Join the dots

Currently, despite claims that they believe in jointness, the army, navy and air force plan their own battles and implement them on the basis of their own priority.

It is not surprising that the Ministry of Defence has opposed the idea of creating the post of a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS). No higher defence organisation in the world has voluntarily reformed itself. In almost all instances, the reform process has required political intervention, and in the case of the US, an act of Congress. Not surprisingly, the arguments that have been put forward by the MoD are spurious -- primarily, that it will have an adverse impact on the individual skills of the army, navy and the air force. It is true that each country in the world has to decide the kind of defence organisation it wants. But, at the same time, technology and the demands of warfare impose global trends that cannot be avoided. For example, you cannot use chariots in the era of horse mounted cavalry.

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The need for a CDS, as outlined by the Group of Ministers’ report in 2003, was triggered not only by the need to fuse the Indian armed forces to fight as one unit, but to manage and control India’s strategic forces armed with nuclear weapons. Currently, despite claims that they believe in jointness, the army, navy and air force plan their own battles and implement them on the basis of their own priority, as was apparent in the unfortunate case of Kargil in 1999. The result is that India has forces that lack the combat capacity to take on even the much smaller Pakistani armed forces. Since the country is unlikely to shell out more money, the only way out for the armed forces to enhance their combat power is integration.