Battle Hardened

Pravin Sawhney

The Land Warfare Doctrine-2018 released on December 19 by the Indian Army is a disappointing document. Its biggest drawback is that its drafters have read the wrong literature on warfare. Instead of lifting ideas from the American literature, they should have drawn upon China’s 2015 military reforms. To be sure, China is India’s bigger military threat. Had the Indian Army studied that closely, it would have identified its threats correctly. And, it would have felt embarrassed declaring that: ‘The Indian Army shall be the primary instrument of the overall deterrence capability of the nation.’

Indian Army tanks during Army Day parade

The military threat from China comes from its overall joint-ness at the strategic (policy-making) and warfighting (operational) levels. Joint-ness at the strategic level (which involves the Central Military Commission headed by the commander-in-chief, Xi Jinping) helps in strengthening political will since the topmost commander understands the war escalation ladder — from crisis to battles to war to seamless transition from conventional to nuclear domains. Or, the spectrum between credible deterrence and military coercion.

Without a robust political will, chances of a nation succumbing to military coercion increase exponentially. The case in point is April 2018 Wuhan informal summit, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought peace with President Xi Jinping subsequent to the June-August 2017 Doklam crisis. Once the People’s Liberation Army’s military build-up in its Western Theatre Command (WTC) facing India in the winter of 2017-2018 became apparent, Modi lost his nerve and hurriedly sought peace with China. His spin-doctors though softened the impact of national humiliation by calling it the reset strategy. The reality was that India, for the first time since Independence, had capitulated to military coercion. China won without firing a shot.

People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA’s) threat at the warfighting level comes from the joint-ness of its forces-in-being in the WTC combined with the capabilities (kinetic and non-kinetic) that can be brought to bear on India. The PLA’s impressive non-kinetic capability has been amalgamated under the newly-created Strategic Support Force (SSF). The SSF, comprising space, cyber, electronic, psychological and other technical capabilities, has two tasks: to support joint operations and to independently paralyse and sabotage enemy’s command, control, communication, computer and intelligence systems.

The PLA’s kinetic capabilities include its army, air force and navy domains, reinforced by precision long-range cruise and