Here we go round the military bush

Manohar Parrikar has asked for "two-three months" to take the chief of defence staff proposal to the cabinet committee and get it okayed. By all means, minister. As long as you don't appoint another committee to study it.

Many would tell you, the CDS proposal is as old as the Kargil hills. Actually, it is older―at least older than the Kargil shells. Old soldiers would tell you, the idea of a fourth chief has been mooted four times since independence―in 1949, in the 1960s, in 1982 and by the K. Subrahmanyam committee after Kargil. Subrahmanyam's was the most detailed proposal, and one which was taken up with some seriousness.

So seriously did A.B. Vajpayee take it up that he gave it to a group of ministers led by home minister L.K. Advani. Advani & Co studied it in detail and gave their own ideas. Then a committee of secretaries was asked to check how the Advani committee's ideas could be implemented. Like Roman senators who were debating how to defeat the Visigoths and Vandals when the very same barbarians were knocking down their city gates, the secretaries were still studying the matter when Vajpayee was voted out and a government led by the Congress, which had never liked the idea of a super-general, came in.

Pranab Mukherjee who came in as the new defence minister told THE WEEK nearly ten years ago that there was no political consensus to have a CDS. We thought the matter ended there.

Illustration: Bhaskaran

Four years ago, Manmohan Singh, who keeps committee reports for bedtime reading and probably had run out of them, asked former cabinet secretary Naresh Chandra, who had headed more committees than there are letters to his name, to review the national security situation. Chandra is also learnt to have mooted a CDS. Before Manmohan could appoint another committee to study the Chandra idea, he too was voted out. Now it is Narendra Modi's turn.

Many think a CDS will be a five-star officer―a field marshal, an admiral of the fleet or a marshal of the air force―who will shout orders at the three chiefs. No way. A CDS will be another four-star officer, just like the three chiefs.

At present the chiefs have two roles. They are as much military advisers to the government as they are operational commanders. As advisers they meet in the chiefs of staff committee (that's where they can plot a coup, if ever) which is chaired by the seniormost among them, and give military advice to the government. As soon as the government accepts the advice and issues orders, they put on their battle fatigues and rush into the war-room to plan and direct the operations. Thus they give operational orders to themselves, plan the ops and conduct the ops. A CDS will relieve them of the advisory role, and the government will get single-shot military advice.

The CDS system also aims at jointness in planning, training and ops. Every havaldar and his elder brother know that future wars will be 'elementary'. They will envelop all the five elements of prithvi (earth), ap (water), tejas (fire), vayu (air) and akash (ether), and not just the missiles and warplanes that are named after them, plus cyberspace. But our militaries still train to fight Waterloos on earth and Trafalgars in water.

Ideally the CDS system also should aim at doing away with the separate regional commands and setting up integrated commands suited to the terrain and region. Thus the China frontier should be looked after by an air commander who would have ground troops at his disposal. The Pak frontier should be managed by an army commander who would have fighter squadrons at his beck and call. And the waters should be ruled by a naval commander with air power at his disposal.

But would the generals, admirals and air marshals yield turf easily?

*prasannan@theweek.in *