More articles by

R Prasannan
R Prasannan

COMMENTARY

Defence reforms: Top-down approach is need of the hour

india-defence1-ap The cabinet on Wednesday decided to implement 65 of the 99 recommendations made by the Lt Gen D.B. Shekatkar committee | AP

The Modi government is keen on restructuring the defence organisation. The real challenge, however, is in reforming the headquarters and the ministry

The easiest administrative issue to study in India, and make a report, is about defence reforms. But they are also the most difficult to implement. On Wednesday, the Narendra Modi government finally set the ball rolling, but up the hill.

The problems are known to all. Forget defence personnel and bureaucrats, even media persons can reel out to you the problems and the solutions that have been offered by every committee over the past few decades. So much so that many treated it as a joke when the Naresh Chandra committee's report was kept classified. 

In fact, the joke among strategic experts has been that each committee was simply cut-pasting from the recommendations of the previous committees' reports.

Most reports have been offering more or less the same set of solutions—appoint a chief of defence staff; dismantle the present system of separate service commands; instead, have a system of integrated theatre commands; set up a cyber cell or command, explore the requirement of a space command; consider rolling plan for defence financing; cut the revenue budget; hike the capital budget; increase defence expenditure to more than two per cent of the GDP; outsource tasks of a civilian nature, such as nursing in peace stations, to civilian agencies, and so on and so forth. So much so that a defence reorganisation committee had become almost a joke.

Finally, the government has begun to act. On Wednesday, the cabinet decided to implement 65 of the 99 recommendations made by the Lt Gen D.B. Shekatkar committee, which, incidentally, took the least time to study the issue and submit a report.

The government hasn't specified whether it has rejected any recommendations. As of now, “the cabinet has approved 65 recommendations,” was what the defence minister told the media on Wednesday. He did not rule out the possibility of the remaining 34 recommendations being accepted.

The mother of all committees was the K. Subrahmanyam committee, better known as the Kargil Review Committee. It went in detail into every aspect of higher defence management, and made radical recommendations, including integration of the military establishments with the defence ministry, appointment of a chief of defence staff, establishment of a defence intelligence agency and so on. 

A group of ministers, headed by the then home minister L.K. Advani, examined the Subrahmanyam recommendations, and made their own set of recommendations which largely concurred with the original. 

APTOPIX India Air Base Attack The announcement of the decision to accept 65 recommendations came as a big surprise | AP

However, the UPA government of Manmohan Singh was not quite impressed with the changes suggested. The Congress was, in principle, opposed to having a single defence chief, and whenever asked about the CDS issue, the UPA defence ministers—both Pranab Mukherjee and A.K. Antony either gave evasive replies or cited that there still was no consensus on it. And when it appointed another committee—though with the nomenclature of task force—under Naresh Chandra, it was clear that the government did not have its heart in it.

The change of guard in 2014 rekindled the hopes of the pro-changers. However, it was soon apparent that the new government was taking time to come to grips with defence matters, especially with minister Manohar Parrikar giving non-committal replies like “soon” and “a decision is on the anvil”. And, when it appointed another committee, now headed by Lt. Gen D.B. Shekatkar, many read it as another attempt at postponing a decision.

Meanwhile, a second committee that Parrikar had appointed to look into defence modernisation, got stuck when its chairman Vivek Rae, who had earlier been director-general (acquisition) in the defence ministry, resigned. 

However, to the surprise of the pessimists, the Shekatkar committee submitted its report within about six months. Then there were again doubts, raised especially when the full-time defence minister was sent to Goa as chief minister and Arun Jaitley was in effect made a part-time defence minister. It appeared that the regime's idea of defence reforms and modernisation was merely confined to upgrade of weaponry, and providing improved pay and facilities to the personnel.

Thus the announcement of the decision to accept 65 recommendations came as a big surprise, though the ministry had already indicated that it was moving to dismantle the infrastructural anachronisms such as military farms.

mig21-fighter-new-afp If theatre command system is implemented, the northern theatre which faces the Chinese threat would have to be an air force-dominant command | AFP

What next?

The biggest reform, yet to be implemented, is appointment of a CDS. Now there are various ideas about who exactly will be a chief of defence force. While the earlier committees had recommended a five-star officer—field marshal, admiral of the fleet or marshal of the air force—the more current thinking is said to be about having a four-star officer. In other words, the CDS could be another general, admiral or air chief marshal. He would not be a CDS, but a permanent chairman of the chiefs of staff committee.

A bigger challenge would be to accept and implement the theatre command system. To implement it, the present command structures of the three services would have to be dismantled and a new system will have to be put in place. This system would give primacy to one service depending on the kind of territory that needs to be defended in that particular theatre. Thus, the northern theatre which faces the Chinese threat from across the Himalayas would have to be air force-dominant command, under an air marshal, with the other two services planning operations under his command. Similarly, the western theatre, facing Pakistan would be an army-dominant command, and the western and southern command will be navy-dominant.

Such a restructuring would call for almost complete dismantling of the present service set-up. There would have to be integration of training institutions, planning institutions and even the materials and ordnance departments and corps. 

The Naresh Chandra Committee is also learnt to have recommended deputing service officers to the ministry which is a civilian establishment. The Kargil review committee and the group of ministers had also recommended this, and there was a half-hearted attempt at implementing this under the Vajpayee government. But Parliament's standing committee on defence found in 2009 that follow-up had been lethargic. 

Wednesday's cabinet decision has finally indicated that the Modi government is keen on restructuring the defence organisation. But the decisions taken so far have been the ones pertaining to lower-level institutions. The real challenge is in reforming the top, that is the headquarters and the ministry.

This browser settings will not support to add bookmarks programmatically. Please press Ctrl+D or change settings to bookmark this page.
Topics : #defence

Related Reading