Pravin Sawhney

The clamour for creation of two joint theatre commands – western theatre command for Pakistan and eastern theatre command for China – for better war-fighting has grown loud with senior serving military officers and, importantly, defence analysts (Business Standard, 14 July 2018) having jumped into the fray.

Attendees at the Unified Commanders Conference

The Indian Air Force (IAF) is seen as the villain of the piece with the army and the navy in favour of the new structural reform for optimal war results. The IAF believes that given its limited assets, enormous flexibility inherent in aircraft, and that the military is for defence of the nation and not for out-of-area operations, expensive assets should remain centralised and not distributed to theatre commands. Cognisant of this internal bickering, defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman has taken a clever position by saying that while she liked the idea of joint theatre commands, she prefers a ‘bottom-up’ rather than a ‘top-down’ approach.

The basic argument of the army and navy is that the Indian military (three services) today have a total of 19 different commands which are neither co-located nor co-purposed. Since speed (in decision-making, allocation of resources and flexible operations) would be the essence in modern war, it is important that there should be only two commanders, one for each joint c