to the defence minister.
Following these suggestions, the NDA government in May 2001 was on the verge of appointing navy chief Admiral Sushil Kumar as the first CDS. A date had even been set for the event, an office and residence identified for the new chief. But the decision almost immediately sparked off angst within the services. The air force, fearing it would be subsumed by the larger Indian army, stepped up its resistance.
There was behind-the-scenes political lobbying by senior retired service officers, dire predictions from among the services. Years later, a bitter George Fernandes, the then defence minister and a most enthusiastic votary of the post, blamed UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi for stalling the move. She, he claimed, had despatched former president R. Venkataraman as an emissary to convince then PM Vajpayee to stall the appointment, just days before it was to be made.
The scuttling of the appointment at the last moment ripped the heart out of the GoM recommendations, says Admiral Arun Prakash, former navy chief. In September that year, the government went ahead and created the Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff (HQ-IDS), the CDS's secretariat headed by a three-star officer. HQ-IDS would function as a stopgap arrangement, a single-point organisation for jointmanship in MoD that would integrate policy, doctrine, warfighting and procurement'.
The Chief of Integrated Defence Staff (CIDS) would report to the CoSC. The post of CoSC was held in rotation by the seniormost of the three service chiefs. But, in the absence of a full-time head, HQ-IDS stumbled around the corridors of South Block, a disembodied military organisation with no full-time head. The KRC had blamed India's antiquated defence structure for loading the service chiefs with the twin tasks of being operational commanders who would fight wars and also national security planners responsible for training and equipping the services. Adding the post of CoSC meant service chiefs had to devote time to a third responsibilityrunning a tri-services coordination body.
A former service chief who was CoSC candidly admits how deeply flawed the two-hatted approach was. I could only devote around 30 per cent of my time to the CoSC, the rest was focused on my service, he says. This year, the ephemeral nature of the post is on full display. The baton of the chairman, CoSC, will change hands three times in seven months. On May 30, retiring navy chief Adm. Sunil Lanba passed it on to Air Chief Marshal B.S. Dhanoa. The air chief will hold the post for just three months before he retires, handing it over to army chief Gen. Rawat on August 30. The army chief will occupy the post for just four months before retiring on December 30.
Serious differences between how the services approached security threats saw the CoSC turn into a battleground for budgetary allocations. In 2012, the army overruled objections from the navy and air force to push its case for a new Mountain Strike Corpsthree divisions that would add over 90,000 soldiers to the army's bloating revenue budget.
In the past 17 years, there has been only one tri-services commandthe Andaman and Nicobar Commandwhich has elements of all three. It was being commanded by a three-star officer from each of the three services in rotation and was to have been a test-bed for what a future tri-services command would look like. However, in 2015, the navy, clearly unhappy with the experiment, reclaimed the command. The CDS appeared to have political backing in the Modi government's first term. Speaking at the 2015 india today conclave, then defence minister Manohar Parrikar said, Integration has to be there and the CDS is a must. How do you work it out? Give me some time and I will do it because three forces integration does not exist in the present structure.
In 2016, a Parrikar-appointed 11-member committee called the creation of a CDS the need of the hour. Headed by Lt Gen. D.B. Shekatkar, it also recommended doing away with the 17 different single-service commands. There would only be three joint theatre commands north, south and west each to be headed by a theatre commander, who would report directly to the CDS. The recommendations did not just worry the three services, it even frightened the defence ministry. The contentious partsCDS and theatre commands were shelved. The MoD accepted only the report's less controversial sections.
In 2017, the armed forces began taking the first steps towards jointmanship. Navy chief Lanba, the chairman, CoSC, brought on board Gen. Rawat and the IAF's Dhanoa. It was the first time the three chiefs had agreed on a common tri-service chief. The CoSC proposed a permanent chairman for the CoSC. This was a recommendation first made by the Naresh Chandra Committee in 2012, appointed to examine the implementation of the KRC and GoM reports. The CoSC did not recommend theatre commands where land, air and naval assets would be led by a single military commander.
This omission was deliberate, senior defence officials say. It was to allay the fears of the air force. The permanent chairman, the CoSC opined, would not head operational commands. He would, instead, devote all his attention to training, planning and running joint exercises. It had been pending with the government for over a year.
Agent of change
The August 15 CDS announcement will now set the government machinery moving. The CDS was always going to be a political calla decision imposed on militaries in the US, UK and France from the top down. Implementing this transformational reform will call for the same resolve Modi demonstrated in the past when he pushed for the national war memorial in New Delhi proposal hanging fire for nearly half a century overriding objections from heritage activists. Army chief Rawat and the IAF's Dhanoa are being seen as possible candidates for the post. But more than the candidate, it will be his role and responsibilities that the military and civilian authorities alike will scrutinise closely.
The MoD will set up a committee to define the CDS's mandate before a formal government notification is issued. It will be important to see what financial powers the new CDS will have. If he controls budgets and resource allocation, then he will be significantly more powerful than just another service chief.
A critical and contentious aspect will be whether the CDS commands troops on the ground, the theatre commands as recommended by the Shekatkar Committee. These integrated commands are being opposed by the navy and air force who fear the army's dominance. But without theatre commands, the CDS runs the risk of becoming a glorified CISC.
The government is yet to enunciate its thinking on the CDS appointment. It is fair to assume that it will borrow from the guidelines for the permanent CoSC chairman post recommended by the collegium of three chiefs the previous year. The chairman would be the single-point military advisor to the government, oversee training, budget and procurements and also head the Strategic Forces Command, which manages India's nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. He will also look after budget and procurements as well as head the three new tri-services institutions that have been set up nascent commands for Cyber, Space and Special Forces.
Anit Mukherjee, assistant professor in the South Asia programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore and a long-time tracker of India's defence reforms, feels the government will make the CDS head the IDS and use it as a fulcrum for defence policy. If that happens, it may not be such a bad thing. Except maybe the services need to make a joint staff experience necessary for upward mobility like what the Goldwater-Nichols Act did for the US army. In short, civilians will have to be more hands-on delineating the contours of defence policy-making instead of leaving the implementation of this decision entirely to the military, he says.
The 2001 GoM tasks the CDS with enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the planning process through intra- and inter-service prioritisation of acquisitions and projects. A 2017 study by then MoS defence Subhash Bhamre found that barely 10 per cent of 144 schemes for buying defence equipment contracted in the preceding three years fructified in the stipulated time of 18-25 months.
The average time taken by 133 of these schemes52 monthswas more than twice the stipulated period. It traced some of this delay to the lack of inter-service coordination. Individual services, the study found, did not do enough to streamline their requirements. Perspective plans of the services were individualistic and lacked the desired levels of integration. This service-specific approach strained the limited defence budget and, as a result, critical capability requirements could not be attained.
This bottleneck, the report states, could be cleared at the very beginning at what is called the pre-Acceptance of Necessity (AoN) stage if the HQ-IDS was given executive powers. The IDS, the organisation the CDS will head, could then evolve an integrated plan and accord inter-service prioritisation based on budgetary projections. The IDS could, for instance, take a call on what was more critical third aircraft carrier for the Indian Navy or 110 fighter jets for the IAFand allocate budgetary resources accordingly.
A key recommendation of the 2001 GoM report was for the CDS to ensure jointness'. Besides integration of the three services, the CDS has to propel the integration of the armed forces with the civilian bureaucracy. Shekatkar says integration or bringing the armed forces HQ into the MoD should be a major priority. To start with, you need to appoint lieutenant-generals as additional secretaries and major generals and equivalent as joint secretaries.
All this, however, will take years to fructify. The CDS is not a magician with a wand. Acceptability and evolution of the post will take time, there will be a transition period, says Lt Gen. Vinod Bhatia, head of the MoD tri-service think-tank, Centre for Joint Warfare Studies (CENJOWS).
Theaterisation of the commands, senior defence officials say, is the next logical step to make the CDS more effective. Without an integrated system and a CDS, combat power (consisting of men and materiel) accretions by individual services remain fiefdoms without the ability to use their awesome power as a single, war-fighting machine, says military analyst Brig. Xerxes Adrianwala (retd).
But integrating all the three services into one common war theatre' is a process that is several years down the line. It will involve extensive changes to the current command structure. The Southern Command, which has all three services present in strength, could be the first to be theaterised.
This will involve the creation of a joint HQ with common intelligence, communication, surveillance and air defence systems. Service chiefs will become force creators' and force providers' in charge of planning, training and managing defence budgets. An empowered CDS could then be just the silver bullet India's dysfunctional defence apparatus needs.
https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/...90902-enter-the-superchief-1590316-2019-08-23
