SOURCE: https://www.indiatoday.in/magazine/special-report/story/20201207-the-high-se-as-command-1744377-2020-11-27
Indian Navy Proposal For Maritime Theatre Command; Will it take wings?
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The High Seas Command
A joint study draws up the ambitious Maritime Theatre Command by restructuring existing military commandsto straddle India's entire maritime sphere. Will it take wings or meet the fate of its predecessor?
Sandeep Unnithan
From his headquarters near the picturesque Binaga Bay in Karwar, Karnataka, the commander-in-chief (C-in-C) of India’s first Maritime Theatre Command (MTC) will have an overview of his enormous responsibilities. His ships will not only patrol the country’s 7,516-km-long coastline but also its distant maritime interests astride the world’s most important ocean, stretching as far as the Cape of Good Hope off South Africa and to the southern shores of the Indonesian archipelago.
The creation of the post of maritime theatre commander and a new integrated command, subsuming all operational aspects of the four existing naval commands, are key recommendations of a recent Indian Navy study. The proposed MTC will also include Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter jets, helicopters and transport aircraft on the Indian peninsula, two Indian Army brigades, comprising around 10,000 soldiers, and, interestingly, all Coast Guard patrol vessels, helicopters and aircraft.
The study, part of a government mandate to reduce India’s 17 single-service commands into five joint commands, and prepared by vice chief of naval staff Vice Admiral G. Ashok Kumar, will soon be handed over to chief of defence staff (CDS) General Bipin Rawat.
Government officials told india today that the study proposes a model that can be implemented in a short timeframe, nine months to a year, and does not require the creation of additional posts or flag ranks or even office space. It will use existing manpower and resources. It is the most complex of the two tri-services theatre commands to be created in the next two years, the other one being the Integrated Air Defence Command headed by the IAF.
Significantly, the MTC will be the first one that loosens a service chief’s command over operations and assets. A parallel study for setting up the Air Defence Command is underway, but it’s not as radical because the IAF chief will hold on to his fighter, transport and combat fleets.
The MTC commander-in-chief will report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee headed by the CDS. The navy chief will shed their operational roles and be primarily responsible for ‘Raise, Train and Sustain’ functions, administration, acquisitions and training. The three C-in-Cs will be reported to the CNS for ‘raise train and sustain’ functions and to the Maritime Theatre Commander for operations. The navy study, thus, paints a picture of the desired end state of independent India’s most significant military reform that kicked off this year with the appointment of the first CDS and the bifurcation of the military into theatres and service headquarters.
The MTC, earlier called the Peninsular Command, is likely to be the more significant of the first two theatres because it has a larger share of assets from the air force and the army. It could serve as a template for other more complex theatre commands to follow. The northern, eastern and western theatre commands, which directly address China and Pakistan, portend greater inter-services rivalry and will have to be undertaken on live borders. This could push their implementation to the second phase of the theaterisation.
The Commands' Challenge
General Rawat completes the first year of his CDS tenure on January 1, 2021. He has just two more years to complete his biggest task, of creating integrated theatre commands. A command is a military formation headed by a three-star C-in-C and is responsible for all military tasks in a given operational space. All of India’s 18 commands presently are single-service commands, which means they are exclusively run by the army, navy or the air force. The army and the air force have seven commands each; the navy has the remaining four. The Strategic Forces Command, which has operational control of India’s nuclear weapons, is the sole joint-services command.
The 18 commands are not co-located, and train, plan and exercise separately. If the IAF commander, for instance, needs to ask for a naval platform to assist his operations, he will have to initiate a complicated bureaucratic procedure through two service verticals.
Theaterisation pools in all resources, army, navy and air force, under a single theatre commander. “The setting up of such a maritime command, especially if it is to operate under the chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, is a right step that will address the issue of dual-hatted chiefs, which is an anomaly and a managerial nightmare,” says Anit Mukherjee, associate professor in the South Asia Programme at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Singapore. “It is encouraging, though, as it seemingly addresses a fundamental tenet for jointness/ unity of command and control.”
The MTC integrates all Indian navy, army, air force and coast guard assets to achieve what the 2017 ‘Joint Forces Doctrine’ terms the addressing of the ‘integrated theatre battle’. This operationally adaptable force will ensure decisive victory in a network-centric environment across the entire spectrum of conflict in varied geographic domains. The Joint Maritime Theatre will not only have to address the growing power of China’s PLA Navy, which with 350 warships is the world’s largest, but also integrated Chinese military power. China’s president Xi Jinping recently set the goal of turning the PLA into a ‘fully modern military’ matching the US by 2027.
“Indian sea power today will not have the luxury of fighting the PLA Navy alone,” says Rear Admiral Sudarshan Shrikhande, who once headed naval intelligence. “It will also be fighting all the combined elements of the PLA’s military power, from air power to long-range ballistic missiles, range of expeditionary capabilities, cyber warfare and space-based assets. Our responses against the PLA Navy likewise, ought to be joint.”
Before that, MTC will have to deal with inter-services rivalries arising from the sharing of assets. The navy might not have trouble persuading the army to shed two amphibious brigades, based in Thiruvananthapuram and Port Blair, a force of nearly 12,000 infantry soldiers who can be transported on naval utility vessels to enemy shores. But it could face resistance while getting the IAF to move its maritime strike assets to the MTC, the Jaguars based in Jamnagar and Su-30MKIs and Tejas aircraft in Thanjavur.
Senior IAF commanders loathe tying their air assets to geographical theatres. Top navy officials say they have addressed this by proposing service verticals within the MTC. While the command will be headed by a three-star navy officer, the army and IAF verticals will be better interfaces with their respective services. The MTC will have a similar vertical for the Coast Guard, which presently reports to the defence minister through the defence secretary.
While this reporting chain will continue, Coast Guard assets will be placed under the MTC. The maritime theatre commander, for instance, could deploy Coast Guard patrol vessels for the navy’s ‘mission-based deployments’, warships deployed at seven vital points in the Indian Ocean, Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Navy officials cite the government designating the navy as the principal authority for overall maritime security post-26/11 as the logic behind this move.
The MTC is being created with the navy’s inhouse resources. The MTC C-in-C will be based out of the navy’s existing base, INS Kadamba in Karwar, and function with less than 300 staff, lesser than the crew strength of a Delhi-class destroyer.
Moreover, 2021 could well be the time to implement drastic restructuring in the service. The navy will see a rare and unprecedented reshuffle of its top brass when chief of naval staff Admiral Karambir Singh, vice chief of naval staff Vice Admiral Ashok Kumar, C-in-C West Vice Admiral Ajit Kumar, C-in-C East Vice Admiral A.K. Jain and C-in-C South Vice Admiral A.K. Chawla all retire within months of each other.
The Cost Benefit
The navy is yet to calculate savings on account of this command. Top navy officials point to potential savings by halting acquisitions and new infrastructure for the Coast Guard. “The nation can ill-afford two maritime forces,” says a senior naval official.
Former Coast Guard director general Prabhakaran Paleri terms as “ridiculous” the move to place the Coast Guard under the navy in peacetime. (It is done so only in war.) “Navies cannot enforce maritime law; they are meant for war, which is why the navy itself had proposed the raising of the Coast Guard in 1978,” he says. The MTC structure will call for modifying the Navy Act and the Coast Guard Act, he adds.
The MTC is a gigantic version of the much smaller Andaman and Nicobar tri-services command that India had unsuccessfully attempted to create in 2001. The command was held in rotation by three-star officers from each service. This experiment was envisaged as a template for other geographically and functionally delineated joint commands. Lack of political will and inter-services rivalry thwarted this model from being replicated. Finally, in 2016, the navy took this command back.
Under MTC, the Andaman and Nicobar Command will go back to what it was in the mid-1990s, Fortress Andaman or FORTAN, just another outpost in the maritime theatre commander’s new domain.
