The uncertain science of military planning

Horses for courses” is a late 19th-century British idiom of the racetracks. Horses that prove winners, say on boggy ground, may not be as good on hard surfaces. The idiom applies to military planning as well but it brings with it enormous difficulties and intangibles. Unlike a horse, military planning does not come readymade as an organic whole. The whole point and pain of planning are to make it so. All countries face problems planning for future wars and low-intensity conflicts. India is not immune from this just as its victims include the United States, the world’s sole superpower, and Israel, the leading military state of the Middle East.

Since the beginning of

2019, the press has reported conceptual rethinking of India’s military force structure. The Army Chief at the time and the current Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen. Bipin Rawat, advocated the concept of integrated battle groups (IBGs). In the evolution of the concept over the following months, it grew from a battalion force to a brigade combining all fighting arms. The aim was to deploy IBGs quasi-independently on the Pakistan and China fronts in the beginning and gradually transform the Army’s strike and holding corps into networked IBGs for conventional war purposes. Since Gen. Rawat’s promotion as CDS, IBGs have dropped out of the headlines.

Meanwhile, the new Army Chief, Gen. Mukund Naravane, has observed that tanks and fighter aircraft are “outdated” in the modern era. “Icons of 20th-century warfare like large main battle tanks and fighter aircraft are on their way out,” he said addressing a military think tank. Since Gen. Rawat’s IBGs are to have tanks supported by air, it’s not clear how that meshes with the Army Chief’s thoughts which are, independently, quite valid. If you add to that the Indian Air Force’s insistence on full squadrons of fighter planes with the 36 Rafales forming the cherry on the cake, things start to look a bit ragged.

It doesn’t end there. Gen. Naravane believes the future foretells more events like the Houthi/ Iranian drone-missile strike on Aramco facilities and the Balakot attack. Saudi oil production plunged by more than half after the September 2019 strike while the only verifiable outcome of Balakot is a lost plane and a captured pilot. But the point is taken. The Army Chief seems to suggest conventional wars may be a thing of the past while the IBG concept and the IAF leadership would appear to be stuck in it. Conceptual clarifications may not be out of order here.

However, clarity in concepts flows from clear first principles. To that must be applied the idiom, horses for courses. For example, how does India define future threats? What is the nature of its standalone threats from Pakistan and China and how do they transform in a situation of collusion between them? How does the internal security situation impinge on external threats? Who are the country’s foreign friends and adversaries? How much stake has the existing world order in the status quo in the region and what will it do to preserve it? What is the level of threat that contesting ideologies pose? What is the correlation of future threats with the decline of the Indian economy and nearly stagnant defence expenditures where a bulk is spent on salaries and pensions at the cost of force modernisation and upgrade?

Almost no country has got answers to similar or possibly slightly different questions exactly right. Often not raising questions and demanding adequate answers result in botched war results. In 1967 in Sinai, Israeli tank forces seemed to be invested ironically with the ghostly powers of the Wehrmacht armour great, Heinz Guderian. In the Yom Kippur War six years later, anti-tank weapons proved the nemesis of Israel. In 2006 against the Hezbollah in Lebanon, history was repeated. It was more than anti-tank weapons in 2006 though. By focussing on the Hamas insurgency, Israel’s tank warfare skills had deteriorated when it took on the Hezbollah, which was both insurgent and a conventional warfighter. Israel faced two war variants on two fronts and failed in foresight, planning and improvisation.

As a superpower, the United States has also barely muddled through. After the first Gulf and Kosovo wars, it realised the need to model an intermediate force between the heavy strategic and light tactical ones. One took inordinately long to deploy with armour, artillery and so forth though perfectly suited for conventional wars, which were expected less and less likely to occur. The other could be quickly gotten into battle but had limited staying power. That intermediate force took the name of Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs) centred on Stryker all-purpose fighting vehicles which were supposed inter alia to make up for the absence of 70-ton tanks in rapid deployments. Although an interim plan, its full evolution with so-called future combat systems has suffered a setback not least because the US remains unconvinced of large conventional wars despite a resurgent Russia and an expansionist China. There are similarities between BCTs and the Indian IBGs but their contexts are different which raise their own perplexing questions. It is about horses for courses again.

BCTs are purposed for easy foreign deployments. They have seen action in Iraq and Afghanistan and are present in Korea although their principal briefs are counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Are the same roles envisaged for IBGs? From Gen. Rawat’s viewpoint, the role would cover conventional war because IBGs include tanks. His successor, Gen. Naravane, thinks tanks and even fighter planes are outdated. He also seems to be writing the obituary for conventional wars. Where does all this leave Indian military planning? There is no doubt that Gen. Naravane is right. But India still needs a plan. The first requirement of a plan is determination of the course. The course in this instance means determining the country’s future threats and answering the related questions raised in the foregoing. Choosing the horse for the course comes later.

The first requirement of a plan is determination of the course. The course in this instance means determining the country’s future threats and answering the related questions.

N.V. Subramanian is a writer, journalist and analyst