The brouhaha began with a statement attributed by a journalist to the former army chief, General Qamar Bajwa, who is said to have told a group of journalists in 2021 that peace with India was imperative because the Pakistan Army was in no position to fight the Indian Army.
Not being privy to that meeting, I do not have the context in which to situate the former chief’s remarks. And context is invariably crucial. I also do not have the exact phrasing of what General Bajwa said. Nor do I know if the meeting was on, or off the record. My assumption is that it was off the record, or what he said would have been reported immediately. That clearly raises the question of why the journalists chose to “reveal” what General Bajwa allegedly said nearly two years after that meeting.
Be that as it may, let’s get down to what combat readiness means. Since the issue can be assailed from various dimensions, I will be parsimonious and restrict myself to some general observations regarding operational readiness. This, therefore, is not a comparison of Pakistani and Indian armies. That would demand a different treatment. I do intend, however, to offer some oblique observations with reference to the regional context through a general overview.
At a very basic level, combat readiness is the ability of a military to fight and sustain that fight. The crucial element here is sustainment. Operational planning looks at various scenarios and calculates the costs for those scenarios. In doing so, one has to play both sides, one’s own as well as the adversary’s.
Planning, no matter how extensive and intensive, also has an endpoint in mind. It cannot be open-ended. But no matter how elaborate and nuanced the process of planning, information about the adversary and potential scenarios will always remain incomplete. In other words, after hostilities break out, despite meticulous planning, no one can control all the circumstances to one’s advantage. War (its many battles) shapes itself around ever-changing situations.
Initial planning can go awry; initial supplies can run dry or troops can run low on them; logistics are crucial — you can have the best troops and equipment, but battles take their toll.
What does this mean? Perhaps an example would be instructive. Contrary to popular belief, Napoleon did not miscalculate Russia’s vastly expansive terrain. If anything, he understood it perfectly. This is why he diligently focused on logistical preparations for the campaign for an entire year, forward deploying ammunition and supply depots, using artillery train battalions to keep his army supplied (since he had shed the old system of contracting civilian teams to handle horses for hauling artillery guns), establishing hospitals for the wounded et cetera. Despite these extensive preparations and excellent organizational skills, Napoleon’s campaign extended, both in time and space, beyond his original calculation because the Russians didn’t give him an early decisive victory.
Take a more recent example, the Russo-Ukraine War. When President Vladimir Putin sent his army into Ukraine, the aim was to move on Kyiv, take control of the city, install a Kremlin-supporting government, which presumably would have bludgeoned the Ukrainian morale, and then negotiate with the US-NATO alliance. If the plan had succeeded, the situation in Ukraine would likely be very different. It did not. The Ukrainian resistance and Russia’s inability to provide for the force and sustain the advance on Kyiv resulted in the Kremlin abandoning the main effort and shifting the focus to the eastern and southern theatres. Since then, the war has dragged on with both sides trying to attrit each other. Both have run out of steam for any major combined arms offensive.
What are the takeaways? Initial planning can go awry; initial supplies can run dry or troops can run low on them; logistics are crucial — you can have the best troops and equipment, but battles take their toll. Men get killed; material gets destroyed. Nothing remains in prime shape.
Offensive combined arms maneuvers increase the probability of attrition. Such maneuvers also rely on speed and speed creates its own logistics problems. Supplies have to be transported by road. The supply points remain vulnerable.
To quote from a 1942 US Naval College report titled Sound Military Decision: “Success is won, not by personnel and materiel in prime condition, but by the debris of an organisation worn by the strain of campaign and shaken by the shock of battle. The objective is attained, in war, under conditions which often impose extreme disadvantages.”
The report, which was used as a textbook at the Naval College, remains spot-on. Even though the conduct of war, given new systems and platforms, continues to change, the fundamentals remain the same. Trained human resource, equipment, logistics and replenishment and a state’s ability to take a battering are as crucial today as they were in the 1900s.
Modern war requires a very complex logistics and supply system with multiple tiers. The Table of Organization and Equipment (TOE), a document in modern militaries, not only details the wartime mission, capabilities, organizational structure, and mission-essential personnel but also supply and equipment requirements for military units.
Tanks, Armored Personnel Carriers and Self-Propelled Artillery – all essential components of maneuver warfare – are very logistics-heavy. In his book, Technology and War, Martin van Creveld writes: “In 1940-41, a German Panzer division engaged in active operations already required 300 tons a day. By 1944-45, an American armored division was consuming twice that amount, and the most recent estimates are of the order of 1000-1500 tons and more.”
A typical armored division would have supplies based on troop strength, such as rations; items listed and identified in the TOE (clothing, personal equipment, vehicle replacements, etc); POL (Petrol, oil, lubricants); supply requirements for damaged equipment which cannot have a fixed quantity and would depend on attrition rates; and, yes, ammunition.
Offensive combined arms maneuvers increase the probability of attrition. Such maneuvers also rely on speed and speed creates its own logistics problems. Supplies have to be transported by road. The supply points remain vulnerable (especially in modern war where a number of technologies allow adversaries to locate fixed positions and target them), as do long convoys of vehicles carrying supplies.
Then there’s the nexus between fighting and sustaining a war and a state’s economy. To quote US Rear Admiral Henry Eccles, “logistics is the bridge between military operations and a nation’s economy.” The linkage is not just about existing stocks and how reduced human resources and material can be replenished but also the industrial base which can supply to the fighting troops what they need. You can hold the best rifle in the world but if you are out of ammo, it is about as good as a wooden club. And that’s just a basic, banal example. Rations, POL, replacement of damaged equipment, cannibalizing equipment and vehicles, replenishing ammunition, evacuating casualties…the list of what needs to be done is long and everything that needs to be done gets done (or doesn’t) under fire.
Calculating the strengths and weaknesses of two adversaries is not a function of TV soundbites and choreographed revelations. How the two sides would fare is a question that depends on multiple factors and the nature of the armed clash itself.
Pakistan and India are a conflict dyad; they are also a nuclear dyad. They have fought two Test matches (’65/’71), two ODIs (Rann of Kutch and Kargil) and counting out India’s claim of 2016 surgical strikes, one T20 (February 2019). Given the presence of nuclear weapons, ideally both should stay away from armed conflict. In this context, India’s desire to find a band where it can punish Pakistan short of a Test match or even an ODI is highly destabilizing. That is of course a different discussion and outside the scope of this article.
The point is that a Test match will favor a bigger economy and higher quantities in men, material and reserve stocks. While that asymmetry will reduce in an ODI, the scales can tilt one way or another in favor of either, whether militarily or more broadly diplomatically. The T20 result will depend on who could concentrate force better at the point of conflict and dominate the spectrum in that episode. On February 27, 2019, PAF dominated the point of conflict.
The important point to note, leaving aside the technical discussion, is that while Test matches are out, ODIs and T20s have the potential of escalating beyond the area/point of conflict.
In a nutshell — and the foregoing is a sketchy treatment of a very complex set of phenomena — calculating the strengths and weaknesses of two adversaries is not a function of TV soundbites and choreographed revelations. How the two sides would fare is a question that depends on multiple factors and the nature of the armed clash itself. A drawn-out war generally favors bigger numbers; short, sharp conflicts, on the other hand, give a weaker adversary the chance to offset the advantage of bigger numbers.
In the end, over a longer trajectory, the power of the purse begins to play out. It becomes less about courage on the battlefield and more about economic and industrial strength.