New Threats, Old Mindset

Ghazala Wahab

The year 2020 has been difficult for everyone. But for the Indian Army it has been a rude awakening. Decades of grappling with semi-trained terrorists driven by a desire to embrace death, had lulled it into a somnolent belief that the only war it would be required to fight was this. Over the last decade, most of its intellectual capital was expended on upcycling these counter insurgency/ counter terrorist operations in the belief that a rose by another name would cease to be a rose. Hence, basic CI/CT morphed into low intensity conflict operations (LICO) or no war no peace, asymmetric warfare and now hybrid war.

Occasionally, the spectre of a two-front war was raised in seminars, research papers and table-top exercises. But the fact that no serious effort was ever made to factor that in doctrinally, which would have paved the ground for preparedness, showed that even the army never