Not just summer madness
By K.S. Bajwa

COME the month of May and the strands of golden wheat are gone. The bare brown earth as if exhausted after yielding its rich bounty, slumbers in the shimmering heat haze; recouping, regenerating, awaiting the furrow and the seed, to grow green to sustain life again.

Intruding into this cycle of life and growth are men with their deadly weapons, purposefully preparing to snuff out life. Dotted under all trees in the vicinity of tubewells gathered are guns, tanks vehicles, tents and bivoucs, nestling under camouflage netting to deny their congregations to unfriendly eyes. Men clad in olive green are busy burrowing into the earth. Into clumps of trees disappear commanders and their staffs with their maps, radios and telephones, hatching plots and counterplots. What summer madness has seized the army, to be out in this inhospitable weather?

While else where in the country, coolers and cold potations do brisk business, soldiers brave the merciless sun. Why, then, do the soldiers forsake the comfort of their barracks? They are out training for war so that their professional competence and operational readiness prevent a war. If a war is either forced upon them or becomes unavoidable in the pursuit of state policy, it is concluded favourably. This still does not explain the summer madness.

Training for war requires space wherein deployment drills and battle manoeuvres can be practised as realistically as is possible under conditions of peace. When the crops are cut and before the transplantation of paddy starts, the countryside is bare and becomes the domain of the soldier.

In battle the primary focus is to kill or disable the adversary and prevent such a thing happening to you. The weapon is the projectile, whether it be the bomb, the bullet or the bayonet. Your own ally is Mother Earth. Dig down or seek protection behind natural or man-made bunds, indentations or folds and live to fight on. When an opportunity comes by or is created, the soldier manoeuvres to come to grips with his adversary under the most favourable conditions of terrain, weather, time and comparative strength.

He must be adept at using the terrain to his advantage. The soldier must, therefore, train and live close to the land. Here largely lies the rationale for his summer madness.

What precisely is involved in the training for war — Well-defined skills are needed to use weapon systems to maximum effect. Most of these skills can be acquired by repetitive practice in the unit lines. These skills have to be then combined with the delivery of the projectile to have maximum effect on the designated target whether it be the enemy soldier or his weapon systems or his supporting infrastructure.

This combining of handling skills, live use of weapon systems and effective delivery of the projectiles at the target end is practised on short, long and field firing ranges. The next step is to integrate the use of weapon systems with manoeuvre and ground to get to grips with the enemy to deny him the advantageous use of ground and to inflict maximum damage upon his fighting machine with minimum damage to own forces.

This training is carried out on large specially designated field firing ranges. Even then, it is difficult to create battle field realism.

An armed force may be equipped with the most modern and highly destructive weapon systems, but if it has not acquired the efficiency to use these weapons effectively, it would not make a dent in battle. In the early sixties, the Pakistan armed forces and the elite that motivated the thrusts of that nation, were drunk with the arrogance of their armed power, so willingly provided by the United States of America and its western allies.The superior armaments created an illusion of invincibility and Delhi was in sight.

When the inevitable clash came in 1965, it stood out that the Pakistani soldiers had not done enough homework. They were slow to handle many of their sophisticated toys. The Indian tanks could get off two to three shots before the dreaded Pattons could open their score. In the Khemkaran sector many of the captured tanks had done just enough mileage to roll out of the depots into battle.

The liberal expenditure of artillery and small arms ammunition could not have been supported by the scales of provisioning permitted by the USA. Obviously, the Pakistani army had been stockpiling a sizable portion of the ammunition provided for training every year. The consequences of the lack of adequate training became a part of military history astride the border.

In this conflict, the Indian Army too had its moments of crisis. A fairly rapid expansion after the debacle of 1962, had diluted the manpower structure of units and formations. There had been inadequate time and opportunity to train together and streamline man-oeuvre on the battle-field. Realistic psychological and emotional conditioning of troops, especially leaders, to the shock of battle was lacking.

In the Amritsar Sector, complete surprise was achieved due to political miscalculations of the Pakistan leadership who believed that India would not violate international borders. In the first push on September 6, the ease with which the Ichhogil Canal was jumped astride the Grand Trunk Road from Amritsar to Lahore was quite unexpected. Our commanders who seemed not to have acquired the operational mobility of mind, could not exploit this situation.

As Pakistan recovered and hit back with intense fire from artillery and ground support aircraft, two newly raised battalions wilted under this shock. We were back to square one with an ominous fear of disaster in the air. Undoubtedly we were a shade better than the enemy and more determined and resilient. The ground once captured and abandoned had to be fought over again. The gallant 3 Jat rewrote the saga of determined valour in battle at Dograi. At the end we had to be content with a stalemate along Ichhogil. We too were not very well up in our homework.

In contrast in 1971, Manekshaw resisted tremendous political pressure to go into erstwhile East Pakistan at the beginning of April so that the forces could train and adequately prepare for this operation. That the Indian Army succeeded in liberating Bangla Desh in 14 days in riverine terrain which favoured the defender against a Pakistan army of nearly five divisions, amply proved the efficacy of good homework.

Much hard work and devotion is needed during peace time to prepare for war. Given the imponderable in battle, planning for war and conduct of battle are not easy. Execution of plans is just as demanding. Given the basic factors of organisation, equipment and leadership, realistic training provides the final content for an effective armed force. It is a gigantic task to develop a cutting-edge combination of individual, group and leadership skills.

The psychological and emotional conditioning is essential to reduce fear of death and injury to a manageable perspective. Peace-time safety regulations and the moral considerations of avoiding casualties in training make this vital aspect of training extremely difficult to achieve. The current practice of subjecting troops to close, but the safe proximity of fire of different weapon systems, at the best produces a conditioning to battle noises only. Acceptance of well calculated, but greater risks will pay handsome dividends in withstanding the initial shock of hostile fire.

So when you next see the man in uniform toting his gun around your fields in the noon-day heat and at an unearthly hour at night, he has not been overtaken by summer madness. He is preparing for a vital function — the battle readiness of our security.

This feature was published on June 6, 1999