India's theatre command plan may be rethought as new military chiefs take charge
A proposal to split India's armed forces into geographic commands is stuck at the Defence Ministry, and a new top brass could reopen the whole question.
India's long-planned overhaul of its military command structure may be going back to the drawing board. A proposal for integrated theatre commands is pending at the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The previous Chiefs of Staff Committee forwarded it, and with new people now in the top posts, it will likely need a fresh look.
An opinion piece in ThePrint argues that this pause is a chance to ask a harder question. Everyone agrees India's higher defence management needs reform. The real debate is what shape that reform should take. The piece says the answer must reflect India's strategic ambitions, limited resources, reliance on foreign suppliers, tough geography, threat perceptions and the kind of wars it may actually fight.
The model on the table, as widely reported, would create three integrated theatre commands. A northern command would focus on China, a western command on Pakistan and a maritime command on the seas. In each, army, navy and air force units would report to a single theatre commander. The piece calls this a borrowed idea from American and Chinese practice, and a "solution looking for a problem" in India's case.
The push for change has a long history. Talk of reform followed the wars of 1962, 1965 and 1971 but fizzled out. Kargil in 1999 changed that. The Kargil Review Committee found that service chiefs were acting more like operational commanders than advisers to the government, and the 2001 Group of Ministers report built on its findings. Several bodies followed, including HQ IDS, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the Andaman & Nicobar Command and the Strategic Forces Command.
The Chief of Defence Staff post took longer. It resurfaced in the Naresh Chandra Task Force in 2012 and gained further backing from the Shekatkar Committee in 2016. India finally created the CDS and the Department of Military Affairs in 2019, and Parliament passed the Inter-Services Organisations Act in 2023. Setting up joint or theatre commands was written into the DMA's mandate, and the CDS was tasked with bringing more jointness to operations, logistics, training and support services.
Work on theatre commands began in earnest under the first CDS, General Bipin Rawat, and continued under General Chauhan. It reportedly stalled over disagreements among the services, especially over how to divide scarce air assets. The Indian Air Force is said to be firmly against parcelling out its limited resources.
Why does this matter beyond military circles? How India organises its forces shapes how fast it can respond on its borders with China and Pakistan, and how well it spends defence money. The author's message is that joint planning, rather than copying another country's blueprint, may be the surer route to a more coordinated military.
Read the original opinion piece at ThePrint.
