@Oscar
I agree with you wholeheartedly on your assessment of the use that we have made on the sub-continent of our bulging professional talent, not only in the NCO cadres, but also in the JCO cadres.
A young friend of mine, ex-PAF, recounts that at an unnamed Pakistani air base, he saw a USAF Sergeant take control of a flight of war-planes (he refused to specify what they were, but they had flown in from Afghanistan), and handle the ordnance load, checking and calibrating it, then dealing with the aircraft themselves and sending them through a pretty elaborate procedure, without a single officer intervening. As you might imagine, he found it unsettling and asked a Major posted at the base about it. The Major was not very sure what the question was, since the Sergeant was certified to do what he was doing, what was the problem? What supervision did my friend think was required? A little later, he asked the Sergeant himself, and got more or less the same answer: since he was certified, why would he need supervision?
Of course, this was a very technical task, and the man was acting in his technical capacity. But my friend's observation of the USAF was that a huge amount of work got done by the men themselves, with minimal or no 'supervision' by the officers. Our own forces overdo the supervision, if at all it can be called supervision. It usually calls for a brief interaction, on the lines of "Jemadar Sahib, sab kuchh thik thak hai?" "Jee, Sir, sab kuchh thik chal raha hai." "Oh, very well, carry on then." (I must remember they are Naib Subedars now, possibly because of the ambiguity of the social context of the original rank). Given the possibility of training our jawans to western standards of autonomy and independence of action, we might turn out to be mildly over-staffed, and with a little streamlining at field level positions, we might be able to avoid the carnage at the levels of full colonels and brigadiers (I don't know how it is in the Pakistani Army, but in the Indian Army, full colonels have become active roles, and people no longer get promoted direct to Brigadier).
That was a good intervention, as usual, Oscar, and most obliged for the same.
