David Smith, a former US army colonel who retired from service in 2012, has written a very useful book about attitudes, values and training at India’s premier mid-career school, the Defence Services Staff College. The book, The Wellington Experience: A Study of Attitudes and Values Within the Indian Army, has been published by the Stimson Centre, a non-partisan policy research centre in Washington DC.
Colonel Smith has had a long association with South Asia, particularly with the Pakistan Army. He is a graduate of Command and Staff College, Quetta and had two three-year tours as a US army attache in Pakistan. The current volume on DSSC follows a similar earlier story, The Quetta Experience: Attitudes and Values within Pakistan Army. That volume was published in 2018 by the Wilson Centre, a prominent think tank in DC.
Both books used the same methodology: interviews conducted with US military students at Quetta and Wellington, covering nearly four decades in both cases.
The Wellington Experience offers many findings and of course an assessment of what those findings mean for US policymakers and the United States’ strategic partnership with India both in terms of what such partnership means for South Asia and, more importantly, for the growing strategic rivalry between the United States and China. Border skirmishes in eastern Ladakh have further sharpened the salience of that aspect.
But of the several findings, I intend to focus on three related ones. This must not be construed to mean other findings are less useful. This selection is more for reasons of parsimony.
The DSSC provides an adequate mid-career officer education, but the college’s approach to pedagogy sharply restricts useful learning and inhibits the development of critical thinking.
From a US perspective, the ground doctrine taught at the DSSC pays insufficient attention to combat support and combat service support functions, and fails to adequately address combined arms operations.
The DSSC fails to provide effective joint training.
As should be obvious, an institution that doesn’t award innovative thinking ends up creating career-oriented, risk-averse officers in the higher echelon. Contrast this, for instance, with what William Lind, a conservative US author, wrote in a 1989 essay: “During 19th-century war-games, German junior officers routinely received problems that could only be solved by disobeying orders. Orders themselves specified the result to be achieved, but never the method (Auftragstaktik). Initiative was more important than obedience. (Mistakes were tolerated as long as they came from too much initiative rather than too little.)”
With reference to ‘b’ and ‘c’, instruction appears to defeat the very purpose of having a school that is officially configured to bring the three services together for purposes of joint training. Hence, Defence Services Staff College. The other important implication of these two related findings is that the three generations of officers — senior staff, directing staff and students — create a continuum of traditional operational thinking in what is clearly the creme de la creme of the officer corps of India’s three defence services.
Here’s an excerpt from Smith’s book:
“Most students agreed that the major joint exercise at the end of the school year mainly involved meticulously prepared and over-rehearsed presentations by each service about its capabilities and contributions to the final plan. All the actual work done in the joint syndicates was accomplished by separate service teams working on service-specific portions of the plan that were then briefed to the other service teams. The school solution called for the three service inputs to be integrated into a single plan and then for a process of “joint de-confliction” to be performed. How and where this process of joint de-confliction was to be accomplished and by whom was never made clear, as the process was never practiced.”
Smith gives plausible structural reasons for this approach. His discussion of these problems corroborates the findings in a brilliant 2019 book by Anit Mukherjee, a former Indian army officer who is now an academic. Mukharjee’s The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Military in India, has a full chapter (The Coordinators) on the problem of jointness in Indian military planning. He calls it “I Will Go It Alone” approach:
“The biggest impediment to jointness is the dominance of the individual services and the prevalence of the single-service approach. The single-service approach can be defined as the characteristic of each service planning, training, and emphasising its own operational and organisational priorities over any concept of joint operations. This is entirely in keeping with theories of organisational behaviour but, as seen from the previous discussion on India’s wars, has been problematic in terms of interoperability and the training, planning, and execution of joint operations.”
While Smith reaches these findings through his methodology of interviewing US military officers who attended DSSC over a four-decade period, Mukherjee looks at “the British legacy shaping inter-services relations after independence” before examining “jointness in five major wars — the 1962 China war, the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars, the military intervention in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, and the 1999 Kargil war.”
With the Chief of Defence Staff’s appointment, India, in theory, might have moved to jointness, but the problem remains: the CDS, just like every commandant of DSSC, remains an army general. Also, as Mukherjee points out, services continue to go for “coordination” to retain their autonomy rather than integrating, which is the necessary condition for jointness.
So, this should be great news for us in Pakistan. The adversary is still grappling with the concept of integrated operations: “cross-service cooperation in all stages of the military processes, from research, through procurement and into operations.”
Let me, therefore, pour some cold water on such misplaced happiness.
We are no better when it comes to jointness. Just like the Indian army, we too are stuck in the British “appreciation of the situation” system. Worse, more often than not, we end up situating the appreciation instead of appreciating the situation. We are equally unprepared for what Smith calls IPB (intelligence preparation of the battlefield).
The three services operate their own mid-career instruction schools and get token students from other services, which is neither here nor there. Put another way, we have the same A.R.M.Y problem as India. Take, for instance, Inter-Services Public Relations. Look at the dictionary definition of “inter-services” and then try and find officers from the air force or navy at ISPR.
Now move to Joint Staff Headquarters. Until the establishment of the Strategic Plans Division, JSHQ had no real job other than as placement for one four-star general who couldn’t become army chief. And, you guessed it: when was the last time a navy or air force four-star became Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff?!
I know it’s the worst example and an aberration, but while Mukherjee and others have recorded the acrimony between Indian army and air force during Kargil, on our side even the Military Operations Directorate had no idea about the operation! That, you would agree, takes jointness and mauls it beyond recognition.
But here’s the problem: different services look at war and their roles differently. If they are to stay in their own silos, their interoperability becomes a massive problem. For instance, what does the army want from the air force? That sounds like a simple question, but in terms of conceptualising that role and training for it, it requires that both services must operate integrally. In this, one has to give credit to former COAS General Ashfaq Kiyani who worked with his and PAF’s top brass to create better synergy and integration between PA and PAF. But, clearly, more work needs to be done.
The battle space is fast changing. We are now entering an era of the internet of military things. Emerging technologies are offering new opportunities and newer challenges. Stultified thinking is not going to cut. I quoted Lind above with reference to German officers. That’s equally applicable today: innovation, not DS solutions; bold mistakes, not safe, correct approaches according to given templates.
The writer is a former News Editor of The Friday Times and reluctantly tweets @ejazhaider
Colonel Smith has had a long association with South Asia, particularly with the Pakistan Army. He is a graduate of Command and Staff College, Quetta and had two three-year tours as a US army attache in Pakistan. The current volume on DSSC follows a similar earlier story, The Quetta Experience: Attitudes and Values within Pakistan Army. That volume was published in 2018 by the Wilson Centre, a prominent think tank in DC.
Both books used the same methodology: interviews conducted with US military students at Quetta and Wellington, covering nearly four decades in both cases.
The Wellington Experience offers many findings and of course an assessment of what those findings mean for US policymakers and the United States’ strategic partnership with India both in terms of what such partnership means for South Asia and, more importantly, for the growing strategic rivalry between the United States and China. Border skirmishes in eastern Ladakh have further sharpened the salience of that aspect.
But of the several findings, I intend to focus on three related ones. This must not be construed to mean other findings are less useful. This selection is more for reasons of parsimony.
The DSSC provides an adequate mid-career officer education, but the college’s approach to pedagogy sharply restricts useful learning and inhibits the development of critical thinking.
From a US perspective, the ground doctrine taught at the DSSC pays insufficient attention to combat support and combat service support functions, and fails to adequately address combined arms operations.
The DSSC fails to provide effective joint training.
As should be obvious, an institution that doesn’t award innovative thinking ends up creating career-oriented, risk-averse officers in the higher echelon. Contrast this, for instance, with what William Lind, a conservative US author, wrote in a 1989 essay: “During 19th-century war-games, German junior officers routinely received problems that could only be solved by disobeying orders. Orders themselves specified the result to be achieved, but never the method (Auftragstaktik). Initiative was more important than obedience. (Mistakes were tolerated as long as they came from too much initiative rather than too little.)”
With reference to ‘b’ and ‘c’, instruction appears to defeat the very purpose of having a school that is officially configured to bring the three services together for purposes of joint training. Hence, Defence Services Staff College. The other important implication of these two related findings is that the three generations of officers — senior staff, directing staff and students — create a continuum of traditional operational thinking in what is clearly the creme de la creme of the officer corps of India’s three defence services.
Here’s an excerpt from Smith’s book:
“Most students agreed that the major joint exercise at the end of the school year mainly involved meticulously prepared and over-rehearsed presentations by each service about its capabilities and contributions to the final plan. All the actual work done in the joint syndicates was accomplished by separate service teams working on service-specific portions of the plan that were then briefed to the other service teams. The school solution called for the three service inputs to be integrated into a single plan and then for a process of “joint de-confliction” to be performed. How and where this process of joint de-confliction was to be accomplished and by whom was never made clear, as the process was never practiced.”
Smith gives plausible structural reasons for this approach. His discussion of these problems corroborates the findings in a brilliant 2019 book by Anit Mukherjee, a former Indian army officer who is now an academic. Mukharjee’s The Absent Dialogue: Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Military in India, has a full chapter (The Coordinators) on the problem of jointness in Indian military planning. He calls it “I Will Go It Alone” approach:
“The biggest impediment to jointness is the dominance of the individual services and the prevalence of the single-service approach. The single-service approach can be defined as the characteristic of each service planning, training, and emphasising its own operational and organisational priorities over any concept of joint operations. This is entirely in keeping with theories of organisational behaviour but, as seen from the previous discussion on India’s wars, has been problematic in terms of interoperability and the training, planning, and execution of joint operations.”
While Smith reaches these findings through his methodology of interviewing US military officers who attended DSSC over a four-decade period, Mukherjee looks at “the British legacy shaping inter-services relations after independence” before examining “jointness in five major wars — the 1962 China war, the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars, the military intervention in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, and the 1999 Kargil war.”
With the Chief of Defence Staff’s appointment, India, in theory, might have moved to jointness, but the problem remains: the CDS, just like every commandant of DSSC, remains an army general. Also, as Mukherjee points out, services continue to go for “coordination” to retain their autonomy rather than integrating, which is the necessary condition for jointness.
So, this should be great news for us in Pakistan. The adversary is still grappling with the concept of integrated operations: “cross-service cooperation in all stages of the military processes, from research, through procurement and into operations.”
Let me, therefore, pour some cold water on such misplaced happiness.
We are no better when it comes to jointness. Just like the Indian army, we too are stuck in the British “appreciation of the situation” system. Worse, more often than not, we end up situating the appreciation instead of appreciating the situation. We are equally unprepared for what Smith calls IPB (intelligence preparation of the battlefield).
The three services operate their own mid-career instruction schools and get token students from other services, which is neither here nor there. Put another way, we have the same A.R.M.Y problem as India. Take, for instance, Inter-Services Public Relations. Look at the dictionary definition of “inter-services” and then try and find officers from the air force or navy at ISPR.
Now move to Joint Staff Headquarters. Until the establishment of the Strategic Plans Division, JSHQ had no real job other than as placement for one four-star general who couldn’t become army chief. And, you guessed it: when was the last time a navy or air force four-star became Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff?!
I know it’s the worst example and an aberration, but while Mukherjee and others have recorded the acrimony between Indian army and air force during Kargil, on our side even the Military Operations Directorate had no idea about the operation! That, you would agree, takes jointness and mauls it beyond recognition.
But here’s the problem: different services look at war and their roles differently. If they are to stay in their own silos, their interoperability becomes a massive problem. For instance, what does the army want from the air force? That sounds like a simple question, but in terms of conceptualising that role and training for it, it requires that both services must operate integrally. In this, one has to give credit to former COAS General Ashfaq Kiyani who worked with his and PAF’s top brass to create better synergy and integration between PA and PAF. But, clearly, more work needs to be done.
The battle space is fast changing. We are now entering an era of the internet of military things. Emerging technologies are offering new opportunities and newer challenges. Stultified thinking is not going to cut. I quoted Lind above with reference to German officers. That’s equally applicable today: innovation, not DS solutions; bold mistakes, not safe, correct approaches according to given templates.
The writer is a former News Editor of The Friday Times and reluctantly tweets @ejazhaider