The latest report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on defence makes for very disturbing reading. According to the report, nearly 70 per cent of the equipment in possession of the Army can be categorised as "vintage". Normally, this should not be more than 33 per cent. The state-of-the-art equipment which should be also 33 per cent is only around 8 per cent.

The report reveals the scandalous financial strangulation of the armed forces by successive governments that has not only affected the modernisation of the armed forces but worse, affected defence preparedness of the country.

The situation is fast reaching a point where, forget about initiating any action against the enemy, India will find itself hard-pressed to even defend itself against any adventurism by the enemy. While India might still be a little ahead of the curve when it comes to Pakistan, it is falling alarmingly behind the curve both qualitatively and quantitatively when it comes to China.

Dismal state

None of this should really surprise us. Successive army chiefs, just before demitting office, have written to the prime ministers apprising them of the deficiencies faced by the army. Normally this communication is secret but every once in a while it gets leaked.

For example, in 2012, just before retirement, Gen VK Singh wrote a letter to Manmohan Singh informing him of the dismal state of affairs in the army – almost obsolete air defence, serious ammunition shortages for tanks, ill-equipped infantry and Special Forces lacking essential equipment.

That this was the state of affairs more than a decade after the Kargil War, which in the words of the then army chief Gen VP Malik, the army fought “with what we have” speaks volumes for the commitment of the political and bureaucratic class to the defence of the country.

And yet, it is almost as though no one cares. While all political parties are quick off the blocks when it comes to flag-waving, none of them are ready to devote the resources required to keep the flag flying.

Every finance minister parrots a standard line: “constraints will not come in the way of providing any additional requirement for the security of the nation”. Clearly, this is nothing but a tacit acknowledgment that the defence forces have been denied the resources they require to secure India.

The bottom line is that to prevent a war you have to prepare for one, but that has to happen before and not after a war starts. India, however, has made it a habit to provision its forces after a shooting match starts. This happened not just at the time of the Kargil war but also in 2017 after the situation on both the western and eastern borders became very tense around the time of the Doklam crisis and the army went in for emergency purchases of ammunition, stores and spares.

For some strange reason, despite the experience of 1962, 1965 and Kargil, it appears that the Indian policy makers are unable to comprehend that wars don’t always come after giving adequate notice. Perhaps, Indian defence planners and policymakers prefer to live in denial.

Closing gap

The result is that over the last decade Pakistan is steadily closing the gap with India, while China is exponentially increasing the gap with India. Many people in India take umbrage over questions being raised or exposure being made of gaps in India’s defence preparedness.

But silence doesn’t solve the problem. The morale of the troops suffers less from revelations about the glaring gaps in readiness and more from the failure to fill these gaps. It now appears that even the Army Chief, who in June last had claimed that “Indian Army is fully ready for a two and a half front war”, has since then backtracked and started saying that India needs to be prepared for a two-front war.

There is, however, a world of a difference between being fully ready and the need to be ready. While the former is needless grandstanding, best avoided if you are going to fight on empty, the latter is unexceptionable because the strategic environment that is developing around India doesn’t rule out a two front situation, for which India needs to prepare, yesterday and not tomorrow.

Political morass

But India will never be able to meet the challenge of an external two-front war until it is first victorious against the domestic one-front – the moribund defence bureaucracy that is more interested in bean-counting, mindless hairsplitting and a politico-bureaucratic decision-making process in which everything but decisions are made, and when made, either not implemented or else implemented after years, even decades. There is, at the same time, a crying need for reform in the defence forces also, not just in terms of force structures, but also operational doctrines, tactics and strategies.

While no defence force in the world ever gets everything it wants, or even needs, there is hardly a defence force of any major country in the world that suffers from the debilitating bureaucratic and political morass faced by the Indian armed forces. Therefore, until India gets its act together, it must do everything possible to avoid a two-front situation from becoming a reality. Given the current state of affairs, the move to try and cool things down with China is the sensible and pragmatic thing to do.

(Courtesy of Mail Today)

Also read: If our pain isn't seen, where do we go?