SOURCE: https://in.finance.yahoo.com/news/why-manohar-parrikar-failed-defence-073833503.html PARRIKAR'S ONLY MISTAKE WAS THAT HE DID NOT TAKE STEPS TO DISMANTLE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE NOR TOOK STEPS TO WORK ON THE REALISTIC REORGANIZATION OF MINISTRY TO THE CHIEF OF DEFENCE MODEL - Vasundhra #############################
Few Defence Ministers began their tenure with such high expectations and ended it on such low key with almost nothing to show for the two-odd years spent as the military’s boss, as Manohar Parrikar. Returning to Goa without making the slightest ripple in a ministry crying out for hard political decisions and implementation of even harder solutions, may be something of a record. Even so, were we all wrong in hoping Parrikar would do big things differently, logically, with oodles of practical good sense? For one as a graduate of IIT, Mumbai, it was expected that he would bring an engineer’s approach and problem-solving methodology to issues of national security, especially those relating to the conventional forces that in many respects are mathematical in nature.
He started out promisingly. The Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) race was decided by the time the Manmohan Singh demitted office. It only remained for the incoming BJP government to sign on the dotted line of a contract for the Rafale aircraft that would enrich France, the French economy, the French aerospace sector, and specifically, Dassault Avions, without doing much for Indian Air Force's (IAF) fighting ability.
He did the unexpected, showing the greatest reluctance to sign a contract, Parrikar pondered more economical options in lieu of the Rafale.
He came to the obvious conclusion that the entire ‘medium’ category in combat aircraft is a bit of a hoax perpetrated by IAF.
This may be seen in his exploring a Hi-lo solution revolving around the Su-30 MKI license-produced by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) in Nasik as the high-end fighting platform, and the indigenous Tejas as the low-end bulk combat compenent. His publicly observing that the price of a single Rafale can fetch the IAF three Su-30s, arguably the best multi-role fighter plane currently flying barring the F-22 Raptor, and his refuting the IAF’s charge propagated through the media that the Sukhois suffered from heavy downtime, by talking of its serviceability rate as comparable to any other aircraft in the fleet, suggested that here was a defence minister who was prepared to take Air HQes head-on.
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A Rafale fighter jet, manufactured by Dassault Aviation SA, prepares to land following an aerial display on the
A Rafale fighter jet, manufactured by Dassault Aviation SA, prepares to land following an aerial display on the second day of the 14th Dubai Air Show on November 9, 2015.
(Photographer: Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg)
Then prime minister Narendra Modi’s Paris trip happened in April 2015 and, voila! just like that, there was the announcement of a buy of 36 Rafales — a ridiculous figure because it meant the IAF could do very little with it in terms of strengthening its force posture or warfighting capability. They were too few in number to operationally matter, and too costly to risk in hostilities, but may prove useful to Vayu Bhavan as a wedge to wangle the resources to get an additional 100-200 Rafales in the future.
This decision marked Parrikar’s slide. He could not in good conscience act gung-ho about Rafale, equally he couldn’t be seen, or even politically afford, to oppose the PM.
This is a sidebar– but why Modi made this decision remains a mystery, considering the Rafale makes little military, political, or economic sense. If, as is being alleged, President Francois Hollande lubricated the Rafale deal by promising Indian nuclear weapons designers access to the French inertial confinement fusion (ICF) chamber in Bordeaux so that India’s unproven and untested thermonuclear designs can be validated short of explosive underground testing, and also finessed, by triggering miniature fusion reactions in the ICF facility, then Modi has taken a big gamble.
Paris has not always delivered on its contractual or even secret executive-level agreements.
Assuming they do this time, where’s the guarantee that the French won’t pass on the Indian ICF data to its friends and allies, thereby compromising the Indian deterrent? Moreover, is a paper promise of access to ICF, Bordeaux, worth the escalating costs of the Rafale, considering Indian scientists continued to gain from access to the Russian ICF in Troitsk, outside Moscow?
In any case, Parrikar was never the same again. He chose thereafter to do what any lay politician has done as defence minister — surrender to the autonomy exercised by the civilian bureaucrats running his ministry.
Leaving it to the babus to do all but formally make decisions meant he sidelined himself, and wound up enmeshed in the Gordian knots of red tape he had set out originally to untangle.
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Manohar Parrikar, then India’s defence minister, attends
Manohar Parrikar, then India’s defence minister, attends the opening ceremony of the Aero India air show at Air
Manohar Parrikar, then India’s defence minister, attends the opening ceremony of the Aero India air show at Air Force Station Yelahanka in Bengaluru, India, on February 14, 2017. (Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)
Force Station Yelahanka in Bengaluru, India, on February 14, 2017. (Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)
One is tempted to compare Parrikar’s fairly undistinguished time in office with that of the longest serving defence minister, AK Antony, in the preceding Congress Party coalition government.
Unlike Parrikar, Antony, a lawyer, understood the pitfalls of decision-making and was wary of babus weaving a web to victimize politicians.
Zealous in protecting his reputation for absolute propriety, he shunned all decisions concerning procurement of major military hardware — Project 75i, MMRCA, howitzers, etc. Consequently, in his eight years as defence minister nothing was decided on the big ticket items, nothing was bought.
In both cases, the usual rampaging waste of national economic resources was avoided but at the cost of weakening force readiness and modernization, by Parrikar because he permitted the civil servants to create an impasse at every turn, and by Antony because he deliberately avoided taking any decision at all.
Not sure whether Parrikar’s mode or the Antony operandi is better.
Bharat Karnad is professor for national security studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. This article was originally published on his website bharatkarnad.com.
The views expressed here are those of the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.
The only sub-theme that vies for pride of place alongside the debate on the alleged shenanigans of an inept civilian bureaucracy is the gross inadequacy of defence outlays. Governments have come and gone since 1947, but the sluggish trajectory of annual defence budgets continues, interrupted only by pay commissions and wars.
It does not require any great power of prophesy to rule out a steep hike in the defence budget in the coming years. The history of the defence budget over the past seven decades should be enough to drive home this truth.
More specifically, the growth in annual defence allocations since 2014 only indicates that it is naive to expect that the gap between the demand projected by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the actual allocations made for defence in the union budget will soon be a thing of the past.
Defence analysts never tire of mentioning the year 2004 when the then outgoing government made a provision for a defence modernisation fund in the interim budget, seen till date as a bold step to address the problems besetting the modernisation of the armed forces. But it is the same political dispensation which, despite being in power now for almost three years, not only has not revived the defence modernisation fund but has also failed to cut the mustard when it comes to raising the defence expenditure.
There is a continuous lament over inadequate funding and this is invariably attributed to politicians and bureaucrats, widely believed to be impervious to the imperatives of defence and security of the country. Apart from being an unfair characterisation, this has served no purpose all these years and is unlikely to be much help in future.
If anything, this narrative has crowded out the academic discussion on how much should be allocated for defence and, more importantly, how could the government of the day meet the expectations of the defence establishment without an adverse impact on other competing sectors, such as health, education and infrastructure.
The dominant view among the strategic studies community in the country is that the defence budget should be pegged at a minimum of three per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Going by this benchmark and without questioning its basis, the defence allocation for 2017-18 should be approximately Rs 2,31,310 crore more than the amount actually allocated in the union budget, excluding defence pensions for which a sum of Rs 85,737 crore has been allocated separately.
This is a huge gap to cover, especially if the fiscal and revenue deficit targets are to be met. The gap cannot also apparently be bridged just by reducing expenditure on other sectors. On the face of it, the government will have to raise its income substantially to be able to almost double the allocation for defence to reach the three per cent of GDP mark. Governments have evidently not been up to this task either because of the serious political cost of raising income through taxation or for other inexplicable reasons. This is where defence economists, and even think tanks, need to step in and suggest a pragmatic way out.
The question that arises every year when the union budget is analysed in seminars and in the media, but remains unanswered, is whether the Finance Minister could actually allocate more funds for defence without, at the same time, causing an adverse impact on other sectors, assuming no positive change in the estimated income. The alternate question would be whether the minister had more options for raising governmental revenues to the extent that allocation for defence could be raised substantially, if not to the extent of three per cent of GDP, without facing any difficulty in giving a rational explanation for rejecting the demand from other sectors for higher allocations.
To answer both the above questions, defence economists will have to deal with a more fundamental set of questions. What should be the pragmatically ideal level of funding? Whether the defence allocation should be fixed at a certain percentage of GDP? If so why? Or, would it be enough to meet the requirement projected by the MoD, irrespective of how much it works out to in terms of percentage of GDP and regardless of the method of costing adopted for working out the requirement.
The basic challenge for defence economists is to demonstrate that there are other feasible ways of skinning the cat during budget formulation. But the challenge is also inextricably linked with the need for rationalisation of defence expenditure, especially if manpower costs cannot be contained in any substantial measure.
There are indeed other steps, such as the creation of joint logistics and theatre commands that could potentially bring down costs and increase operational efficiency. But the thrust for these measures is unlikely to come from within the services or from the political class, unless independent and objective analyses by defence economists points to the imperative of adopting these measures and throws up a roadmap for bringing about these seminal changes.
The controversial nature of the new Indian army chief’s appointment and the corruption scandal involving a former air chief has brought the Indian military leadership in the media spotlight once again.
In India, traditionally, military leadership has got a short shrift. The lack of a strategic culture in India, evident from the lack of understanding of military matters by the civilian hierarchy, is a possible reason for this. The gradual “corporatisation” of the Indian armed forces is another possible contributory factor, where corporate mismanagement [ Read Babugiri] has undermined time-proven military leadership skills. India and its defence establishment need to revisit their own military leadership culture and identify weaknesses. A more copious media debate and agitation by the cognoscenti is required before policy changes could possibly be brought about in this regard.
Military leadership offers different sets of challenges than its civilian variant. Over the years, some civilian leaders have to tried to imbibe certain aspects of military leadership but with very little success.
Attempts by the military to “civilianise” or “corporatise” its leadership ethos may have more dangerous implications as it could have a direct impact on national security.
A military leader needs to lead men into battle. In the absence of war, the armed forces tend to lose their leadership perspective, and consequently, their fighting edge. This seems to be the case with the Indian armed forces, as these days, they are employed essentially only for counter-insurgency or Low Intensity Conflict Operations. The challenges are even more profound when a military establishment must keep itself battle ready even in times of comparative “peace” or “no peace, no war” situations. This is when basic tenets of military leadership cannot be allowed to be glossed over.
The biggest problem for a peace-time military is what has been described as the “ticket-punching” phenomenon. Every military service lays down norms to enable its officer cadre to have a smooth transition from its tactical to operational and strategic levels of leadership. Nevertheless, some officers choose to “ticket-punch” their way through the established hierarchical shaft, either avoiding the more challenging assignments altogether by opting for “low threat” assignments or by opting for other ornamental staff jobs. These “easier” assignments also tend to offer inflated report statuses numerically, allowing the concerned ticket-punchers to steal a march over their other colleagues who may have exposed themselves to operationally much more challenging and riskier assignments. The promotion criteria in all services, therefore, ought to be based on a military leader’s successful transition across the mandatory field and staff assignments across all levels – tactical, operational and strategic – of war, and not any other extraneous considerations.
Another factor that assists “ticket-punchers” in gaining an unfair advantage is the ill-thought out changes in personnel policies, at times provoked by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The Staff/Operations criteria attempt proposed by the Army – and undone by the MoD – and the wanton reduction some years ago of “discretionary weightage” drastically from 25 per cent to 5 per cent (precluding the scope for objectively compensating a deserving candidate during promotion for higher ranks in the Air Force) are two such cases in point.
If the Establishment sends across the message of appointing only an “operationally sound” officer as the chief of any of the services, most travails regarding inept senior level military leadership would be overcome. Even with such merit-imbued promotional criteria in place, it is possible that a senior military functionary, including a chief, could get compromised in some scam.
Air Chief Marshall (Retd) Shashi Tyagi’s alleged involvement in the AgustaWestland chopper scam is one such example.
These types of situations need to be addressed through reforms such as Intelligence Bureau vetting, subordinate reportage in confidential reports, and increased transparency in the equipment procurement processes. What is currently playing out with Air Chief Marshall (Retd) Shashi Tyagi is a different matter altogether. He appears to be the fall guy for big political entities. With a proactive judiciary, it is only a matter of time before the truth prevails.
The requirement, therefore, is to ensure that military leadership does not get compromised in terms of dilution of mandatory qualitative criteria for any promotion, particularly the ones to starred ranks. This would remove any possible controversy if a person with better operational credentials supersedes lesser endowed peers. Military leadership has to be nurtured over time.
Performance in wars may not always be a practical criterion, given that the entire military leadership is now from a “post-war” era as they were commissioned post-1971, the system should look for other norms. It is still possible that these criteria could be ignored leading to the wrong person being elevated to the top job. India’s Defence Minister Manohar Parikkar is quite right when he says that seniority alone cannot be a criterion for promotion. This is where the Indian military needs doctrinal precepts to support its personnel policies, preventing tinkering of norms without objective analyses. India also needs to put in place institutional quadrennial defence reviews like they have in the US – to undertake reformations in the Indian military’s operational, administrative and support infrastructure and procedures.
RELATED MUST READ PART -I :- http://bcvasundhra.blogspot.in/2016/12/the-army-chiefs-challenge.html PART - II:- http://bcvasundhra.blogspot.in/2016/12/arm-in-arm-institutions-like-army-are.html
PART - III:- http://bcvasundhra.blogspot.in/2016/12/selection-of-army-chief-sensitive-issue.html
PART - IV:- http://bcvasundhra.blogspot.in/2016/12/men-in-shadows-derailed-bakshis-chances.html PART - V:- http://bcvasundhra.blogspot.in/2016/12/india-coas-brewing-storm-in-teacup.html
Selection of Army Chief
a
Sensitive Issue
By
Dinesh Kumar A civilian government’s prerogative to make appointments must be respected without a doubt. However, it is mandatory that it exercises judgement based solely on merit — without prejudice, lobbying or parochial considerations.
Lt Gen Bipin RawatIT is a convention rather than a statutory requirement for the senior-most lieutenant general to be appointed as a Service Chief. Thus, the government has not committed any illegal act by appointing Lt General Bipin Rawat as the country's 27th Army Chief after superseding two lieutenant generals. On the contrary, it has exercised its prerogative in a democracy where civilian supremacy over the armed forces is paramount.
Yet, the decision has evoked much criticism among sections of retired Army officers who have attributed it to “political interference”, described it as a “bad precedent” and even predicted “the beginning of the end of an apolitical Army”. The government has defended the decision to appoint Lt General Rawat as the Army Chief by explaining the rationale in a generalised and generic expressions of he being “best suited” to deal with “emerging challenges, including a reorganised and restructured military force in the north (China), continuing terrorism and proxy war from the west (Pakistan) and the situation in the North- East.” The government has also highlighted Lt General Rawat's operational experience as an Infantry officer in counter-insurgency (CI) operations in Jammu and Kashmir and the north-eastern states and also along both the Line of Control (LoC) with Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir and Line of Actual Control (LAC) with Chinese-occupied Aksai Chin.
This explanation sounds reasonable when viewed in isolation but not necessarily when seen in a larger framework. The senior-most superseded officer, Lt General Praveen Bakshi, is currently heading the critical Eastern Command which is entrusted with defending India's borders with three countries - China, Myanmar and Bangladesh and also the territorial integrity of Bhutan. It is also entrusted with counter-insurgency operations in the north-eastern states. If he is considered “less experienced”, then how did Lt General Bakshi, an armoured corps officer, be assigned to head the Eastern Command which in 1971 spearheaded the liberation of East Pakistan in a landmark war with Pakistan?
In any case, considering the security environment in the country, most officers from the Army's three principal combat Arms — Infantry, Artillery and Armoured Corps — have had exposure to either or both the CI and LoC / LAC environment in some form or the other. For example, officers from the armoured corps and the artillery are known to serve in Rashtriya Rifles units that are tasked specifically with CI operations.Will all future Army Chiefs from now on be required to be from the infantry with operational experience in Jammu and Kashmir, is one of the many questions that the announcement raises.
This is not about discussing the merits or demerits of Lt Generals Rawat and Bakshi. Their names are incidental. Rather, the limited point here is that both these officers rose to become Army Commanders after obtaining equivalent experience during their career. There is little to suggest that one is more outstanding than the other. With both officers at par, should not the seniority convention have prevailed so as to keep the armed forces away from needless controversy?
As it is civil-military relations have of late come under considerable stress with the government mishandling the One Rank One Pension issue; doing little to address the anomalies of the Seventh Pay Commission,; downgrading mid-ranking military officers vis-a-vis their civilians counterparts in the Ministry of Defence;milking the retaliatory strikes across the Line of Controlfor political capital and, more recently, announcing the next Army and Air Force chief barely a fortnight prior.
There is nothing wrong in making a “deep selection” to appoint a highly capable officer as the Service Chief or a regional commander. Currently, all professional parameters being satisfactory, an officer's seniority (date of birth and date of commission) determines his appointment to top positions. Aware of their standing in the service list many, if not most, Service officers are known to take the careerist route and play safe. This does not always result in the best officer getting promotions and being assigned pivotal posts. As such there is need for the armed forces, particularly the Army, to seriously review its deteriorated internal health which includes the quality of leadership, politics and vendetta among the higher ranks, the subjective system of annual confidential reports that has led to considerable litigation and financial, moral and professional corruption.
A larger challenge is from the political executive of the day. Considering the nature of petty, partisan and corrupt politics prevalent in the country and how politicians are used to blatantly interfering with appointments of civilian bureaucrats and policemen, the credibility of the Indian politician is at a constant low. While many politicians in India may otherwise treat the armed forces with awe, barring some individuals they take little interest in understanding the armed forces in particular and national security in general. National security is not the exclusive preserve of the armed forces; it is multi-faceted and complex requiring serious study and understanding by the political executive which takes all final decision.
Hence, if 'deep selection' is to henceforth become a norm in selecting Service chiefs, the government will have to devise a criteria. While a civilian government's prerogative to make appointments must be respected, it is mandatory that it exercises judgement based solely on merit without prejudice, lobbying or parochial considerations. Political meddling with a potent and monolithic organisation like the army has the potential for inducing political ambition in its leadership.
The country can do without politicians trying to use an Army headed by “deep selected” pliable generals to exert influence. Surely that will mark the end to India's professional and apolitical instrument of last resort in a country where governance continues to be marked by political and administrative mismanagement even as security threats abound.
