21st May 25
Armed clashes in 2020 between China’s military – the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) – and Indian Army units stationed in eastern Ladakh have destabilized India’s Himalayan borders with Pakistan and China. In the most recent provocation, the militaries of India and Pakistan, clashed this month after a Pakistan-based terrorist squad gunned down 26 tourists at Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir on April 22. As a consequence, large numbers of Indian troops are being moved into India’s most sensitive border state.
Meanwhile, in a slew of military-wide changes, New Delhi is reconfiguring its corps, divisions, warships and combat aircraft into “integrated theatre commands,” each of which will be self-contained with the weaponry, personnel and equipment needed to defend their respective areas of responsibility and to prosecute an offensive, where necessary.
This re-configuration is aimed at replacing the Indian military’s current 17 single-service commands with a smaller number of integrated theatre commands. The hazy outlines of the new operational structures are already discernible. There is expected to be a new “northern theatre command,” headed by an army lieutenant general, to handle the China threat from the north and northeast. On similar lines, a “western theatre command,” headed by an air marshal, will handle the Pakistan threat from the west and north-west. A separate “maritime theatre command” will be created under a navy admiral to defend peninsular India’s 7,500 km-long coastline and 12,500 km of island territories in the southwest and southeast. Meanwhile, a tri-service “strategic forces command” (SFC) will oversee and operate India’s nuclear deterrent force. In addition, purpose-built commands, such as the “cyberspace command,” will take on roles that become apparent.
However much the three services attempt to ensure the equitable distribution of assets, there will inevitably be gainers and losers. Amongst the biggest gainers will be the 83,000-strong navy, today the smallest of the three services, but which will be ramped up into a “maritime theatre command” (MTC) with 300,000 –500,000 personnel. In internal naval strategy discussions, several admirals have proposed asking for two separate maritime theatre commands, one each for the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. But this costly proposal was eventually shelved with cooler heads, like that of former naval chief, Admiral Sunil Lamba, arguing that this inflated demand would only lead to other services demanding multiple commands too.
Many of the proposals being discussed are aimed at assuaging individual services’ apprehensions about power and turf. The enormous, 1.3 million-strong army’s size and budget would be significantly reduced with control of the Indian peninsula, where many of the army’s training schools and establishments are located, passing to the navy. Even so, the army, still the biggest part of the military, would continue to oversee the Sino-Indian border – the country’s primary threat. Finally, the air force, which has always placed great emphasis on operating as a coherent whole, would achieve that aim by getting control of the “western theatre command.”
Placing the “northern theatre command” under the leadership of a commander from the army will make logical sense, since it would bring India’s primary military threat—China—under India’s most potent military force, the Army.
For decades, Pakistan’s military leadership has complained about the deployment pattern of the Indian military being aggressively oriented towards Pakistan, giving the lie to New Delhi’s assertion that China and the PLA were actually Enemy No.1.
For decades, the Indian military’s “order of battle” (orbat)—the formations and units it lines up for battle—has allocated a disproportionately large share of the country’s military units to the Pakistan front, rather than the more apparent enemy, China.
The numbers support Pakistan’s anxiety. Until 2007, India faced-off against China in Ladakh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh with about 11 mountain divisions. These added up to about 165,000 troops, assuming there are 15,000 soldiers in each division.
Meanwhile, the India-Pakistan border—running from Kashmir, Jammu, Punjab, Rajasthan to Gujarat—was defended by 25 Indian divisions. These amount to 375,000 Indian troops, again assuming there are 15,000 troops in each division.
Before 2007, the Indian troops arrayed against Pakistan were even heavier and more powerful than these numbers suggest, since they included three strike corps, each with an armored division on its “orbat.” A back-of-the-envelope calculation reveals that, leaving aside headquarters, training establishments and troops engaged in logistics and administration functions, China-facing elements in Ladakh and Eastern Command added up to about 30 percent of India’s combat strength, while Pakistan-facing troops added up to almost 70 percent of India’s fighting force.
Starting from 2007, the Eastern Command was allocated two more mountain infantry divisions for strengthening its defensive capability, bringing its total personnel strength to about 195,000 troops. In addition, one of India’s three strike corps, including the two infantry divisions under its command, underwent a role change from desert to mountain strike. This raised the China-focused elements by 60,000 soldiers to 2,25,000.
All this was long overdue. For more than half a century after independence in 1947, civil-military relations were the subject of a desultory debate. After the Kargil conflict in 1999, a number of experts, including the Kargil Review Committee of 1999, the Group of Ministers (GoM) Report of 2001, the Task Force on National Security in 2012 (also known as the Naresh Chandra Committee) and the Shekatkar Committee in 2016 examined and made recommendations on the inter-se advantages of creating the post of a tri-service commander—whether a five-star “chief of defense staff” (CDS) or a four-star “permanent chairman chiefs of staff committee” (PC-COSC). The Naresh Chandra Committee recommended the latter; a decision which would keep civilian (read bureaucratic) control in place.
However, it was only in 2019, after the National Democratic Alliance was re-elected to power, that Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced his decision to appoint a CDS. In his Independence Day speech, he said: “India should not have a fragmented approach. Our entire military power will have to work in unison and move forward. All the three (services) should move simultaneously at the same pace… After formation of this post (CDS), all the three forces will get effective leadership at the top level."
Four months later, the Union Cabinet formally approved the creation of a CDS—a four-star general who would be the equivalent in rank, salary and perquisites to the three service chiefs. The appointment of CDS came with two major changes. First, the CDS would head a new organization called the Department of Military Affairs (DMA). This organization would function within the Ministry of Defense (MoD) and deal with significant matters relating to the army, navy and air force. This would serve to address a longstanding grouse of the three services, which was that the military had no status within the government. All issues relating to the military were dealt with by the MoD. Now the DMA, headed by the secretary-ranked CDS, would provide a voice to the services.
Almost five years later, the three services have still not fully understood that joint/theatre commands are not a discussion point; they are the Prime Minister’s diktat on a military reform measure that is in line with what armed forces around the world have implemented. The CDS must forward his proposals, as mandated, to the government at the soonest, so that the all-important recommendations on higher defense management can be finally implemented.
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