On the Move

(Force) : Army’s force modernisation plans designed to make pro-active warfighting strategy a reality
Since late 2002, post OP Parakram (the 10-month eyeball-to-eyeball standoff with Pakistan starting December 2001), Indian Army HQ, has been in the process of conceptualising its future warfighting doctrines. It has also been working on the strategies and tactics required for waging ‘hyperwar’ or multi-dimensional parallel warfare — the optimum pro-active warfighting strategy (mistakenly referred to as the non-existent Cold Start Doctrine by both Indian and foreign think-tanks) that is designed to both reduce the mobilisation time of its offensive formations and their break-out into Pakistan (within a 72-hour period) in a series of shallow thrusts going no deeper than 30km into enemy territory. This is meant to ameliorate the Indian Army’s disadvantage of longer external lines of communications as compared with the Pakistan Army’s advantage of deploying and switching its warfighting formations along interior lines of communications. Given the fact that the next round of all-out war between the two countries will be short, swift and intense, the 1.13 million-strong Indian Army believes that instead of making multiple Corps-level thrusts deep into enemy territory, the objective should be to force the Pakistan Army to commit its operational reserves into battle at the very early stages of the war. Following which, the Indian Army would employ superior operational art backed up by network-centric war-waging technologies to envelop and overwhelm the hostile forces by waging effects-based ‘parallel’ or ‘hyper’ war, thereby destroying the enemy’s war-waging assets in detail.

However, several questions remain unanswered till today. For instance, what will be the usefulness of the three armour-heavy offensive Strike Corps and the Armoured Battle Groups, depending on the theatre of war? Should the three existing Strike Corps be placed under a new Strategic Command? What will be the quantum of close air support and battlespace air interdiction provided by the Indian Air Force (IAF) to compensate for the army’s inferiority in field artillery within the first 72 hours of hostilities breaking out, considering that early in the war the IAF’s air campaigns will be monopolised by air superiority and counter-base sorties? Will China activate a second front against India and if so, then how much and in what ways will Beijing militarily support Pakistan? Will this prevent the Indian Army from re-deploying a few of its existing Mountain Divisions from the Sino-Indian border to the western front? 
Despite these still-unanswered questions, the Indian Army has set in motion several force modernisation programmes that are designed to make the pro-active warfighting strategy a reality — such as those involving new-generation force multipliers like 155mm/52-cal field artillery assets, battlefield utility and light observation helicopters, battlespace management system (BMS), F-INSAS and the tactical communications system (TCS), although they all are still years away from deployment. In addition, the integral offensive firepower of all existing warfighting formations is being increased exponentially through the large-scale induction of medium altitude long endurance UAVs like the Heron and Searcher 2, anti-armour guided-missiles like the 9M133 Kornet-E, Milan-2T and FGM-148 Javelin, all-terrain wheeled armoured recce vehicles, plus batteries of the 214mm Pinaka and 300mm 9K58 Smerch-M multi-barrel rocket launchers, and 290km-range BrahMos Block 2/3 supersonic land attack cruise missiles. Going hand in hand with such projects are efforts by the army to raise an extra two infantry divisions to add to the two already raised since June 2008 (these being the 41 Mountain Division in Binaguri, West Bengal, and 56 Mountain 56th Mountain Division headquartered at Zakhama, Nagaland, during the 11th Defence Plan (2007-2012), each of which was raised at a cost of Rs7 billion. This will be followed by a new Corps (to be headquartered in Panagarh in West Bengal), including its two new infantry divisions, being raised during the 12th Defence Plan (2012-2017).

By Prasun K. Sengupta