View From the Sky

Air Marshal G.S. Bedi (retd)

It’s the silver jubilee year of the Kargil conflict and lot of water has flown through Jhelum since then. There have been insightful interventions, both educating and impressive, to bring out just about everything perceivable related to the conflict. Be it intelligence issues, tactical wisdom, inter service cooperation, role of air power and so on, more than enough has been documented, discussed, analysed and dissected.

While no discussion or analysis is really enough in learning about warfare, repetitive recall of statistics and the obvious tends to become boring. Having taken active part in the conflict, the endeavour here is to reflect on certain personal memories and thoughts that shaped the events during the conflict and had significant influence on the outcomes—in my opinion. The whole account is presented in first person and spares the reader any statistical data, hence is devoid of any references too.

The silver jubilee of Kargil is being celebrated, and rightly so because it was a hard win. All is well that ends well, and of course beyond any doubt it ended well. However, invariably in the euphoria of celebrating the end state, what gets ignored or overshadowed is how it all began. More often than not, pertinent lessons lie more so in how it all began than how it ended. So, to begin with, let’s see here how it all began.

The Story

It was a normal day in the month of May 1999 in Srinagar where I was posted as the Flight Commander of the resident 51 Squadron. Sometime in the afternoon, the Chief Operations Officer (COO) of the base called the squadron to Base Operations Centre for a briefing where the Colonel (General Staff) from the 15 Corps was present with maps rolled in a bundle to tell us something. He began by saying that there were reports of some intrusions in one of the sectors and while it would take a few days to clear them off, the squadron should standby for air support if necessary. There was no panic or concern in his voice, not that he was hiding it or putting up a show but because, as it became clear later, the extent of intrusions had actually not dawned on anyone yet. The Colonel left and so did we to get on with the next flying detail. It was business as usual. Very soon the reality started to show and when the action began it sucked everything around like a whirlwind.

Srinagar and its satellite base Awantipore became the major launch bases owing to their proximity to the area of action and 15 Corps was responsible for operations. The first hurdle was to identify the peaks where the intruders had dug in. The Ground Liaison Officer put in lot of hard work in conjunction with the staff at Corps and briefed the pilots on various peaks of interest, mostly naming them by their trigonometric heights above sea leve