PREPARING OPERATIONAL LEADERS FOR CONFLICT IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Introduction

1. India’s armed forces have delivered in wars of the last century, in no small measure due to the excellent level of tactical leadership provided by direct leaders in the Army, Navy and the Air Force. Equally, in most conflicts, higher-level leaders stepped up to the plate when needed and broke down political imperatives of going to war into achievable operational and tactical level objectives. The Armed Forces have had their share of failures and setbacks as well, 1962 and the intervention in Sri Lanka in 1987 come to mind when reflecting upon poor politico-military decisions made by a hierarchy not well skilled in thinking through second order effects, and military leaders not being straightforward in pointing out pitfalls to political superiors, when asked to undertake operationally challenging or unviable tasks. Between India’s last major military operation, Op VIJAY (Kargil 1999) and recent standoffs in Sikkim and Ladakh, one could make a bold statement to say that the very character of warfare in these 20 odd years has undergone a change. No longer are militaries likely to witness long periods of mobilization of forces, a preparatory period of build up and then a clear-cut campaign against a known adversary (or adversaries). There is a greater likelihood of sudden flareups in critical areas, which have the potential to snowball into larger conflagrations if not responded to speedily, and all against a backdrop of outwardly normal relations with the adversary in other domains. Such warfare challenges the very notion of standard doctrinal response options and conventional preparedness levels, so well known to the armed forces. It needs a certain kind of military leader who is comfortable in operating outside the established boundaries of war and conflict. It calls for well schooled and experienced military leadership at all levels, especially at the operational, which is the most challenging and difficult level, for it is here that campaigns are planned in detail and executed, forces directed and decisions that affect the very survival and wellbeing of tactical units pitched into the direct fight, made and reviewed.

Military Leadership in the 21st Century

2. The basic framework of leadership needed for leading men in uniform hasn’t really changed much since warfare underwent a transformation, starting with the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19th Century, the coming of the industrial age of warfare with the two World Wars and the dropping of the atomic bomb, while closer home the Indian military paved the way for the existence of Bangladesh. Whereas the tools for waging war have changed tremendously, and still continue to do so at a rapid pace, some tenets of leadership remain as solid as foundational blocks for military leaders. These are character, courage (physical and moral), conduct, intellect, care for the men and women under a leader’s charge, sound military knowledge, physical endurance, and mental stability to withstand the stresses and strains of modern warfare. Whether you are a direct, or an organisational and/or strategic leader, these leadership traits are needed, in varying proportions, to prepare and sustain a military for the challenges it faces. It may also be germane to the discussion to bring in the levels of warfare, as are commonly known i.e. the tactical, operational and strategic, to try and understand the requirements placed on military leaders as they climb the hierarchical ladder in service. Some would prefer to directly equate the levels of warfare with levels of leadership. So, as per this school of thought, command up to a certain size of fighting units or formations (battalion, brigade, division etc.) across the three services (even though it is a force fit at times for the navy and the air force) is by tactical leaders, above that till field armies or equivalent is considered operational, and top leaders, who conduct and orchestrate military strategy for the nation as a whole and are the interface with the political representatives of a country, count as strategic leaders. It is felt that today such clear boundaries between levels of leadership and warfare are really not possible given the speed and span of communications, the different means available to nations to wage war, and the effects of small actions by tactical leaders that potentially have ramifications at the operational and strategic levels. The most recent example being the clash at Galwan in June 2020, between Indian and Chinese troops, which set off in motion a politico-strategic rift that is yet to be resolved, with serious implications for the diplomatic and economic ties of both nations. Therefore, as this piece looks at the needs of leadership in the 21st Century for Indian military leaders, there is a definite coalescing of the levels of warfare. Operational leaders especially, who are the focus here, need to possess a mental makeup and attitude that allows them to operate across all levels. This, clearly, will place greater demands on them physically and intellectually and thus the preparation and education of such leaders must commence early.

Professional Military Education and Operational Leaders

3. Professional Military Education (PME) occupies a reasonable space today in the honing of key leadership traits and staff skills of military officers that are essential for any modern military to operate at peak efficiency and be effective in a crisis. From joint services training academies, to staff and war colleges the aim is to impart service specific and joint training to tactical leaders that enhances the war waging capability of fighting units, while operational leaders and staff officers function to keep plans, intelligence, information operations, logistics and civil military relations balanced, and the national effort focused.

4. There is also a definite need to have a set of military officers who are well grounded in theories of joint warfare, military strategy and leadership, geography and history, weapons development, operations and tactics, as also international relations, economics and geopolitics. They are the key functionaries at strategic and operational levels who will convert political directives to the armed forces into discrete military objectives, recommend/assign forces best suited to achieving these, and ensure their adequate equipping and preparations in peacetime to meet expected, and unexpected, requirements. This is no easy task and currently the methodology is to select and impart education in this broad sweep of subjects to a small cohort of officers, who have been determined to possess the potential to rise in their careers (a very subjective assessment), and assign them to attend courses at war colleges/defence universities at home and abroad.

The Future of War

5. If there is one thing that history teaches us, it is that whatever may be the preparations for future war; militaries are invariably trained and equipped for the last war. It is only those nations, whose military leaders are mentally agile and able to modify doctrines and plans as the new situation dictates that will probably emerge victorious. Even the luxury of time to understand and assimilate how an adversary is posing new threats may not be available to operational level commanders in the future. They would have to rely on their critical thinking skills and levels of flexibility inbuilt in fighting forces’ doctrines and tactics to overcome such challenges on the battlefield, without losing cohesion and unity. Thus to have such capabilities within a military, or more specifically a joint field fighting force, leaders at all levels of command have to change the way they train and educate themselves and their subordinate military commanders, to face the realities of a future conflict that no one can predict with any certainty right now. This is when we have not even factored in major challenges of how to deal with the introduction of artificial intelligence driven decision cycles, information overload due to the ever increasing numbers of opto-electronic platforms that are gathering terabytes of digital data about potential threats, and the introduction of ‘game changing’ new weapons systems that can take decisions and act autonomously, all overshadowed by the ever-growing threat of cyber and nuclear doomsday.

Honing Future Operational Commanders

6. As can be analysed from some of the issues that future operational commanders are expected to deal with, their basic training and education in the arcane arts of the fighting forces, as also higher-level preparations to deal with unforeseen threats, has to be visionary and detailed. A cursory look at various militaries’ steep learning curve since early 2020, which the onset of the SARS Cov-2 Pandemic has forced them to adopt in all spheres of military preparedness and assistance, is a good example of the need for such agility and readiness to deal with unexpected threats. Therefore, for future operational commanders, a set of regular and ‘out of the box’ recommendations is offered herein:

(a) First and foremost, change the paradigm of selection of operational level leaders from the tactical sub-set that we currently follow. Identify and mentor (as a formal process) those who show early signs of being able to see the ‘larger picture’ and have the ability to plan for contingencies and effects that most may not visualise. At which point in service should such identification and selection be done; that is a key issue. This inflection point may arrive at varying stages across the three services. However, for future joint occupation of billets in operational headquarters, it is recommended that the staff college could be the start point for such selection and formal mentoring. The current fixation with command and staff billets for all officers who pass staff college needs to be shed. Once officers are put through their paces in staff-college, the possibility of another year of military education for identified officers (via a voluntary written exam) could be considered. They would go on to be operational planning staff and would occupy key billets across the spectrum of military functions in joint HQs. This idea is not something new but is akin to the establishment of the School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) that the US and other NATO allies did back in the ’80s, and which paid dividends in both Iraq wars in the planning and execution of complex military operations.

(b) Second, allow select officers, as they transit through their mid-level careers, the freedom to take a year or two off (yes the much maligned and revamped study leave) to research and do their PhD in a set of subjects taught in universities with excellent faculty for strategic studies, national security and other associated fields that today are essential to deal with an interconnected world. This must be done prior to inducting them into high pressure and key posts in active areas. The whole career management chart by the personnel branches of the three services must undergo a radical change to allow ‘educated mavericks’ to also exist and flourish along with regular gladiators. Not easy to do, but it is an idea whose time is here.

[c] Third, officers must go purple (i.e. joint) in the envisaged theatre commands at the first opportunity and serve outside the narrow confines of their individual services and parochial patronages, which only allow for a certain kind of individual to succeed in the pyramidal structure of military ranks. Even the bifurcation into command and staff (originally envisaged by General Sundarji) for those best suited for plans and those for field forces needs to be relooked and brought into vogue so as to have a well skilled general staff that can advise and draw up detailed contingency plans without having to re-invent the wheel. This is again anathema to the conventional mindset and will have to be force fitted into the personnel department plans for selecting future operational leaders.

(d) Fourth, the way in which services, singly and jointly, exercise and train for possible future scenarios must be revamped completely. The need to assess the potential of future commanders based on such training events has to be done away with and we must be honest in all training activities, to seek and to find those individuals that display originality (very difficult in current circumstances), are not afraid to experiment and lose in training simulations as long as the intent is right and have the courage to speak their minds when asked for solutions to military problems. Right now the whole set up is skewed towards a single thought process that mirrors the thinking of the leaders at the apex of the operational hierarchy. It is once again a huge hurdle to be overcome. But if this is not done, then for every success in battle, there would be an equal number (if not more) of failures.

(e) Fifth, we must make use of opportunities provided by bi and multi-lateral cooperation with other militaries to actually position operational staff in HQ with foreign forces and let them be contributors and learn from their counterparts. Current small exercises with foreign forces are inadequate to impart the right lessons and inputs needed for future combined and joint operations. We do imbibe a bit of such training with UN forces but that is a peculiar sub-set of military peace operations and not enough billets are ever available to train a larger set of officers. Our desire to be indigenous and self-reliant in our military thinking goes counter to such global military best practices. It must not become a virtual millstone around the necks of operational leaders in the future. If another nation or military does it better, let’s learn from them by sending our officers there. So in short we need to overcome hesitancy to interact and absorb from our foreign counterparts, and the internecine wars between the MEA and MoD over military cooperation and diplomacy should be discarded for larger common national goals.

(f) Lastly, there is a crying need to broaden the executive decision making perspective of operational level military leaders by their experiencing the sinews of governance at national and international levels. This is a field very few are exposed to because of the way our ‘steel frame’ of governance is setup. The military remains apolitical and outside of the politico-diplomatic and economic domains that dictate national security policy. By the time they are expected to provide answers to challenges that the political leadership may face, they are incapable of a cogent institutional response as very few (if any) have had exposure to the ‘system’ earlier in their careers. To offset this, spending a couple of years on deputation to key ministries, within the country and even abroad, is recommended for identified military officers. Such cross-pollination of minds has been a recommendation of many committees on national security and defence, most notably the Kargil Review Committee. It is widely resisted by the civil servants but it is an idea whose time is long overdue.

Conclusion

7. The need to have articulate, mentally agile, well-educated and critical thinking operational leaders is an established one. No military can do without the crucial middle rung of staff and operational commanders who have to work in conjunction with strategic brass to translate hazy political and strategic guidance into clearly defined military lines of operation. They need to draw up instructions for the joint force, provide the necessary wherewithal to complete the envisaged mission, and lead the joint force till the successful execution of given tasks. India’s armed forces are going to face a myriad of challenges in the conventional and the sub-conventional domains in the period ahead, with known adversaries already knocking at the doors, posing threats anew. Military commanders at strategic and operational levels would be expected to provide ‘professional advice to and execute plans of’ the political and civilian hierarchy, to meet such challenges. The recommendations mentioned herein, specifically for improving the capabilities at the operational level, are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Better ideas can definitely be thought of and put in place gradually, to ensure that in the 21st Century India’s Armed Forces are well equipped intellectually and temporally to meet a rising nation’s demands.