Col Gautam Das (retd.) speaks with Col Anil Bhat (retd.) on his book “Crafting a New Indian Art of War For Future Challenges” | SAM Conversation
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00:00 Welcome to SAM Conversation, a program of South Asia Monitor.
00:15 Our guest today is Lt. Col. Gautam Das, whose latest book, "Crafting the New Indian Art
00:26 of War for Future Challenges," has just been published and released.
00:36 This is what I consider a very important book and one which will be very informative and
00:46 interesting.
00:47 "Crafting the New Indian Art of War for Future Challenges."
00:56 I would like to begin by reminding the audience that the Indian Army may have been put together
01:10 by the British, but in the period between 1758 and 1818, 60 years, they battled the
01:21 Marathas and it is from the Marathas that they learned about guerrilla warfare.
01:30 The Marathas were specialists in both infantry and artillery.
01:43 The tactics of fighting, hitting and withdrawing before the enemy could react.
02:05 It was this tactic that the British learned from the Indian soldiers, the Marathas.
02:17 And now let's come to the First World War, 1914 to 1918.
02:25 The first very highly technological war in which there were high rate of firing weapons
02:32 at long ranges.
02:34 There were 1.5 million Indian troops who won the First World War for the Allies.
02:42 This is no exaggeration.
02:50 Everything was new to them, the climate, the people, the cultures, they overcame everything
02:56 and they excelled.
03:00 And the British had to change their policy of not awarding the Victoria Cross to non-whites,
03:08 with Khudadad Khan becoming the first recipient of the Victoria Cross.
03:19 Then came the Second World War, 2.5 million Indian soldiers were the winning factor for
03:27 the Allies again.
03:31 Now came independence, the First World War, 1948, 47, 48 in Jammu and Kashmir.
03:40 It is the civilian leadership which didn't allow the war to be completed.
03:49 Then came 1962, again the civilian leadership was very, very flawed.
04:01 And it's great to say that you fight to the last man, last bullet.
04:08 But what happened to Major Shaitan Singh and his company should not have happened.
04:16 The army should not have reached a situation where they are short of men and they are short
04:21 of ammunition, they are short of equipment.
04:24 And we were in any case fighting that war with a rifle which was very old, the .303
04:32 Lee and Field.
04:33 Then came 1965, we were at the gates of Lahore.
04:43 We were stopped again.
04:47 1971, the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi listened to the then Chief General, later
04:58 Field Marshal Sam Manuchow.
05:02 And the result was a 13-day war and a division of Pakistan.
05:10 And Pakistan became liberated and became born as Bangladesh.
05:20 Along with independence came insurgencies.
05:27 The Indian soldiers became specialists in counterinsurgency warfare also.
05:35 And also in 1947-48, the Indian army redefined mountain warfare by fighting at Hajipur with
05:44 tanks, taking tanks there, 14,000 feet.
05:49 What I'm trying to say is that there is probably no better soldier in the world at adapting
06:00 at the amount of resilience.
06:03 So what Colonel Gautam Sen has to say about crafting the new Indian art of war for future
06:14 challenges without saying anything further, I request Colonel Das to hold on, to please
06:24 share his thoughts, share the ideas of his book, please.
06:33 Thank you, Colonel Bhatt.
06:34 Anil, we've known each other a long time.
06:37 And while you have, in a way, introduced the topic for me, thank you very much indeed,
06:44 with Shivaji and his Ghanimi Kava, the term used by them and by his professionals, Maratha
06:51 soldiery, the Bargir, or the mounted soldier, whom you did not mention, by the way.
06:57 But let me come to this particular book.
07:01 Those who are fortunate, or I was fortunate that they were attending the launch, I told
07:07 them that this particular book was born out of sorrow and born out of a sense of grievance.
07:13 I will repeat that for you and your audience, Anil.
07:17 The sorrow was that on the 15th of November 1962, I came down from boarding school along
07:24 with a lot of my schoolmates, barring the class 11 lot.
07:28 I was in class 10, just finished school, just finished that year's exams.
07:33 And we all came down to Sirigudi station from the boarding school in Darjeeling.
07:38 And the 1962 war was still on at the time.
07:41 And there were casualties coming in from what was called NEFA at the time, North East Frontier
07:46 Agency, now Arunachal Pradesh, and coming to the same platform in Sirigudi Junction,
07:51 no longer used very much now because it is a mitigated station.
07:56 But those were Indian soldiers walking wounded, stretcher cases, and being an army brat, I
08:03 was very badly affected.
08:04 I had grown up in the cocoon of the army.
08:07 And it's what made up my mind to pick up the profession of arms at that stage, just having
08:15 finished class 10.
08:17 But the sorrow comes from there.
08:20 The grievance comes from the fact that in my service as an infantry officer, very often,
08:29 while practicing advance to contact as a Vanguard Company commander and such like, I did with
08:39 consideration realize that perhaps we could have done some of those tactical maneuvers
08:44 better in our practice phase.
08:48 And therefore, avoided some of the mistakes that we subsequently did, starting from the
08:52 first time of my second lieutenant service.
08:58 And sure enough, there were mistakes, some pretty horrendous ones.
09:03 The one which affected me most at the time in the 71 war was the 14 Grenadiers attack
09:11 on Buruching.
09:12 Now, curiously enough, the core commander is the equivalent core commander of 15 Corps
09:20 then, which is like today's Northern commander.
09:23 General Sattar Singh, he came to the cricket I was commanding, cricket 561 in Southern
09:32 J&K in the Mashara sector, along with MK Bhatt, the Regimental Commander, Brigade Commander
09:39 and so on.
09:40 To discuss a particular approach we were coupling.
09:45 And along with them, they brought Lieutenant Colonel Inderjeet Singh, CO of 14 Grenadiers,
09:51 who was the Reserve Battalion commander of the whole division.
09:55 Very smart, very handsome CFO, CO of the Reserve Battalion.
10:01 I happened to meet him there.
10:04 But within a year, this battalion was decimated by the attack.
10:09 They were forced to put in.
10:11 And I felt that there were serious mistakes in the way this was launched and executed.
10:17 So therefore, in this book, I cover the period starting from August 47 and I take it to the
10:27 end of my period of grievance that I have used, which is August 2020, the Galwan episode.
10:35 And I have said that by, depending upon whose calculations you're using, we have lost anywhere
10:40 between or lost the rights to patrol if you want to be so diplomatic, a certain large
10:46 amount of equipment.
10:48 So that is my grievance that we are still there from 62 to this place.
10:55 Sir, thank you very much.
10:57 And I'm very glad you come to the point of Galwan because with the Chinese, we learned
11:07 a new kind of war, a war from 1967, where after which they pressed very hard for us
11:16 not for each other, for not firing at each other.
11:22 Because they lost almost 400 in those skirmishes in Natula and Chola in 1967, September, they
11:29 lost about 400.
11:31 We lost 67.
11:33 And thereafter, they pressed very hard and let's not fire at each other.
11:37 So now began a new kind of warfare where we are doing border management, bulletless border
11:44 management by mukkebazi, fisticuffs, pushing, pulling, wrestling, grab, you know, and finally
11:56 even throwing stones at each other and the medieval barbaric way of iron rods with nails
12:06 on them, which the Chinese tried and they killed 20 of us.
12:17 And what the official reports of how many we killed are about 43.
12:21 But there are other reports which say we may have killed more than 100.
12:27 And again, ironically, without arms, without firing back at them, with bare hands.
12:38 I mean, you are again proving a point here that this is the kind of adaptability.
12:48 Now please, if you can tell us what we require to be considering the fact that we face two
13:01 foes, two enemies, China and Pakistan, both are nuclear armed.
13:09 It's a great scratch each other's back kind of friendship that they have and I know of
13:20 a lot of support of building up the nuclear arsenal.
13:28 The agreement between China and Pakistan is what they're calling the iron bond or the
13:37 iron bodies in Mandarin.
13:42 But to come back to the book and to the things I put in and to answer the question just posed
13:48 by Colonel Anil Pat, the book covers the period from August 47 to August 2020, which is the
13:56 Galwan issue.
13:58 And I have taken examples, both good and bad.
14:03 One of the first good examples that I have in the book is the one Colonel Bhatt has referred
14:08 to himself, the tanks at Zojila.
14:10 There are others, which I'm happy to point out that we have been, our commanders at different
14:17 levels have been able to think of and execute.
14:21 So it's not that we are not capable of it.
14:23 We are and our commanders are capable of coming up with tactical solutions to actual tactical
14:32 problems on the ground at the spur of the moment.
14:36 So I emphasize in this book, what I feel were our shortcomings over time, the same period
14:44 that I'm talking about, for which I've given specific examples in detail from published
14:49 works, including the official history, is that our policy that we have, our military
14:58 doctrinal policy, which by the way, is not something that is not unpublished, like the
15:05 National Security Strategy, this military, the Indian Army's doctrine is a published
15:11 document available on the net to anyone.
15:14 But it needs to be more aggressive.
15:17 This is my first point, that our tactical doctrine and the doctrine for the level above
15:26 it, that of operational art needs to be inherently more aggressive than what we are following
15:33 up.
15:34 No doubt, sir.
15:35 No doubt.
15:36 Therefore, what we need to have, number one, is a aggressive defensive policy.
15:40 I'm not advocating an offensive policy such as the American policy for the world, their
15:47 military policy for the world.
15:49 They're clearly in a completely different mindset of putting in assaults, attacks, or
15:59 capturing territory anywhere in the world.
16:00 I'm not talking of that.
16:01 All I'm saying is that where we are pressed by two political armies whom we are facing,
16:10 the Pakistanis, because the Pakistan army also tries to handle the politics of Pakistanis.
16:15 It has been very famously described as every country has an army, every nation has an army.
16:24 Pakistan is the only country where the army has a country.
16:33 On the other side is China.
16:35 Now, China's is avowedly a political army.
16:38 That is part of their actual official status.
16:43 It is not the Chinese army that you face or that we face.
16:47 It is the army of the Communist Party of China.
16:50 Party of China, absolutely.
16:54 It is reiterated at their army day parades by no less than the president of the country
17:00 who's also the head of the army and head of the government.
17:06 And he says that your duty lies to the Chinese Communist Party and not to the Chinese government.
17:13 So, therefore, they are prepared to act against any government of China irrespective of the
17:17 fact that it was set up by the party.
17:21 If required, they will act against the people of China.
17:25 It will act against the government of China in the interests of the party.
17:30 And they cite the collapse of the Soviet Union to say that we will never nationalize the
17:37 army.
17:38 They say so.
17:39 He says so every year.
17:40 We will never nationalize the army.
17:45 Soviet Union first made the mistake of nationalizing their armies into Russian army or this army
17:50 or that army.
17:51 The mere fact that they nationalized the army according to the Chinese is the reason of
17:55 the downturn.
17:56 So, they're very clear they're never going to nationalize the People's Liberation Army.
18:01 It is the army of the party.
18:03 So, we have two political armies against us who are apolitical and are also run on a basis
18:12 of strategic expediency, military, political, as well as military expediency by the government
18:20 of the day irrespective of the time.
18:22 I mean, we have one government till tomorrow and under a party which has been in power
18:29 since 2014 and we've had a party which has been in power from much before that.
18:35 But this policy of appeasement or semi-appeasement against the Chinese.
18:41 This causes problems in the sense that these two political armies are aware that we are
18:49 very wary or hesitant to actually use force in addition to the fact that we have actually
18:56 signed these agreements with China which they break at will and we are left holding the
19:04 thing trying to appease them.
19:06 So, this is one factor and the major factor.
19:09 Thereafter, I have gone on to talk of in the book after examining the practices that therefore
19:17 we need what I call the 10 commandments.
19:19 I will not bore you with details but they're all based on apart from the defensive, the
19:26 purely defensive when needed, fixed defenses wherever, plains, mountains, wherever needed,
19:31 where there is a threat to that area, it has to be defended and therefore the army will
19:37 do it.
19:38 We are meant for this.
19:39 When I say we, it's been almost 33 years since I left the army but nevertheless, I still
19:46 say we for the army.
19:48 The issue here is that what I believe is that our defensive policy should be such that if
19:57 we are very closely threatened, we should strike back, we should counter attack, we
20:02 should counter move.
20:05 The Chinese after 1962 have been describing their assault, their offensive on us as counter
20:11 attack in self-defense and this is before we did any such thing other than occupying
20:17 the Thagla Ridge.
20:19 That was for them, that was the attack and that is the whole.
20:24 I will end here and hand you back to Karnubhat.
20:28 So, the point here is that we need a more aggressive offensive strategy even as part
20:35 of our defensive posture.
20:36 To tell you any more would be tedious.
20:40 I would have to name the 10 commandments.
20:42 I don't think it's worth it.
20:43 No, no, sir.
20:44 Absolutely.
20:45 You have hit the nail on the head with how you, you know, in your stressing on this point
20:54 again, the assertiveness of the government in policy and not have statements being repeated
21:08 that China has not taken an inch of our territory.
21:12 What's that effect?
21:13 Right from 2020, they've not budged from whatever they took.
21:19 And now, finally, what more we have to be very, very focused on is cyber, the cyber
21:28 warfare, espionage, psychological warfare, covert operations, artificial intelligence
21:38 and propaganda.
21:39 These are what we must use in very good measure against China because China is going to be
21:49 fighting us in every other way except bullets, which they are very shy of.
21:56 Sir, your book is, I recommend should be read very widely.
22:05 And it's, thank you very much for bringing out these points.
22:12 Maybe we will be able to meet again for once I had the pleasure of reviewing the book.
22:20 Thank you very much, sir.
22:21 All the best.
22:22 Thank you very much, Colonel Barton.
22:24 It's been an honor and a pleasure to speak to you and to your viewers on South Asia Monitor,
22:30 SAM discussions.
22:31 Right.
22:32 Thank you.
22:33 Thank you.
22:34 Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Good night.