A security architecture without the mortar

A security architecture without the mortar

News:

1. The article discusses about India’s national security inadequacies which stem from the absence of a national security vision.

Important Facts:

2. Background:

• Defence Planning Committee (DPC): In April 2018, the government set up a Defence Planning Committee (DPC) to assist in the creation of national security strategy, international defence engagement strategy, roadmap to build a defence manufacturing ecosystem, strategy to boost defence exports, and priority capability development plans etc.
• Strategic Policy Group : Earlier this month, it also decided to revive the Strategic Policy Group (SPG) within the overall National Security Council (NSC) system.

3. Revival of these committees by the government in its final year in office raises question about national security performance and preparedness.
4. Author observes that India’s neighbourhood policy continues to be in the doldrums and there is a clear absence of vision on how to balance, engage and work with the many great powers in the regional and the broader international scene.
5. Author observe that recently there is deterioration in security environment. Both the overall violence in Jammu and Kashmir and ceasefire violations on the Line of Control reached a 14-year high in 2017, a trend that refuses to subside in 2018.
6. Author rejects government claim of surgical strike as befitting response and observe that he surgical strikes hardly made any significant gains
7. The pressure from China is also on the rise. The Chinese forces according to report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs are back in the Doklam plateau with more force. The report goes on to fault the government for “continuing with its conventionally deferential foreign policy towards China”.
8. Lacunas in India’s defence preparedness:

• Absence of defence reforms: India spends close to $50 billion annually on defence and yet there are serious concerns about the level of our defence preparedness.
• Non-functional higher defence organisation: India’s defence policy is hardly with any political oversight or vision. There is little conversation between the armed forces and the political class, and even lesser conversation among the various arms of the forces.
• Absence of jointness in the Indian armed forces: India’s doctrines, command structures, force deployments and defence acquisition continue as though each arm is going to fight a future war on its own.
• Not only do the various arms of the Indian armed forces plan their strategies in silos but even their rhetoric is partisan. Eg. Army Chief, Gen. Bipin Rawat’s statement about the Army, not the armed forces as a whole, being prepared for a “two-and-a-half front war”.
• Chief of Defence Staff (CDS): The talk of appointing a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) has all but died down. Leave alone appointing a CDS, even the key post of military adviser in the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) remains vacant. And the government seems to mistakenly think that by having the NSA chair, the SPG and DPC will take care of the fundamental problems in the country’s higher defence sector.
• The NSC, which replicates the membership of the Cabinet Committee on Security, almost never meets under the new regime, and the National Security Advisory Board, initially set up by the Vajpayee government, to seek ‘outside expertise’ on strategic matters, is today a space for retired officials. As a result, there is little fresh thinking within the government or perspective planning on the country’s national security or defence.

9. Issues with NSA: NSA is not a legally-mandated one. So one might rightly wonder how an unelected and retired official with no parliamentary accountability has come to occupy such a crucial position in the country’s national security decision making, and whether this is healthy in a parliamentary democracy.

• All that the SPG and DPC would achieve is to further bureaucratise the national security decision making and centralise all national security powers under the PMO. While this might provide a little more coordination in decision making, these committees are hardly sufficient to get the country’s national security system back on track.
• To expect the NSA to chair all these committees and then action their recommendations while at the same time running the country’s national security affairs on a day-to-day basis is unrealistic, and would end up producing sub-optimal outcomes.
• Under the present system, where the ratio of revenue to capital expenditure in defence is roughly 65:35%, any serious attempt at modernisation would be impossible.

10. Way forward:

• Ideally, India should have an overall national security document from which the various agencies and the arms of the armed forces draw their mandate and create their own respective and joint doctrines which would then translate into operational doctrines for tactical engagement.