It’s ‘Integration’ & Not ‘Integral’, Stupid!

The latest installment of the series of institutional firefights between the three armed services of India was witnessed at the Manekshaw Centre in New Delhi on September 13, with the principal sparring parties this being the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force (IAF). The occasion was a one-day seminar jointly organised by the New Delhi-based Centre for Land warfare Studies (CLAWS) and the AAC, as part of the on-going silver jubilee celebrations of the Indian Army’s Aviation Corps (AAC), and the seminar was attended by none other than Defence Minister Arakkaparambil Kurian Antony and Chief of the Army Staff Gen V K Singh, along with Admiral (Ret’d) Arun Prakash, former Chief of the Naval Staff, and Lt Gen V K Ahluwalia, GOC XIV Corps and Colonel Commandant of the AAC. Soon after the usual keynote addresses and presentations, the firefights began with the onset of the Q & A session, with the IAF claiming that its existing inventory of attack helicopters were an integral part of the Army’s ORBAT, and the Army retorting by saying that the need of the hour was the full-scale integration of such assets with the Army’s formation-level command-and-control hierarchy. During the heated arguments—of the type not normally witnessed during such seminars--it emerged that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had as far back as 1986 drawn up a time-bound plan (thanks to the efforts of then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and his then Minister of State for Defence Arun Singh) for not only creating the AAC (it eventually came into being on November 2, 1987, equipped with some 130 SA.315 Lama/Cheetah and SA.316B Alouette III/Chetak helicopters for battlefield observation and light utility), but mandating the change of ownership of the Mi-25 and Mi-35P attack helicopters from the IAF to the AAC. However, for undisclosed reasons, this detailed plan could not be fully put into effect. Another subject that generated heated accusations and counter-accusations concerned the employment of IAF-operated Mi-17 utility helicopters for CASEVAC sorties. While the IAF maintained that the Mi-17s could not be optimally employed for CASEVAC due to the Army’s inability to designate suitable landing sites, the Army accused the IAF’s Mi-17 pilots of cowardice when it came to the conduct of such sorties.

In between the slugfests, it was the Indian Navy which gave an objective assessment of the issue at hand—whether to rest satisfied with the existing status quo or whether to keep pressing for the full-scale integration of the existing attack helicopters with the Army’s formation-level command-and-control hierarchy. The Navy’s view is that the Indian Army’s point of view is both rational and logical. For instance, during the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars, since long-range maritime reconnaissance and air-sea rescue was carried out by the IAF’s Pune-based No6 Squadron with about six Lockheed L1049 Super Constellations, the Navy was severely restricted in terms of deriving a comprehensive and coherent maritime situational awareness in the Arabian Sea. At the end of the 1971 war, No6 Squadron’s Super Constellations had accumulated a mere 39 sorties in support of maritime operations, totalling 391 hours! Subsequently, grasping the logic of the day, the MoD decreed that such airborne assets should be owned and operated by the Navy and consequently, on November 18, 1976, the IAF handed over the five remaining Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation aircraft to the Navy’s No312 Albatross Squadron in Dabolim, Goa. This in turn raises another question: if the IAF today has no ways or means of acquiring maritime situational awareness, why should it continue to maintain a Maritime Air Operations Directorate and a combat aircraft squadron (No6) dedicated for maritime strike? No convincing answers or rebuttals came forth on this point yesterday.

And the one person who is in a position to learn from the Indian Navy’s experience and with the help of HQ Integrated defence Staff, sort out matters between the IAF and the Army in a decisive and purposeful manner—Arakkaparambil Kurian Antony—ended up doing exactly the opposite by passing on the buck to the Army and IAF and asking them to reconcile their differences internally. This is what he had to say: “Our armed forces need to adopt a holistic approach to security. No single wing of our security forces can work in isolation. The need for synergy and pooling in efforts and resources is being felt like never before. The Army and IAF must ensure that there is perfect synergy between them. The armed services will have to act in reconciliation amongst themselves so that India can have better and stronger armed forces. I will try to play a limited role in finding reconciliation”. A pathetic show by the Raksha Mantri, to say the least.

For those who may not know, the Indian Army’s C4I, ISTR and spectrum allocation networks/bandwidth have been in place since 2007 for accommodating a full-fledged Combat Aviation Brigade, which was to be raised during the 11th Defence Plan (2007-2011) as per original Army HQ projections that were approved in principle by the MoD as far back as mid-2004. Consequently, adequate infrastructural and operational-level preparations have already been made by Army HQ to utilise such a Brigade in support of offensive Corps-level or Division-level campaigns that include surgical vertical envelopment operations. However, the principal problem has been the MoD, which has not even approved even till this day the 11th Defence Plan. Which means for the past five years, thousands of billions have been allocated for defence spending on a year-by-year basis, without any medium-term or long-term articulation of how this money should be spent.—Prasun K. Sengupta