Rahul Bedi
New Delhi: Progress in instituting Integrated Theatre Commands (ITC) by the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan, to augment inter-service synergy, is reportedly stalled, principally over the knotty and lingering issue surrounding the overall operational control of the proposed formations.
According to recent media reports, citing official sources, the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) which General Chauhan heads, is also ‘re-evaluating’ its earlier plans of creating three ITCs – one each for the northern and western borders, in addition to an overarching maritime/peninsular command-and opting for ‘additional others’.
This latter provision is reportedly under consideration, primarily to ‘accommodate service interests’, a euphemism for senior service officers retaining their ranks, multiple privileges and perquisites which, other than existing exaggerated pomp and majesty, included exclusive use of aircraft and rotary assets by them.
But a cross-section of senior military veterans maintain that determining the overarching operational head of the ITCs remains the CDS’s principal challenge, before formally forwarding the architecture of these joint battle groups to the government, which was scheduled earlier for completion by 2022.
“While the proposed structure of the theatre commands seems to have been finalised, there are some important issues where greater deliberation is required,” declared military analyst, retired Lieutenant General H.S. Hooda in an analysis for the Delhi Policy Group think tank in August. The issue of how the command and control over the theatre commands will be exercised remains unclear, he added.
Other veterans, declining to be named, said that this ‘ticklish’ issue of operational control over the ITCs was posing ‘grave problems’, as it was collectively ‘hobbled’ by hierarchical inter and intra-service rivalries, conflicts of interest and personal ambitions. “Competing interests make it difficult to resolve this critical concern swiftly,” admitted a retired three-star Indian Navy (IN) officer, requesting anonymity. It requires deftness and all-round placate-ability within the military to be agreeably resolved, he added.
Matters at the outset had been complicated by dealing with the CDS, in accordance with the post’s founding charter in December 2019, out of this operational equation, despite him being India’s senior-most soldier. Under his terms of employment, the CDS is denied any military command, including over the three Service Chiefs, and his remit, amongst a host of myriad other responsibilities, including prioritising materiel procurements and force modernisation is, as the sole provider of ‘impartial (military) advice’ to the political leadership.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Army, BRO and ITBP personnel.
Media reports also indicated that the role of the three four-star single service chiefs in the re-organised ITC milieu, which had earlier been envisaged as one merely encompassing recruiting and training manpower and logistically supporting it, too was being re-assessed. This review, prompted no doubt by the individual chiefs themselves, miffed at being sidelined to a secondary role in the overhauled higher defence management setting, supposedly aims at providing them with some ‘compensatory’ operational role.
Some veterans argued that this would only further complicate the CDS’s task in finalising the ITCs, as conferring operational responsibilities upon these three service chiefs of staff in an exclusively multi-service environment, could end up not only impinging upon but also clashing with the battlefield authority of theatre commanders.
Alongside, the earlier proposal of having four-star ITC commanders – on par with the service chiefs – is also believed to have been shelved, as it was felt that such a move would, by default, have meant elevating the CDS to five-star or field marshal status. For now, however, it appears that the ITC commanders are likely to remain three-star officers, but independent – and yet not independent – of their senior in rank, four-star service chief counterparts.
Various ITC models have been under consideration over the past two decades; but amazingly none had been finalised to meet the 2022 deadline imposed on the first CDS General Bipin Rawat, who died in a helicopter accident in Tamil Nadu in December 2021. According to defence analyst Brigadier Rahul Bhonsle of the Security Risks Asia consultancy in New Delhi, all endeavours so far to formulate ITCs were an exercise in ‘reinventing the wheel’, leading only to recurring delays. Resistance from the services in this regard was also obvious in confirming the ITC’s unitary operational commander.
In August, parliament passed the Enabling Inter-Services Organisation (Command, Control & Discipline) Bill, 2023, which provided inter-services commanders with disciplinary and administrative powers over multi-service personnel serving under them. This, in turn, had smoothed the way for the DMA to conclude its task of formulating ITCs in their entirety which, so far, it has failed to vindicate. This Bill also empowers the government to create additional organisations as required, thereby providing the DMA a clean slate to operationally structure the ITCs.
Many veterans and analysts agreed that the projected ITC formations were ‘riddled with confusion and contradictions’ at multiple levels, indicating that such a major transformation guaranteed to completely alter the Indian military’s overall composition forever, had entailed little or no credible planning. This was despite the creation of two multi-service organisations in 2001 and 2007 for the specific purpose of fostering ‘jointness’ between the three armed forces once a CDS was appointed, which was in January 2020.
The first such recommendatory body was the Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff or HQ IDS, created in October 2001, following the recommendations of a ‘Group of Ministers’ after the 1999 Kargil war with Pakistan, with the responsibility of evolving the blueprint for tri-service cooperation, in addition to reforming numerous other inherent shortcomings to enhance operational efficiency.
Accordingly, the IDS was given charge of the country’s first two tri-service commands of which the Andaman and Nicobar Command or ANC was one to safeguard India’s strategic interests in the Indian Ocean Region, by creating the potential for rapid multi-service deployment. The other was the Strategic Forces Command or SFC, tasked with the ownership of India’s nuclear assets, deliverable by land-based mobile platforms and air and underwater assets.
The Group of Ministers had reasoned, at the time, that being a mixed organisation, staffed by service and civilian personnel, HQ IDS would be able to integrate policies and doctrines of the individual services into joint documents, but little had since emerged or been achieved. Furthermore, the IDS advanced its jointness agenda by promoting discourse on higher defence planning through the multi-service Centre for Joint Warfare Studies (CENJOWS) founded in 2007 which too had proved disappointing as did three other service-specific think tanks, founded by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
These included the Centre for Air Power Studies or CAPS which came up in 2001, followed by the Centre for Land Warfare Studies or CLAWS, created in 2004, while the National Maritime Foundation or NMF was the last to be inaugurated, in 2005. Additionally, the 60-year-old MoD-financed Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA) too does not seem to have provided a workable proposal for higher defence reforms, let alone ITCs.
In the meantime, several complex personnel and fiscal issues threaten the formation of ITCs, which have not received adequate, if any, attention.
These comprise the planned absorption into the ITCs of establishments like the Border Roads Organisation and the Indian Coast Guard, both managed presently by the MoD and Central Para Military Forces like the Border Security Force, Assam Rifles and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, which are run by the Ministry of Home Affairs. Integrating all these organisations, albeit partially, into the ITCs is not going to be without problems, as it will entail service, salary and retirement matters that invariably present grave obstacles in India’s litigious environment that take years to resolve and, in many instances, end up being financially depleting.
The other more critical issue and one that dominates discussions within the services and the DMA is of parity in status and seniority of military officers presently heading the 17 existing single service geographical and functional commands. These comprise seven each for the army and the Indian Air Force (IAF) and three for the Indian Navy (IN), all headed by a three-star officer. These 17 were in addition to the two tri-service commands mentioned earlier.
But with these 17 commands eventually being subsumed by three, four or even five ITCs, one immediate fallout will be the placation of around 13-14 three-star officers, who would be dispossessed of their elevated statuses. Additionally, some 10-odd Principal Staff Officers (PSOs) at all three Services Headquarters, three vice chiefs and the IDS head would also need to be ‘adjusted’ without losing their sheen and frills in the new ITC set-up, further engendering disaffection amongst senior military officers. Likewise, the numerous three-star Directorate heads at each service headquarters would also need to be similarly accommodated in this herculean ITC endeavour, albeit without rancour.
Retired Lt General Raj Shukla who headed the Indian Army’s Training Command in Shimla declared at a recent seminar organised by the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi in August that in the debate over the ITCs, the ‘services were behind the curve’. He also warned of ‘serious consequences’ from China if India got this ITC concept wrong. Former IN Chief Admiral Arun Prakash concurred, declaring in the same discussion that there was ‘myopia and parochialism’ within the armed forces over the ITCs, as the military was intrinsically opposed to reform.
According to the US theatre command model, on which the Indian ITC template is largely believed to be patterned, the chain of military command flows from the president to the secretary of defence and onto the theatre commanders and back. The latter were overseen by another four-star chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who, like India’s CDS, performed an advisory role to the US’s political leadership.
If nativised, this concept would incorporate ITC commanders reporting directly to defence minister Rajnath Singh who then, like the US defence secretary, would be the deciding operational authority, but obviously with no military or battleground experience, like the majority of his predecessors. To overcome this handicap, a former IN chief had recently even suggested appointing a defence minister with intimate knowledge of military affairs with multi-party consensus. But such a fantasy remains just that, as such reasoning could be extended to include the appointment profile of India’s entire federal cabinet.
Defence minister Rajnath Singh with CDS Anil Chauhan and Air Chief Marshal V.R. Chaudhari.
Conversely, the default option of revising the CDS’s charter and investing him with operational responsibility over the ITCs needed to be viewed with caution, warned Gen Hooda in his aforementioned analysis. “The political leadership,” he cautioned “must decide on how much authority they wish to invest in a single (military) appointment.” Such a decision, he added, would impact the nature of future civil-military relations and needed to be deliberated upon carefully. Gen Hooda’s caveat harks back to the early 2000s, when one of the principal arguments against appointing a CDS with operational authority was that it could have an ‘adverse’ outcome that was analogous to ‘military upsets’ that had occurred since Independence in India’s neighbourhood.
Meanwhile, other measures under consideration by the CDS that were delaying the ITCs’ formal announcement reportedly included the appointment of a vice CDS and deputy CDS to oversee assorted ‘verticals’ in military planning like intelligence gathering, procurements and joint training.
In conclusion, the onus of concluding the ITC model in its fullness, especially its operational command and control framework is exclusively dependant on the DMA and the forces and, for a change, not on the political leadership which has green-lighted the entire ITC project and awaits the outcome.
It is now up to the DMA and the CDS heading it to justify their averred inclusive military planning capabilities.
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