Joint Armed Force Doctrine

Recently, the Joint Armed Force Doctrine of India has been unveiled. It is a document that gives out the guiding principles behind the approach of the Indian military towards war fighting. They revolve around the approach towards the security concerns and tackling the threats in terms of military conflict.

Origin

The strive to create a joint Indian military was felt as back as before sixty years. Lord Mountbatten who is known as the architect of the India’s Higher Defence Organization had suggested setting up a Chief of Defence and debated for creation of a Joint Staff. But the bureaucracy of that time had resisted this effort fearing an overpowered military. Later, it could not be implemented as the branches of military enjoyed the autonomy through this single service approach.

However, the need for a joint command was felt after the Kargil war. This was introduced in the defence reforms of 2001 but never found a suitable place in the practice due to the blame game and corruption involved in the defence sector. The Joint Armed Forces Doctrine of 2017 should have been an effort in this regard of atleast integrating the various groups of armed forces.

Characteristics of the Doctrine

• Surgical strikes-These are attacks aimed a particular legitimate military target and not intended to cause any collateral damage to person or property in the adjacent areas of the target. These have been recognized as a major retaliatory toolkit against any sort of terror provocations.
• Nuclear strategy-There has been a shift of nuclear strategy from credible minimum deterrence to credible deterrence.
• Expanding overseas operations– The document provides for complete and effective inter-operability with countries both big and small. These involve logistics, communications and intelligence collaboration with the countries like USA, Australia and Japan. It has made reference to the 2015 maritime security strategy wherein the position of Indian diaspora in the national strategy has been emphasized upon. These are mostly in the Middle East or North African regions that are connected through the seas.
• Integrated Theatre Battle-The doctrine provides that Integrated Theatre Battle shall be undertaken for ensuring decisive victory in the network centric enevironment.
• Self Sufficiency-The National Military Objective under it provides that India must work towards achieving self-sufficiency in defence equipment and technology and target for technological indeopendence has been set at 2035. The Make in India initiative can play a great role in this regard.

Criticisms of the Doctrine

The doctrine has received vehement criticisms from several critics. Some of the major criticisms are:

• Nuclear doctrine shift– By indicating the shift in it nuclear doctrine, an anomaly has been created between the nuclear strategy doctrine and the new Joint Armed Forces Doctrine. Many have expressed concern over indicating this paradigm shift through this document.
• Civil-military relations-The document of this level contains only two appendices to it. One explaining a doctrine and the other on civil-military relations. There is already a divide between the military and civilian bureaucrats in the Defence Ministry. Over and above that the second appendix merely lists down the complaints that the military has against the civilians. It gives more importance to views of military over the other group, further widening the divide.
• Maintaining status quo-The military has always been blamed for not taking adequate steps to have a Joint Staff for Defence. The Joint Armed Forces Doctrine merely continues this status quo. The definition of Jointness mentioned in the appendix provides for joint war fighting and joint operations. But joint operations are not a concept like joint war fighting, they have evolved from both joint and single and joint approaches. This significantly shifts the focus from the actual initiative of joint staff.
• Lack of expertise in drafting-The doctrine has been criticized of being poorly drafted without adequate referencing of the plagiarized content. There is a lack of academic integrity and use of plagiarism detection software while drafting this document. While the Indian Navy’s Doctrine is quite holistic in nature and indicates some investment being made in its doctrine writing branch, the Indian Army or the Air Force have not invested that significantly to develop such expertise. These lacunae expose the lack of intellectual capacity development in the Indian military which can prove to be a very major setback.
• Lack of clarity-If the sole purpose of the doctrine as the name suggests is to promote joint command, then the accurate mechanism or the model for such joint command has not been laid down in the doctrine.

This doctrine can be perceived as a very bold announcement by India in times of an ongoing military standoff at Doklam with China. It does provide light of hope on some positive and active steps but they also have some lacunae which can in the end question the credibility of the document. As it has received criticisms in all respects it may prove to be a futile document after so many efforts. So there is a serious need to relook into the lacunae and find means to rectify them.