Opinion Generally speaking

The present criticism of the views of General Kapoor highlights the need for early establishment of a National Defence University and imbuing our senior service officers with adequate diplomatic skills besides their military ones. In the present day globalised world professional soldiers also need to be diplomats when they deal with international situations. General Kapoor is due to retire in the next few months. In a democracy like ours he is entitled to have his views and also express them at professional seminars,provided he makes it clear they are his personal views. Surely the Indian audience at the seminar would have interpreted them in that way. Perhaps his personal caveats were not reported in the media. It would be a pity if because of embarrassment caused there are attempts by politicians and the civil bureaucracy to stifle such frank expression of opinions in professional debates and seminars.

As the American strategist Bernard Brodie pointed out,in the earlier periods the role of the armed forces was to win a war after diplomacy failed and in the nuclear age their role is to prevent a war from breaking out. It can perhaps be argued that by talking about India getting prepared for a two-front war the purpose was to discourage the two anti-status quo neighbours who have committed aggression against India in the past. Professionally,Indian armed forces officers have a duty to anticipate such adventures by our potential adversaries in future and plan to forestall them. It would be justified to think about such a contingency since this country was threatened with such a possibility in 1965 and in 1971. However the international situation has radically changed with the end of the Cold War. Most strategic opinion today discounts the possibility of a war among major powers with nuclear weapons. Pakistan tested out the old Maxwell Taylor thesis of salami slicing in Kargil and had to withdraw when it met with an effective flexible response.

Today the main threat is that of terrorism,the sub-conventional asymmetric war behind the shield of nuclear deterrence. Some Indian strategists are trying to follow the Brodie maxim of formulating a strategy to prevent state-sponsored terrorist aggression by threatening a cold start or limited war under a nuclear overhang to punish such terrorist aggression. They are also influenced by the fact that China armed Pakistan with nuclear weapons and missiles and continues to provide the bulk of its conventional arsenal. However the term “two-front war” reminds people of the superpower idiom of the Cold War era. Irrespective of the proliferation relationship between China and Pakistan and the former using the latter as a surrogate,the nature of the security problem this country faces in respect of each country is different. As a status-quo power India is interested in forestalling threats as they arise and cannot be planning for any pre-emptive moves. In such circumstances what should be planned for is exercise of deterrence and dissuasion in each case using the most modern technology available. How realistic are scenarios of wars for even a week or two in the present international strategic environment? If deterrence and dissuasion fail,will a limited war or a cold start army operation be the first logical steps or are there other possible alternatives? These have to be thought through in interdisciplinary fora which include all the three services,the foreign service and intelligence services. Since the nature of the threat and conflict on the two fronts are vastly different the choice of the term “two-front war” appears to be inappropriate.

While stressing particular strategic responses may be deemed part of the exercise of nuclear deterrence,if it is done by the political leadership at appropriate levels surely nations do not emphasise particular strategic and tactical responses in terms of contingency planning in conventional operations and make a doctrine out of it. The adversary is best left in uncertainty while attempting to assess one’s own response. Part of the Indian problem,both in the diplomatic and military fields,is the absence of a national intelligence assessment of potential adversaries. So,each service,agency and ministry makes its own assessment and attempts to formulate its own plans on that basis. That invariably results in linear extrapolation of the past behaviour pattern of the adversaries,overlooking the possible discontinuities and innovations in their behaviour. It has been said often that people tend to prepare for the last war and not for the next conflict.

The country needs more such debates. India should cultivate the healthy practice of officers coming out with the caveat that the views expressed are personal and not those of the service or the government. If the Pakistanis and the Chinese confuse the views of senior Indian officers expressed in seminars as policies of the government,let them be confused more and more. No harm done from the point of view of our national interest or security.

The writer is a senior defence analyst

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