Interview | Col David O. Smith (retd), USAF and author The Wellington Experience

Your book The Wellington Experience has generated a lot of discussion in India, especially amongst the Indian Army officers. How much of this did you expect? Did any part of the reaction take you by surprise?

I am not at all surprised that the book generated discussion—and probably a lot of criticism—from Indian Army officers; I fully expected it. To provide a bit of context, in October 2018, I made presentations on my then newly-published book about the Pakistan Army, The Quetta Experience, to several think tanks in New Delhi. Not surprisingly, because the book was critical of the Command and Staff College and the Pakistan Army, the presentations were well received.

I was more surprised, however, when several senior retired military officers suggested I do a similar book about the Indian Army, surely knowing that because Wellington and Quetta share the same origin and use the same pedagogy that the criticisms levied on the Pakistani system would likely also apply to India. Accordingly, last June the Stimson Centre arranged for me to make a virtual presentation of selected key findings in The Wellington Experience to a small group of top-flight Indian academics and retired senior military officers. Again, not surprisingly, this presentation received mixed reactions—a few that were negative, but many others that were positive.

The areas of agreement, or at least those that resulted in no significant pushback during the event, included my criticism of the lack of ‘jointness’ in the Indian armed forces; the Defence Services Staff College’s (DSSC’s) curriculum, pedagogy, and organisational culture; attitudes about Pakistan, China, and civil-military relations; and the lack of preparedness of the Indian Army to operate in a nuclear environment. Two areas of pushback were that my findings about the Indian Army ignore its own counterinsurgency doctrine in Jammu and Kashmir and is involved in the extra-judicial killing of militants, and that my findings in the nuclear area reflected a basic lack of understanding about India’s deterrence doctrine. I carefully reviewed those sections of the book but did not make any change to the findings.

The most significant pushback came from an offhand comment I made that the Indian Army had not engaged in high intensity combat since 1971, an observation that can also be applied to the Pakistan Army, as well as to China since 1979. In response, a senior retired officer tartly declared that the Indian Army had been facing bullets in Jammu and Kashmir for more than 30 years. Since this was clearly an emotive issue, I took care to clarify a comment in the book and wish to do it here as well. What I mean by intensity combat is large-scale manoeuvre warfare against a similarly organised and equipped, competent foe that requires the application of combined arms operations by ground forces, systematic cooperation between at least one other service, and sustained logistics operations—the kind of warfare the Indian Army will face in a future war with Pakistan or China. I continue to believe my definition does not include counterinsurgency operations or incidents along the Line of Control (LC) in which the forces of both sides are, for the most part, safely protected in bunkers during the brief periods of small arms, machine gun, mortar, and ar