Reforms in Higher Defence Organization.

Byline: Raashid Wali Janjua

'There are two thousand years of experience to tell us that the only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old idea out.'

(B.H. Liddell Hart)

Chief of Defence Staff is an appointment that exercises command over all three services resulting in operational, logistic, procurement, and force readiness synergies between three Services. The three Services in armed forces of India and Pakistan inherited the organizational ethos and professional values of the British Indian Army which essentially was a colonial organization meant to run the British colonial project in their 'Jewel in the Crown' possession i.e India. While the British moved on and reorganized their own army in keeping with the requirements of the modern age Pakistan and India remained stuck in the old groove with three Chiefs of equal rank for Army, Navy, and the Air force without a central command authority. The modern armies like United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany Spain, and Italy have adopted CDS as the top military appointment with Australia having the similar model but with a different name i.e Chief of the Defence Force.

A Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee existed for both countries that comprised three Services' chiefs and was meant to coordinate defence planning in the absence of a unifying Headquarters, other than the Ministry of Defence in case of India and an effete Joint Staff Headquarters in case of Pakistan. In India the need for jointness in command and operations was felt acutely in its three wars with Pakistan, especially the Kargil Conflict. It was the Kargil Conflict that brought to the fore the need for operational synergies and tri-service coordination for the Indian armed forces. The Kargil Review Committee instituted to identify operational and strategic shortcomings in the conduct of war and also recommended the creation of a new appointment i.e Chief of the Defence Staff to add necessary suppleness and punch to the conduct of operations in a Tri Service environment.

General V.P Malik writes in his book on Kargil that he had to do some serious convincing with the three Services Chiefs while asking for a tri-service response to the emerging threat. He ascribes some initial delay in employment of air to the same convincing effort and hoped that in any such situation in future the time would be taken by the forelock, instead of the desultoriness displayed during Kargil. The Indian Prime Minister...

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