All ‘Chiefs’ and no ‘Indians’!

Adm. Arun Prakash (Retd)

“In a strongly worded letter to the Raksha Mantri, the Army Chief has stressed that the Navy and IAF were unfairly trying to usurp more posts than they deserved. If the government accepts their unjust demands, the Navy and IAF will wield more influence than what is desirable in military matters.”
Times of India, 17 September 2007

It was disconcerting to read in the press, accounts of a disagreement between the three Services, over competing claims for additional vacancies at senior ranks; some sections of the media going so far as to term it as a ‘war’ between the Services. India’s gallant armed forces surely have enough challenges to face on land, sea and in the air, and the last thing they need is, to fight each other. In the context of the recent controversy, it was therefore most reassuring to hear the Raksha Mantri telling the media that there was no ‘infighting’ and that each Service was only ‘presenting its case’.

However, it would have far better, had the Service Chiefs resolved their mutual differences behind the teak doors of the Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) room, and presented a joint case; not to the media or bureaucracy, as has happened recently, but to the government of India (GoI). This would have occurred naturally, had a genuine spirit of Jointness actually prevailed in the COSC. But each Service Chief is hostage to the demands emanating from within his Service, and sometime tends to heed the loudest, and not the most reasonable counsel from his Principal Staff Officers (PSOs). This is a world-wide phenomenon, and not something unique to India.

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It does not help that we are stuck with an archaic system of Higher Defence Management which often rotates the Chairman COSC at absurdly rapid intervals (the current incumbent is the 4th successive Chairman in the past 12 months). Nor has he been adequately empowered to ensure that cogent decisions (unanimous or otherwise) emanate from the Committee. So, this is yet one more reminder to the nation and the GoI that if they do not wish to witness spectacles of inter-Service squabbling, a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) must be put in place.

If a CDS is not considered acceptable at this juncture for political or other reasons, even the appointment of a ‘full-time’ Chairman COSC, with a fixed tenure, would overcome many critical shortcomings in our existing higher defence framework. Such a functionary could then take a holistic and objective view of issues, and provide badly needed professional advice to the GoI on most military matters, especially those cutting across Service lines.

Knowing that some sections of the Indian media suffer from a deficit of comprehension as well as empathy where the country’s armed forces are concerned, I am not sure about the veracity of the news item displayed above. But true or not, it is bound to have created misgivings within the Services fraternity as well as amongst concerned civilians, and there is a need to set the record straight.

The original purpose of forming the Ajai Vikram Singh Committee (or AVSC as it has come to be known), was to find a way to ensure that officers placed in command of the Indian Army’s basic combat units, were in a younger age bracket. Over the years, a number of factors had combined to push the age of battalion and brigade commanders to an average which compared unfavourably with their counterparts in other armies; and it was felt that as a result their physical and mental dexterity may be severely tested under fire.

The Navy and IAF did not have a similar difficulty, and initially these two Services believed that the Army would be able to resolve its problem by making necessary changes in personnel management and promotion policies. However, a degree of unease began to be felt in NHQ and Vayu Bhavan, because the army had, just a few years earlier, departed from a pre-Independence Indian Army tradition, and upgraded battalion commanders from the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel to full Colonel (which was till then not so much a rank, as an appointment). The simplest way of reducing the ages of both battalion and brigade commanders would have been to revert to the old rank structure, but it became evident that the favoured route was to seek more vacancies in the latter rank.

‘Selection and maintenance of aim’ is a cardinal principle of war, but somebody, somewhere seems to have lost the thread, and the aim got shifted from ‘reduction in age of battalion commanders’ to the more am