Discussion on Indian Special Forces

[Singha]

looks vaguely british army due to the sa80 bullpupish look, helmet chin piece and camo...

[Singha]

amid the fight over what the NSG is or should be, we are losing track of a clear and present danger - which is the jihadi-wahabi-paki "organism" spreading like algae around the warm waters of the arabian sea and ASEAN region down to the shores of SA, madagascar, australia.

the kind of activity we could be faced with are along a whole spectrum
(1) capture and killing of groups of indian tourists / business delegations - a lot of indians trade and visit these regions..none of these places have a cast iron security
(2) creeping or overt takeover of govts like maldives with chinese backstopping at the rear
(3) threats against indian business interests
(4) threats on indian shipping and fishing operations. absolutely nothing prevents a few SSG type dressed as fishermen from wandering in among a troop of indian fishing boats at night and killing people until out of bullets
(5) threats to shore installations both indian and abroad

we need to have
(1) eyes and ears on every island like mauritius, maldives, seychelles, ... malaysia, indonesia, thailand(south part), east africa, dubai...
(2) make it worthwhile for their business and political elite to be cosy with india - this includes a few adharmic things if need be like permitting them to stash wealth in india or run some scam using indian soil but kya karein, even yudhisdhira dharmaraja was guilty of being economical with the truth!
(3) covert and over surveillance via ELINT posts , CG type high seas surveillance and tracking
(4) MARCOS expanded to the right levels and formed into distirbuted teams at a few sites
(5) full logistical merging with the C-130J being used by Army SF, and helicopters of the navy
(6) mobile command posts / weapons systems / vehicles / FACs capable of airlift and tested with our C17s
(7) a ruthless attitude to tolerate no mischief in our backyard and crush any outbreak of jihadi flag like a bug

comments welcome.

I think its high time we took a leaf out of the mchrystal/petraeus playbook and formed two "commands" - arabian sea and IOR-ASEAN in the maritime sense and make all of RAW, IB, marcos & army SF unit commanders sit under the same roof and share actionable intel. better to crush this algae out of sight in the high seas and say nothing for the sikulars to whine and mewl about.

a essential first step is the formation of our own JSOC which apparently the MOD , Defmin and IA all want now. chinooks are coming for sure. c17 is imminent. we have the hardware, need the re-org and mindset change.

sitting around whining makes nobody a power. either act our weight or stop these pretensions of having a vast array of SF units.

its NEVER about the size of the dog in the fight. its ALWAYS about the size of the fight in the dog.

[Karan M]

Karan M,

First, with regard to the picture of the NSG trooper. You've suggested that it was a very valid means of firing from cover, but what volume of fire could two men have accurately put down on what must have been at least several dozen men of various security forces? And if the terrorists were exposing themselves to lay down such fire, shouldn't they have been, I wouldn't say easy prey, but at least prime opportunity for snipers/sharpshooters, who as you rightly pointed were there on scene.

VivS, c'mon man, what you have posted is armchair quarterbacking of the highest order. Do you seriously believe what you wrote? That two men with automatic weapons could not put out enough fire just because there were several dozen men opposite them? Then how did the NSG man die in the operation? Was it because a magic bullet hit him? Forget all this, "elite" versus "x" and see how single men have held up entire large units, purely because they were either sited well, or had good firepower at their disposal, or were simply willing to fight to the last round!!

If the NSG is facing such a situation & knows that they have opponents who are willing to sacrifice their lives for just the chance to get some glory by killing their operators, and are either on drugs or being motivated by handlers to do so, it makes ample sense for them to stretch the operation out and tire them out!

And all this presupposes that the NSGs express orders were to storm the house at the very beginning. If their orders were to hold off & attack at x clearance from y person/chain of command, then they were well within their rights to do what they did.

Secondly, with regard to the Nariman House operation. By 'unusual', I meant I've never heard of a CT unit putting down sustained fire on a civilian complex in an urban area for over 12 hours, even when there were heavily armed hostiles within. Used to happen during COIN operation in J&K and the NE but they were usually conducted by regular infantry, not CT forces.

There you go again! What expertise, pray tell have you accumulated over your extensive CT career or infantry career to exactly make such snap judgements of where to use sustained fire, in an urban area and when not to? Please understand your comments are not only judgemental but come across as superficial because they presume that the way you are accustomed to - merely on the basis of third party reports or media, or what you find there - is the way to follow!

Regular infantry in COIN operations in J&K and NE are as skilled & probably more so than several NSG or SF operators. Shocking, if you subscribe to the adage that CT/SF are some supermen that know everything, but if you ignore actual hands on experience, then that is what you get!! In some cases, NSG has been called, where the place has to be cleared and significant political sensitivities exist - eg a mosque with people holed in inside. But what happens in the other 90% of cases? The local RR, or Army or Ghatak units take care of it.

As if J&K, NE urban areas are to be somewhat different from the rest of India. There is a presupposition in your post that these areas can be treated differently than any other place. Not so, the Army will behave much the same there in terms of attempting to limit damage that it will do elsewhere!

If regular infantry in J&K or NE use such firepower, and do so regularly, then guess what, its authorized and its authorized because its effective. And those same lessons will percolate to the SF and the NSG and every unit out there. If the CPMF go for training, they will be taught those very lessons!

And I would take those hard won lessons as being every bit as valid as those adopted by other nations, in their wisdom, because the Indian services have their way of doing things, adopted from actual hard won combat experience in sustained firefights, the kinds many western SF have to truck themselves to Afghan or Iraq to experience in the past decade. Guess who has seen more of the hard life, than many of these academic GSG9 and other "elite operators"?

There is the argument that all the hostages were dead and the NSG could afford to take its time and be liberal with its fire. I have seen the Channel 4 documentary including the part where they played the phone intercepts, and from what I could tell, the particular terrorist on the phone seemed reluctant to execute the hostages, procrastinating even when given explicit orders by the handler. Eventually there was the sound of gunshots and the hostages were killed, but to someone monitoring the conversation there would still have remained a sliver of hope; maybe it was a ruse and they showed mercy and lied to their bosses in Pakistan.

The Channel 4 documentary makes the explicit point that the Indian side stopped reaching out to the terrorists because they were convinced that the hostages were dead. You are making a judgement about the sliver of hope bit, based on what you heard Channel 4 showed pieces of, whilst ignoring the ultimate call the Indian side made. Why? If there were additional sources that led the Indian side to make their decision, do you think, if they involved anything like HUMINT which India would not want to reveal, those would be publicly revealed?

Plus relying primarily on the intercepts for intelligence, meant relying on the terrorists to do a thorough job while rounding the civilians up. The nanny was able to escape with the rabbi's child, there could most certainly have been others, hiding under a bed or desk, in a closet or alcove... the assumption could not or should not have been that the hostages were all dead.

That is your judgement, but that is not the judgement the decision makers who asked the NSG to go in made! Per the information they had, they deemed the hostages dead, they asked the NSG to go in and get those guys. Which means the NSG tactical leaders then make the best of what they have.
This is the inherent risk that all combat operations make, they are always liable to be questioned in hindsight, but nobody has a crystal ball when making these judgements.

Coming to the crux of the argument i.e. the NSG organisational structure and defining characteristics - you've stated that the NSG is an infantry-centric force and fundamental change in role is unnecessary (setting aside for the moment, matters like VIP protection, IPS-IG, etc). Lets go ahead and define the job then. Most large cities in the world employ SWAT-type paramilitary teams as first responders during events that may require the use of lethal force like New York's ESU, LA's Metro/SWAT, SO19 in London, SEKs in German cities, BOPE's in Brazilian districts, OMONs in Russian ones and so on. By and large its an arrangement that works well, and the (police) officers, as you put it, get the job done. We don't have an equivalent. There are the State Armed Police Forces but they hardly compare, being analogous to the CAPFs.

Which is not relevant to the NSGs role even so, because now you are bringing in other forces which should be there, but aren't & even if they were, they would hardly be a scratch on the NSG's SAG which comprises of a trained infantry force, ready to do combat at a moments notice. They are not a paramilitary or police force, which also do combat training. BOPE for instance, media-hype apart, when is the last time they faced anything like 26/11 or took part in sustained combat over an extended insurgency? Rolling up in APCs down crowded streets, exchanging a few shots with favela druggies is dangerous, but is not a patch in closing out all avenues of access and taking on those aforesaid people in a fight to the finish! Its all very nice to have a movie (and I loved it) of BOPE being a kicka$$ military force which is second to none, and employs stone cold killers etc etc - but the reality as shown in several documentaries is more prosaic. Training apart, they are not a kill or be killed force. They are a police force with the tactics that enable them to survive hostile situations and occasionally engage in combat. NSG SAG in comparison trains 24/7 for combat!!
From a report on the NSG in 2006

This is what demonstrates to me, that for all the acronyms you are bringing in, you still dont have a fundamental understanding of the NSG when you bring in these SWAT type units and the like. They are smaller units, with a police component to them. They do not go in for the kind of opponents the NSG faces, and when they do, they are taken by surprise. In recent news, the French faced some urban jihadi type and were talking in awe about how he was prepared to die, went out fighting etc. These were comments by the people who faced him, not the media. That speaks volumes about the average threats they face, and what they are trained for.

If these people were facing the Mumbai team, having gone through many months of training, hopped up on drugs, equipped with automatic weapons, liberally using grenades and constantly relocating, then guess what, all their fancy reputation apart, they would be sh!t out of luck. And they would have realized whom they were facing, that they were outgunned, and would have started bringing in the military Spec Ops guys from SFOD-D, Seals and who knows what else. Right now, they have a lot of these types running about, thanks to the Gulf conflict & Afghanistan. A decade from now, they'll run into several issues in terms of quantity.

The SAG does NOT cultivate that policing mindset alone. That is why from day 1, recognizing the problems in taking a bunch of policemen (and a handful of exmilitary types) and training them to do limited combat roles... the NSG instead chose to go down the path of recruiting trained professional soldiers and teaching them the hard task of combat in urban areas & like those experienced by the IA in Blue Star, plus keeping people alive & the HRT aspect. Its also a reason, why SF soldiers alone do not fit directly into the NSG mindset. When a SF soldier was given a task, his job hitherto, was not to "rescue people" as a primary focus but to eliminate the enemy. In recent years, with SF also taking up NSG style roles for cities without NSG hubs, this may change, but still, if you take trained soldiers & then brush up their "softer" aspects, its a big difference from taking a policeman who has not gone through anywhere that daily grind and making him ready to kill!

And you have this impression that SAG is some sort of catch all force. It is not. They train across multiple conditions and specialized teams specialize in different skill sets. Its not that different nowadays from what the SF is doing, with a primary focus, and a secondary one. Please understand that NSG/SF et al have had decades - they haven't been twiddling their thumbs all the while.

It was the SRG component which was to handle a lot of the non "kill or be killed" stuff. That mandate was subverted by having the SRG become more of glorified political protection, which has been thankfully rescinded.

Similarly, you brought in the SPG earlier. Again, the SPG is not comparable across the board to the NSG. Their job is to protect their principals and engage in combat only to the extent they protect their principals. This is by the way, why the NSG is described as a force of last resort, because when the SAG is sent in, it is understood that chances are that they will have to kill the opponent, and that opponent is going to be a hardened one.

Not merely flash bang some deranged individual who is holding his relatives and the cat hostage, the vast majority of calls that the aforementioned SWAT teams face, and can then apply all sorts of techniques to convince the other guy to back down.

What you also need to get is that numbers matter.

The SAS for instance, if it was tasked with something like Mumbai, do you think they'd have handled it? They would be asking for any & every special operator because they don't have the numbers like NSG. SBS would have been called, and who knows what else. At the end of the day, everyone and their aunt from the British Armed Forces would have been scrambling for a response.

The local "armed police" or whatever SWAT they had, would be totally out of their depth. Its one thing to take on a couple of knife wielding thugs, quite another, in constrained quarters, to be dealing with trained fanatics who can fire accurately, respond back to fire, and lob grenades & are in constant touch with their trainers to regroup and reorganize.

In theory, the NSG is a force of 'last resort'. In practice, if it hadn't earlier, its now certainly morphing into a pan-national SWAT team. Nothing wrong with that per se. On the whole, I'm rather pleased with the development as long as the effort isn't duplicated (case in point, Force One). And just for clarity's sake, when I say that the NSG's current 'official' role needs to be performed by a genuine SF unit, I'm not advocating the NSG be dissolved or similar. If anything, I believe the NSG has been criminally underutilized, despite a variety of heachaches from the Maoists to the Gangs of Wasseypur, instead of being every strongman/don/gang-leader's worst nightmare.

Again, you are mixing up things. NSG is NOT a pan national SWAT team. Take this SWAT stuff out of your mind please. Its probably the biggest con pulled by a media fed on glory talk of some super folks doing super stuff. The average SWAT team will NOT train to NSG level standards, because they don't anticipate the kind of stuff the NSG faces. After Mumbai, that part may have changed and realization sunk in, that sergeant Joe Blobb with his 45 years in the police service, is still not equal to sergeant XYZ from the US Army who fought in Fallujah, was wounded in action twice and has seen house to house combat several times over. In contrast, from day one, the latter is the kind of person the NSG has recruited.

FORCE1 or whatever, can never do what the NSG does, if they do, it will be a big thing, because simply put, unless FORCE 1 starts recruiting the kind of people the NSG does, they are at a perennial disadvantage.

Go take a look at the amount of time a soldier spends becoming a soldier in the Indian Army. From his teenage years he goes through an incredible amount of grind, mental conditioning, and combat tactics, all gradually absorbed over the years. Then there is combat experience. After that, he may end up in the NSG, where they take all that, and hone it in specific areas.

How in anyones name, can that sort of experience be inculcated in any local force, with probationary police officers undergoing a handful of modules?? Whether taught by Israelis or Americans or the NSG themselves?
What these guys can do, is fix the opponent, if he is tough enough, till the NSG arrives. Which is critical.

Most of the casualties in Mumbai were because they were not even restricted in their movements. They moved around from place to place, firing away, and only a handful of people and later the MARCOS intervened in a not so substantial manner. If you get these opponents to at least remain to a certain geographical area, and "fix" them in place, or prevent them from directing fire to the easy targets, the civilians, the NSG can arrive and kill them.

Again, Maoists and Gangs of Wasseypur ARE not what the NSG is trained for. Are the Maoists in a specific location, barricaded or operating in a specific geographical area which can be addressed by the NSG to go in and kill them? Then yes. Otherwise, you will need regular infantry to fix or even fight them, and SF if they are a mobile, hard to locate dispersed group moving through the jungles.

Gangs of.. are usually untrained, opportunist weapon weilders who have been effectively countered by encounter specialists and their squads. Guess what happened to that squad when they faced the terrorists in 26/11?

Despite having a more than decent CT/HRT capacity at the local level, most countries retain a central/federal CT unit tasked with intervening in challenging/high-profile/volatile situations which the local forces could still have arguably handled. This is precisely what I'm advocating India follow as a model. And this unit should ideally operate on an SF model, trained to operate over a wide range of environments.

What you are not understanding is that most of these countries whose template you wish to follow do not face anywhere near the kind of threat India does. Hence they can go about their methods
- having some glorified local county police force donning body armor and calling it swat
- having some regional/big city SWAT which is much more capable but trains for as much regular police style takedowns as versus sustained combat
- have a central SF group which intervenes when things are too hot. Can be of limited numbers, because its tasking is primarily military, and when is the last time something like Blue Star or Mumbai happened in the west? Waco - we all know how that ended, and comparing that to a fortified killing zone as we say in Blue Star..

In contrast, India faces:
- a pathetic understaffed, undertrained regional police force which can barely handle regular policing forces given lack of adequate resources. Forget county swat
- state level/big city SWAT- mired in politics and funding issues. Force1 & Chennai SWAT types are only of recent vintage
- Ergo, India needs a national team like the NSG which has both the numbers & capability to intervene decisively!!
- That force cannot be composed of all SF operators, because there are NOT enough SF operators (first issue) and second, they dont require SF operators! NSG does not require a long range recce specialist who can speak mandarin, to engage a bunch of terrrorists in the Taj!! They require a highly fit, expert marksman, who is tough enough to be wounded and fight on - like the NSG guys in Taj did. That is possible using Infantry soldiers!!
- At the same time, India IS scaling up its SF to intervene at a larger level. Multiple cities which dont have NSG hubs have SF hubs which will do much the same thing. If anything, that is a positive step.

If I may bring up your example here, about 30 soldiers being able to put down two and a half times the volume of fire on a target than 10 commandos can; over open ground this works perfectly. Which is why the large RR has had a far greater effect in quelling the insurgency in J&K than the specialists from the SF units. Fair enough.

That is not why the RR works - that it has numbers. Yes it does, but what really matter is that they dominate the area of responsibility. There are a plethora of RR units, and they are each responsible for a particular sector. As a result of which, they routinely patrol those places, have a fair idea of what's happening (local intelligence collection) and also train for tasks which are beyond the mandate of regular infantry, such as a bigger focus on COIN. This allows the regular army to focus more on its regular mandate - which is conventional warfighting! For instance, a RR unit is not going to have a Milan unit attached to it for (say) anti tank operations. The regular army unit will. The RR unit does not have to plan the logistics for driving deep into an enemy unit behind an armoured squadron and practise for how to undertake joint operations. The Army unit does. The amount of wear and tear on a regular soldier only goes so far. Being in the Army, as you'd know, especially that of a developing world like India's, is a crazily physically demanding task. This is the RRs job to allow the Army, the breathing space, that allows it to remain an Army full time, or almost full time, when not engaging in specific COIN tasks, and not have its soldiers doing naka bandi, when they should be doing route marches or be deployed for a wartime exercise.
Fundamentally, the RR works not just because it has numbers and volume of fire, but because it is physically always present in the Area of Operations. The locals know RR is there. They have that faith these guys are there. So there is a two way communication. If limited Army guys sat in a base to preserve their operational efficiency, and came out from time to time, you have the US in Vietnam with their fire bases, or Pak in FATA experience all over again.

But when a hijacked aircraft needs to be breached at four places simultaneously, the 12 men involved ought to be among the best. And if that aircraft has been landed in Afghanistan, the men on the perimeter need to be the best available (the NSG was the default option during the IC814 hijacking). Such a unit can practically be trained and equipped to world class standards, something that is simply not feasible for the NSG in its current form.

That is your assumption. The NSG does have SAG teams specifically trained for aircraft breaching. Those twelve men can be the best in terms of reaction time, combat skills, but they dont need to learn Pushto or Dari, or learn how to pass undetected in POK - skills like what the SF teach!!

As regards not being equipped to world class standards, yes, that is a problem with the NSG, always has been. Because the GOI is pathetic in terms of execution, and always has been, because the politicos and the one dynasty that has ruled this country of ours, ensures that their protectors - namely the SPG get every toy - from fancy duds to the latest rifles, while the NSG intended for the plebes languishes. The MHA similarly, was least bothered about the RR and it was the Army which funded it initially.

The issue then, is not with the NSG. Its with the GOI and its arrogance, its near complete lack of accountability to Indian citizens and its ability to milk the exchequer of thousands of crores, while a mere fraction of that amount could equip 10 NSGs and give them equipment that the world would salivate over.

In such a milieue, having a powerful godfather helps. Army units and AF units, despite the pathetic state of affairs, do get their acquisitions, some of them, through because of sustained effort. If you have a MHA headed by politicians who use it to retain power, jockey for their own position etc, what is the NSG in the larger scale of things. A few hundred paramil guys dead in some Maoist attack, this, that...

That is one of the primary reasons why the US Tier I forces were raised - by coupling a stringent selection (ST6 for eg. accepts only veteran SEALs as applicants, and even among them not all qualify) with a huge investment in equipment and training, they were able to maximize the probability of a successful operation. And where a higher grade of fire support is critical, other units are available and are used in support (like the Ranger Rgt for Delta, Paras/RMs for SAS/SBS). Also the Chuck Pfarrer comment regarding the ST6's ammo budgets may have been hyperbole, but I've read and heard plenty more to suggest that their training budgets are exceptionally large. That eventually will show in the field (albeit with a diminishing rate of return).

You are again mixing up things without an understanding of how India's situations are nowhere similar to what the US faces. The US is a continent away from 90% of its troubles, many of which it itself meddles in and causes. It can afford to play around with limited forces of super-duper SF operators whom it uses for its expeditionary muddles, knowing that its vast mini-armies of local SWATs, DEA, FBI and others are enough to take down the occasional Waco case or two brothers who go nutso. The day they face something like the influx of jihadis coming across the border like we do, the day they start having to stop Mumbais and still 1-2 occur, then see what happens in terms of scaling up their military units.

And what is with this hero worship/deification of ST6? They may be the best of the SEALs but are the SEALS the best? Spend some time talking to other US Army folks before the Bin Laden raid made these guys "unarguably heroic" and it becomes clear that at the end of the day, ST6/Seals themselves have a training profile which does not make them suitable for many cases of extended infantry missions. Give them "get to a point, take that guy out missions" and they work well. But at the end of the day, a Delta operator, who is an infantry guy since his induction, will be better at most of the overall tasks that Infantry troops can face. In fact, some of the mass casualties Seal teams have faced in Afghanistan, where the tempo of operations has meant every person with the SF tag is thrown in & out of the mission mix, has been attributed to this very fact.

And Ranger for Delta and so forth. All good on paper. What happened in Somalia when these experts with their expert methods went in? A grade A mess. They got whacked, and whacked so badly, that the US withdrew their forces.

You think India didn't have similar methods and hard lessons? In the Prabhakaran raid, the Sikhs were tasked to do the same job as the Rangers did, hold the perimeter while the Paras took Prabhakaran out. The operation went much the same way. And despite not being as "super selected as ST6" as the books would have you believe, the Paras held out against impossible odds. The Army then put in a relief column running its tanks on railway tracks. And pray tell, where is the "epicness" of this effort portrayed as versus glorious accounts of even failed US missions?

Let me tell you a hard truth. One which I realized after personally reading a lot of these peoples tomes & how hard they train, how great they are, etc etc etc. They have a great regimen, sure but so do others. The difference is that there is a huge group of people who are willing to buy the non stop deification of the empire & the US military aids and abets this perception. The same as the Brits, wherever they can, bring in the SAS (the one and only) to show how they are better than the US.

The same as the elite US fighter pilots head to the F-15s. Yes they do. They came to India and got their clocks cleaned at Cope India. The next time around, they weren't so smug. Each time they have exercised with us, a bit of that supercilious, we are at the top of the totem pole rubbish has gone off. In one Cope India, a USAF pilot - that interview was later yanked from the webpage - whether accidental or intentional - who knows, was very irate. He said, each time we went up against the (IAF) MiG-29s, he was killing me and I was killing him, this is not how we train.
In short, the US trains for overwhelming force & every edge against the opponent, technology, manpower etc.

Its a hard fact, but it is true, that as far as training goes, they don't always have the edge. Technology, they sure do. India could never have pulled off the Bin Laden raid the way they did, with stealth, nap of the earth helicopters etc. But if political mandate was there, it could pull a Dawood raid in an entirely different fashion.

So please - dont fall for this hype of some super duper ST6 etc with amazing capabilities which India can't equal.
And coming to budgets, go figure - this year, the USAF is cancelling multiple training exercises and what not, to save money. India isn't. Take a look at the amount India loses to corruption scams and the like, and boondoggles like NREGA, and clearly, money is not India's problem. Funding a 10,000 NSG or a 20,000 SF is well within India's financial means today. If the cretins who embezzle the money weren't around. Even otherwise, there is no dearth of procurements. Its a different matter that those procurements get stuck thanks to all sorts of fraud corruption angles and what not. Not due to lack of money.

If you lack a proper unified procurement organization, and the forces and the NSG cannot even over a period of time, cannot even decide on a proper unified set of ballistic protection jackets, or small arms or other items, then you will get the current set up. Every file being pushed for separately, and with no proper father, the NSG suffers.

There were two other ancillary points made -

1. With regard to physical fitness, being in first rate shape is obviously a prerequisite for an individual training in CT/HRT, but that is just the foundation. Its the training that is the truly distinguishing element, and a damned expensive one at that. The natural hardiness of the Indian soldier provides less of an edge than it would on a conventional battlefield. And in situations where physical and mental toughness is critical, the SF is naturally better suited to the task, being trained for and having specialized in it.

Again, you are mixing up things. The biggest assumption is that SF training is exactly what the NSG requires. The SF guy is trained for things beyond the NSG. He will be trained for specific profiles not required by the NSG. He may be trained for long range recce, where he has to avoid the enemy at all costs. He may be trained to infiltrate organizations, pass as one of them, and speak the lingua franca. This sort of stuff requires a different kind of toughness and ability to handle multiple skillsets that the NSG guy does not need to have!
And natural hardiness provides less of an edge than on a conventional battlefield? Hello, the battlefield the NSG faces is conventional!
Was Stalingrad - i.e. fighting room to room in an urban area - unconventional? And hardiness won't count there?
The ability to go without hot proper meals for a long period of time, the ability to put up with lousy living conditions for a period of time, the ability to withstand pain..

Kindly go look up some of the Kargil operations. And then you will realize the natural hardiness of the Indian soldier - likely to be around for many decades till India urbanizes. And then you will have a different kind of hard urban type. People fought in conditions, western armies would have not considered acceptable. To its (dis) credit, the Army even went after some soldiers who did not find that their operations were within acceptable limits of success/survival. That caused significant resentment amongst several YO, but it also speaks volumes that the vast majority of YO actually did fight within those constraints.

2. With regard to combat experience, its lower today than it has been at any time in the last three decades and is likely to continue falling. The IA has over 500 infantry battalions. Only a handful of men were in firefights in J&K last year (and what I could gather the NE is in a similar (positive) state. The number of combat veterans being deputed to the NSG is fallen and can only be expected to fall further.

The point is there are combat veterans being deputed to the NSG, and furthermore, line infantry men!! These men, like it or not have been in combat operations, not just firefights alone! They bring many years of hard core infantry training to the job, and are then refined further. They are not policemen sitting doing calisthenics, mock drills & firing on a range, without having known anyone who has been in combat or having been part of a unit, that practises war on an industrial scale (and that is what the Army is). And given where India is, as much as I hate to say this, after the US leaves Afghanistan, the IA is not going to lack for any combat experience. The Pakis will ratchet up the jihad if things don't go their way.

There is another question that may potentially get raised here - why disperse the NSG and raise/retask a new unit, rather than the other way round. Well which one gets designation of the 'official' NSG is a matter of semantics. Now the nature of SF unit can be debated further - can be entirely civilian/paramilitary (GSG-9), entirely military (SAS), open/hybrid (NSG) or notionally civilian but military in effect like our very own SG.

The point is you simply dont have enough SF types for a super new NSG and nor do you need them.

Ask the Army for SF and they will say thanks, but no thanks!

Ask the Army to take up the NSG role, and they will say - where there is no NSG hub, we are already training our men to intervene.

The issue is not with the NSG itself or its role or its numbers. These are all worthless comparisons drawn up to some arbitrary KPIs. The USAF is 3000+ fighters strong, yet gets away with the PR of its best. Its supporters whine about its "few" F-22s when that force is some two hundred plus (same as our planned Su-30 MKI fleet). The issue is simply with its leadership.

You cannot have it led by hamhanded political appointees because it has to be "civilian" and then have those guys fail in situations which require combat experience and rapid decision making. You cant have it treated it like a poor cousin to the SPG in terms of equipment because NSG is for the average citizen and not the first family. Till these issues persist, its all smoke and mirrors to claim making the SF, the NSG or vice versa will change things.



As I envisage it, in the event of a Mumbai-like event, the local forces will be the first to respond, while the reserve unit gets airborne. Depending on the situation, the locals can take action independently or in the event of risk/complexity, wait for and thereafter support the central CT unit. If as in the case of Nariman House the assault is launched 48 hours after the event, it can then be spearheaded by the new unit. The result may still be the same, but at least we'll put our best foot forward.

[Karan M]

Karan M,

First, with regard to the picture of the NSG trooper. You've suggested that it was a very valid means of firing from cover, but what volume of fire could two men have accurately put down on what must have been at least several dozen men of various security forces? And if the terrorists were exposing themselves to lay down such fire, shouldn't they have been, I wouldn't say easy prey, but at least prime opportunity for snipers/sharpshooters, who as you rightly pointed were there on scene.

VivS, c'mon man, what you have posted is armchair quarterbacking of the highest order. Do you seriously believe what you wrote? That two men with automatic weapons could not put out enough fire just because there were several dozen men opposite them? Then how did the NSG man die in the operation? Was it because a magic bullet hit him? Forget all this, "elite" versus "x" and see how single men have held up entire large units, purely because they were either sited well, or had good firepower at their disposal, or were simply willing to fight to the last round!!

If the NSG is facing such a situation & knows that they have opponents who are willing to sacrifice their lives for just the chance to get some glory by killing their operators, and are either on drugs or being motivated by handlers to do so, it makes ample sense for them to stretch the operation out and tire them out!

And all this presupposes that the NSGs express orders were to storm the house at the very beginning. If their orders were to hold off & attack at x clearance from y person/chain of command, then they were well within their rights to do what they did.

Secondly, with regard to the Nariman House operation. By 'unusual', I meant I've never heard of a CT unit putting down sustained fire on a civilian complex in an urban area for over 12 hours, even when there were heavily armed hostiles within. Used to happen during COIN operation in J&K and the NE but they were usually conducted by regular infantry, not CT forces.

There you go again! What expertise, pray tell have you accumulated over your extensive CT career or infantry career to exactly make such snap judgements of where to use sustained fire, in an urban area and when not to? Please understand your comments are not only judgemental but come across as superficial because they presume that the way you are accustomed to - merely on the basis of third party reports or media, or what you find there - is the way to follow!

Regular infantry in COIN operations in J&K and NE are as skilled & probably more so than several NSG or SF operators. Shocking, if you subscribe to the adage that CT/SF are some supermen that know everything, but if you ignore actual hands on experience, then that is what you get!! In some cases, NSG has been called, where the place has to be cleared and significant political sensitivities exist - eg a mosque with people holed in inside. But what happens in the other 90% of cases? The local RR, or Army or Ghatak units take care of it.

As if J&K, NE urban areas are to be somewhat different from the rest of India. There is a presupposition in your post that these areas can be treated differently than any other place. Not so, the Army will behave much the same there in terms of attempting to limit damage that it will do elsewhere!

If regular infantry in J&K or NE use such firepower, and do so regularly, then guess what, its authorized and its authorized because its effective. And those same lessons will percolate to the SF and the NSG and every unit out there. If the CPMF go for training, they will be taught those very lessons!

And I would take those hard won lessons as being every bit as valid as those adopted by other nations, in their wisdom, because the Indian services have their way of doing things, adopted from actual hard won combat experience in sustained firefights, the kinds many western SF have to truck themselves to Afghan or Iraq to experience in the past decade. Guess who has seen more of the hard life, than many of these academic GSG9 and other "elite operators"?

There is the argument that all the hostages were dead and the NSG could afford to take its time and be liberal with its fire. I have seen the Channel 4 documentary including the part where they played the phone intercepts, and from what I could tell, the particular terrorist on the phone seemed reluctant to execute the hostages, procrastinating even when given explicit orders by the handler. Eventually there was the sound of gunshots and the hostages were killed, but to someone monitoring the conversation there would still have remained a sliver of hope; maybe it was a ruse and they showed mercy and lied to their bosses in Pakistan.

The Channel 4 documentary makes the explicit point that the Indian side stopped reaching out to the terrorists because they were convinced that the hostages were dead. You are making a judgement about the sliver of hope bit, based on what you heard Channel 4 showed pieces of, whilst ignoring the ultimate call the Indian side made. Why? If there were additional sources that led the Indian side to make their decision, do you think, if they involved anything like HUMINT which India would not want to reveal, those would be publicly revealed?

Plus relying primarily on the intercepts for intelligence, meant relying on the terrorists to do a thorough job while rounding the civilians up. The nanny was able to escape with the rabbi's child, there could most certainly have been others, hiding under a bed or desk, in a closet or alcove... the assumption could not or should not have been that the hostages were all dead.

That is your judgement, but that is not the judgement the decision makers who asked the NSG to go in made! Per the information they had, they deemed the hostages dead, they asked the NSG to go in and get those guys. Which means the NSG tactical leaders then make the best of what they have.
This is the inherent risk that all combat operations make, they are always liable to be questioned in hindsight, but nobody has a crystal ball when making these judgements.

Coming to the crux of the argument i.e. the NSG organisational structure and defining characteristics - you've stated that the NSG is an infantry-centric force and fundamental change in role is unnecessary (setting aside for the moment, matters like VIP protection, IPS-IG, etc). Lets go ahead and define the job then. Most large cities in the world employ SWAT-type paramilitary teams as first responders during events that may require the use of lethal force like New York's ESU, LA's Metro/SWAT, SO19 in London, SEKs in German cities, BOPE's in Brazilian districts, OMONs in Russian ones and so on. By and large its an arrangement that works well, and the (police) officers, as you put it, get the job done. We don't have an equivalent. There are the State Armed Police Forces but they hardly compare, being analogous to the CAPFs.

Which is not relevant to the NSGs role even so, because now you are bringing in other forces which should be there, but aren't & even if they were, they would hardly be a scratch on the NSG's SAG which comprises of a trained infantry force, ready to do combat at a moments notice. They are not a paramilitary or police force, which also do combat training. BOPE for instance, media-hype apart, when is the last time they faced anything like 26/11 or took part in sustained combat over an extended insurgency? Rolling up in APCs down crowded streets, exchanging a few shots with favela druggies is dangerous, but is not a patch in closing out all avenues of access and taking on those aforesaid people in a fight to the finish! Its all very nice to have a movie (and I loved it) of BOPE being a kicka$$ military force which is second to none, and employs stone cold killers etc etc - but the reality as shown in several documentaries is more prosaic. Training apart, they are not a kill or be killed force. They are a police force with the tactics that enable them to survive hostile situations and occasionally engage in combat. NSG SAG in comparison trains 24/7 for combat!!

This is what demonstrates to me, that for all the acronyms you are bringing in, you still dont have a fundamental understanding of the NSG when you bring in these SWAT type units and the like. They are smaller units, with a police component to them. They do not go in for the kind of opponents the NSG faces, and when they do, they are taken by surprise. In recent news, the French faced some urban jihadi type and were talking in awe about how he was prepared to die, went out fighting etc. These were comments by the people who faced him, not the media. That speaks volumes about the average threats they face, and what they are trained for.

If these people were facing the Mumbai team, having gone through many months of training, hopped up on drugs, equipped with automatic weapons, liberally using grenades and constantly relocating, then guess what, all their fancy reputation apart, they would be sh!t out of luck. And they would have realized whom they were facing, that they were outgunned, and would have started bringing in the military Spec Ops guys from SFOD-D, Seals and who knows what else. Right now, they have a lot of these types running about, thanks to the Gulf conflict & Afghanistan. A decade from now, they'll run into several issues in terms of quantity.

The SAG does NOT cultivate that policing mindset alone. That is why from day 1, recognizing the problems in taking a bunch of policemen (and a handful of exmilitary types) and training them to do limited combat roles... the NSG instead chose to go down the path of recruiting trained professional soldiers and teaching them the hard task of combat in urban areas & like those experienced by the IA in Blue Star, plus keeping people alive & the HRT aspect. Its also a reason, why SF soldiers alone do not fit directly into the NSG mindset. When a SF soldier was given a task, his job hitherto, was not to "rescue people" as a primary focus but to eliminate the enemy. In recent years, with SF also taking up NSG style roles for cities without NSG hubs, this may change, but still, if you take trained soldiers & then brush up their "softer" aspects, its a big difference from taking a policeman who has not gone through anywhere that daily grind and making him ready to kill!

And you have this impression that SAG is some sort of catch all force. It is not. They train across multiple conditions and specialized teams specialize in different skill sets. Its not that different nowadays from what the SF is doing, with a primary focus, and a secondary one. Please understand that NSG/SF et al have had decades - they haven't been twiddling their thumbs all the while.

It was the SRG component which was to handle a lot of the non "kill or be killed" stuff. That mandate was subverted by having the SRG become more of glorified political protection, which has been thankfully rescinded.

Similarly, you brought in the SPG earlier. Again, the SPG is not comparable across the board to the NSG. Their job is to protect their principals and engage in combat only to the extent they protect their principals. This is by the way, why the NSG is described as a force of last resort, because when the SAG is sent in, it is understood that chances are that they will have to kill the opponent, and that opponent is going to be a hardened one.

Not merely flash bang some deranged individual who is holding his relatives and the cat hostage, the vast majority of calls that the aforementioned SWAT teams face, and can then apply all sorts of techniques to convince the other guy to back down.

What you also need to get is that numbers matter.

The SAS for instance, if it was tasked with something like Mumbai, do you think they'd have handled it? They would be asking for any & every special operator because they don't have the numbers like NSG. SBS would have been called, and who knows what else. At the end of the day, everyone and their aunt from the British Armed Forces would have been scrambling for a response.

The local "armed police" or whatever SWAT they had, would be totally out of their depth. Its one thing to take on a couple of knife wielding thugs, quite another, in constrained quarters, to be dealing with trained fanatics who can fire accurately, respond back to fire, and lob grenades & are in constant touch with their trainers to regroup and reorganize.

In theory, the NSG is a force of 'last resort'. In practice, if it hadn't earlier, its now certainly morphing into a pan-national SWAT team. Nothing wrong with that per se. On the whole, I'm rather pleased with the development as long as the effort isn't duplicated (case in point, Force One). And just for clarity's sake, when I say that the NSG's current 'official' role needs to be performed by a genuine SF unit, I'm not advocating the NSG be dissolved or similar. If anything, I believe the NSG has been criminally underutilized, despite a variety of heachaches from the Maoists to the Gangs of Wasseypur, instead of being every strongman/don/gang-leader's worst nightmare.

Again, you are mixing up things. NSG is NOT a pan national SWAT team. Take this SWAT stuff out of your mind please. Its probably the biggest con pulled by a media fed on glory talk of some super folks doing super stuff. The average SWAT team will NOT train to NSG level standards, because they don't anticipate the kind of stuff the NSG faces. After Mumbai, that part may have changed and realization sunk in, that sergeant Joe Blobb with his 45 years in the police service, is still not equal to sergeant XYZ from the US Army who fought in Fallujah, was wounded in action twice and has seen house to house combat several times over. In contrast, from day one, the latter is the kind of person the NSG has recruited.

FORCE1 or whatever, can never do what the NSG does, if they do, it will be a big thing, because simply put, unless FORCE 1 starts recruiting the kind of people the NSG does, they are at a perennial disadvantage.

Go take a look at the amount of time a soldier spends becoming a soldier in the Indian Army. From his teenage years he goes through an incredible amount of grind, mental conditioning, and combat tactics, all gradually absorbed over the years. Then there is combat experience. After that, he may end up in the NSG, where they take all that, and hone it in specific areas.

How in anyones name, can that sort of experience be inculcated in any local force, with probationary police officers undergoing a handful of modules?? Whether taught by Israelis or Americans or the NSG themselves?
What these guys can do, is fix the opponent, if he is tough enough, till the NSG arrives. Which is critical.

Most of the casualties in Mumbai were because they were not even restricted in their movements. They moved around from place to place, firing away, and only a handful of people and later the MARCOS intervened in a not so substantial manner. If you get these opponents to at least remain to a certain geographical area, and "fix" them in place, or prevent them from directing fire to the easy targets, the civilians, the NSG can arrive and kill them.

Again, Maoists and Gangs of Wasseypur ARE not what the NSG is trained for. Are the Maoists in a specific location, barricaded or operating in a specific geographical area which can be addressed by the NSG to go in and kill them? Then yes. Otherwise, you will need regular infantry to fix or even fight them, and SF if they are a mobile, hard to locate dispersed group moving through the jungles.

Gangs of.. are usually untrained, opportunist weapon weilders who have been effectively countered by encounter specialists and their squads. Guess what happened to that squad when they faced the terrorists in 26/11?

Despite having a more than decent CT/HRT capacity at the local level, most countries retain a central/federal CT unit tasked with intervening in challenging/high-profile/volatile situations which the local forces could still have arguably handled. This is precisely what I'm advocating India follow as a model. And this unit should ideally operate on an SF model, trained to operate over a wide range of environments.

What you are not understanding is that most of these countries whose template you wish to follow do not face anywhere near the kind of threat India does. Hence they can go about their methods
- having some glorified local county police force donning body armor and calling it swat
- having some regional/big city SWAT which is much more capable but trains for as much regular police style takedowns as versus sustained combat
- have a central SF group which intervenes when things are too hot. Can be of limited numbers, because its tasking is primarily military, and when is the last time something like Blue Star or Mumbai happened in the west? Waco - we all know how that ended, and comparing that to a fortified killing zone as we say in Blue Star..

In contrast, India faces:
- a pathetic understaffed, undertrained regional police force which can barely handle regular policing forces given lack of adequate resources. Forget county swat
- state level/big city SWAT- mired in politics and funding issues. Force1 & Chennai SWAT types are only of recent vintage
- Ergo, India needs a national team like the NSG which has both the numbers & capability to intervene decisively!!
- That force cannot be composed of all SF operators, because there are NOT enough SF operators (first issue) and second, they dont require SF operators! NSG does not require a long range recce specialist who can speak mandarin, to engage a bunch of terrrorists in the Taj!! They require a highly fit, expert marksman, who is tough enough to be wounded and fight on - like the NSG guys in Taj did. That is possible using Infantry soldiers!!
- At the same time, India IS scaling up its SF to intervene at a larger level. Multiple cities which dont have NSG hubs have SF hubs which will do much the same thing. If anything, that is a positive step.

If I may bring up your example here, about 30 soldiers being able to put down two and a half times the volume of fire on a target than 10 commandos can; over open ground this works perfectly. Which is why the large RR has had a far greater effect in quelling the insurgency in J&K than the specialists from the SF units. Fair enough.

That is not why the RR works - that it has numbers. Yes it does, but what really matter is that they dominate the area of responsibility. There are a plethora of RR units, and they are each responsible for a particular sector. As a result of which, they routinely patrol those places, have a fair idea of what's happening (local intelligence collection) and also train for tasks which are beyond the mandate of regular infantry, such as a bigger focus on COIN. This allows the regular army to focus more on its regular mandate - which is conventional warfighting! For instance, a RR unit is not going to have a Milan unit attached to it for (say) anti tank operations. The regular army unit will. The RR unit does not have to plan the logistics for driving deep into an enemy unit behind an armoured squadron and practise for how to undertake joint operations. The Army unit does. The amount of wear and tear on a regular soldier only goes so far. Being in the Army, as you'd know, especially that of a developing world like India's, is a crazily physically demanding task. This is the RRs job to allow the Army, the breathing space, that allows it to remain an Army full time, or almost full time, when not engaging in specific COIN tasks, and not have its soldiers doing naka bandi, when they should be doing route marches or be deployed for a wartime exercise.
Fundamentally, the RR works not just because it has numbers and volume of fire, but because it is physically always present in the Area of Operations. The locals know RR is there. They have that faith these guys are there. So there is a two way communication. If limited Army guys sat in a base to preserve their operational efficiency, and came out from time to time, you have the US in Vietnam with their fire bases, or Pak in FATA experience all over again.

But when a hijacked aircraft needs to be breached at four places simultaneously, the 12 men involved ought to be among the best. And if that aircraft has been landed in Afghanistan, the men on the perimeter need to be the best available (the NSG was the default option during the IC814 hijacking). Such a unit can practically be trained and equipped to world class standards, something that is simply not feasible for the NSG in its current form.

That is your assumption. The NSG does have SAG teams specifically trained for aircraft breaching. Those twelve men can be the best in terms of reaction time, combat skills, but they dont need to learn Pushto or Dari, or learn how to pass undetected in POK - skills like what the SF teach!!

As regards not being equipped to world class standards, yes, that is a problem with the NSG, always has been. Because the GOI is pathetic in terms of execution, and always has been, because the politicos and the one dynasty that has ruled this country of ours, ensures that their protectors - namely the SPG get every toy - from fancy duds to the latest rifles, while the NSG intended for the plebes languishes. The MHA similarly, was least bothered about the RR and it was the Army which funded it initially.

The issue then, is not with the NSG. Its with the GOI and its arrogance, its near complete lack of accountability to Indian citizens and its ability to milk the exchequer of thousands of crores, while a mere fraction of that amount could equip 10 NSGs and give them equipment that the world would salivate over.

In such a milieue, having a powerful godfather helps. Army units and AF units, despite the pathetic state of affairs, do get their acquisitions, some of them, through because of sustained effort. If you have a MHA headed by politicians who use it to retain power, jockey for their own position etc, what is the NSG in the larger scale of things. A few hundred paramil guys dead in some Maoist attack, this, that...

That is one of the primary reasons why the US Tier I forces were raised - by coupling a stringent selection (ST6 for eg. accepts only veteran SEALs as applicants, and even among them not all qualify) with a huge investment in equipment and training, they were able to maximize the probability of a successful operation. And where a higher grade of fire support is critical, other units are available and are used in support (like the Ranger Rgt for Delta, Paras/RMs for SAS/SBS). Also the Chuck Pfarrer comment regarding the ST6's ammo budgets may have been hyperbole, but I've read and heard plenty more to suggest that their training budgets are exceptionally large. That eventually will show in the field (albeit with a diminishing rate of return).

You are again mixing up things without understanding how India's situations are nowhere similar to what the US faces. The US is a continent away from 90% of its troubles, many of which it itself meddles in and causes. It can afford to play around with limited forces of super-duper SF operators whom it uses for its expeditionary muddles, knowing that its vast mini-armies of local SWATs, DEA, FBI and others are enough to take down the occasional Waco case or two brothers who go nutso. The day they face something like the influx of jihadis coming across the border like we do, the day they start having to stop Mumbais and still 1-2 occur, then see what happens in terms of scaling up their military units.

And what is with this deification of ST6? They may be the best of the SEALs but are the SEALS the best? Spend some time talking to other US Army folks before the Bin Laden raid made these guys "unarguably heroic" and it becomes clear that at the end of the day, ST6/Seals themselves have a training profile which does not make them suitable for many cases of extended infantry missions. Give them "get to a point, take that guy out missions" and they work well. But at the end of the day, a Delta operator, who is an infantry guy since his induction, will be better at most of the overall tasks that Infantry troops can face. In fact, some of the mass casualties Seal teams have faced in Afghanistan, where the tempo of operations has meant every person with the SF tag is thrown in & out of the mission mix, has been attributed to this very fact.

And Ranger for Delta and so forth. All good on paper. What happened in Somalia when these experts with their expert methods went in? A grade A mess. They got whacked, and whacked so badly, that the US withdrew their forces.

You think India didn't have similar methods and hard lessons? In the Prabhakaran raid, the Sikhs were tasked to do the same job as the Rangers did, hold the perimeter while the Paras took Prabhakaran out. The operation went much the same way. And despite not being as "super selected as ST6" as the books would have you believe, the Paras held out against impossible odds. The Army then put in a relief column running its tanks on railway tracks. And pray tell, where is the "epicness" of this effort portrayed as versus glorious accounts of even failed US missions?

Let me tell you a hard truth. One which I realized after personally reading a lot of these peoples tomes & how hard they train, how great they are, etc etc etc. They have a great regimen, sure but so do others. The difference is that there is a huge group of people who are willing to buy the non stop deification of the empire (huge group of military enthusiasts in the US, so its good money to keep publishing these books/accounts) & the US military aids and abets this perception. From F-22s in Transformers to US mil equipment in every movie which is Pentagon approved.
The same as the Brits, wherever they can, bring in the SAS (the one and only) to show how they are better than the US.

The same as the elite US fighter pilots head to the F-15s. Yes they do. They came to India and got their clocks cleaned at Cope India. The next time around, they weren't so smug. Each time they have exercised with us, a bit of that supercilious, we are at the top of the totem pole rubbish has gone off. In one Cope India, a USAF pilot - that interview was later yanked from the webpage - whether accidental or intentional - who knows, was very irate. He said, each time we went up against the (IAF) MiG-29s, he was killing me and I was killing him, this is not how we train.
In short, the US trains for overwhelming force & every edge against the opponent, technology, manpower etc.

Its a hard fact, but it is true, that as far as training goes, they don't always have the edge. Technology, they sure do. India could never have pulled off the Bin Laden raid the way they did, with stealth, nap of the earth helicopters etc. But if political mandate was there, it could pull a Dawood raid in an entirely different fashion.

So please - dont fall for this hype of some super duper ST6 etc with amazing capabilities which India can't equal.
And coming to budgets, go figure - this year, the USAF is cancelling multiple training exercises and what not, to save money. India isn't. Take a look at the amount India loses to corruption scams and the like, and boondoggles like NREGA, and clearly, money is not India's problem. Funding a 10,000 NSG or a 20,000 SF is well within India's financial means today. If the cretins who embezzle the money weren't around. Even otherwise, there is no dearth of procurements. Its a different matter that those procurements get stuck thanks to all sorts of fraud corruption angles and what not. Not due to lack of money.

If you lack a proper unified procurement organization, and the forces and the NSG cannot even over a period of time, cannot even decide on a proper unified set of ballistic protection jackets, or small arms or other items, then you will get the current set up. Every file being pushed for separately, and with no proper father, the NSG suffers.

There were two other ancillary points made -

1. With regard to physical fitness, being in first rate shape is obviously a prerequisite for an individual training in CT/HRT, but that is just the foundation. Its the training that is the truly distinguishing element, and a damned expensive one at that. The natural hardiness of the Indian soldier provides less of an edge than it would on a conventional battlefield. And in situations where physical and mental toughness is critical, the SF is naturally better suited to the task, being trained for and having specialized in it.

Again, you are mixing up things. The biggest assumption is that SF training is exactly what the NSG requires. The SF guy is trained for things beyond the NSG. He will be trained for specific profiles not required by the NSG. He may be trained for long range recce, where he has to avoid the enemy at all costs. He may be trained to infiltrate organizations, pass as one of them, and speak the lingua franca. This sort of stuff requires a different kind of toughness and ability to handle multiple skillsets that the NSG guy does not need to have!
And natural hardiness provides less of an edge than on a conventional battlefield? Hello, the battlefield the NSG faces is conventional!
Was Stalingrad - i.e. fighting room to room in an urban area - unconventional? And hardiness won't count there?
The ability to go without hot proper meals for a long period of time, the ability to put up with lousy living conditions for a period of time, the ability to withstand pain..

Kindly go look up some of the Kargil operations. And then you will realize the natural hardiness of the Indian soldier - likely to be around for many decades till India urbanizes. And then you will have a different kind of hard urban type. People fought in conditions, western armies would have not considered acceptable. To its (dis) credit, the Army even went after some soldiers who did not find that their operations were within acceptable limits of success/survival. That caused significant resentment amongst several YO, but it also speaks volumes that the vast majority of YO actually did fight within those constraints.

2. With regard to combat experience, its lower today than it has been at any time in the last three decades and is likely to continue falling. The IA has over 500 infantry battalions. Only a handful of men were in firefights in J&K last year (and what I could gather the NE is in a similar (positive) state. The number of combat veterans being deputed to the NSG is fallen and can only be expected to fall further.

The point is there are combat veterans being deputed to the NSG, and furthermore, line infantry men!! These men, like it or not have been in combat operations, not just firefights alone! They bring many years of hard core infantry training to the job, and are then refined further. They are not policemen sitting doing calisthenics, mock drills & firing on a range, without having known anyone who has been in combat or having been part of a unit, that practises war on an industrial scale (and that is what the Army is). And given where India is, as much as I hate to say this, after the US leaves Afghanistan, the IA is not going to lack for any combat experience. The Pakis will ratchet up the jihad if things don't go their way.

There is another question that may potentially get raised here - why disperse the NSG and raise/retask a new unit, rather than the other way round. Well which one gets designation of the 'official' NSG is a matter of semantics. Now the nature of SF unit can be debated further - can be entirely civilian/paramilitary (GSG-9), entirely military (SAS), open/hybrid (NSG) or notionally civilian but military in effect like our very own SG.

The point is you simply dont have enough SF types for a super new NSG and nor do you need them.

Ask the Army for SF and they will say thanks, but no thanks!

Ask the Army to take up the NSG role, and they will say - where there is no NSG hub, we are already training our men to intervene.

The issue is not with the NSG itself or its role or its numbers. These are all worthless comparisons drawn up to some arbitrary KPIs. The USAF is 2500 fighters strong, yet gets away with the PR of its best. Its supporters whine about its "few" F-22s when that force is some two hundred odd (some 3/4ths of our planned Su-30 MKI fleet).

The issue is simply with NSG leadership and GOI.

You cannot have it led by hamhanded political appointees because it has to be "civilian" and then have those guys fail in situations which require combat experience and rapid decision making. You cant have it treated it like a poor cousin to the SPG in terms of equipment because NSG is for the average citizen and not the first family. Till these issues persist, its all smoke and mirrors to claim making the SF, the NSG or vice versa will change things.

As I envisage it, in the event of a Mumbai-like event, the local forces will be the first to respond, while the reserve unit gets airborne. Depending on the situation, the locals can take action independently or in the event of risk/complexity, wait for and thereafter support the central CT unit. If as in the case of Nariman House the assault is launched 48 hours after the event, it can then be spearheaded by the new unit. The result may still be the same, but at least we'll put our best foot forward.

[/quote]

You dont need the new unit to do the job the NSG can, provided somebody fixed the terrorists or at least engaged them to begin with..

[vasu raya]

Cross posting from cyber warfare thread

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Del ... epage=true

Can this be the result of an cyber attack ?

NSG should be prepared for such a eventuality with armed men operating in the tunnel, the laid out evacuation procedures may not work

[member_23455]

Maybe I joined late or am not seeing the finer points of this discussion, but why is a Desi version of SWAT being compared to Army SOCOM operators?

Ouch!

[wig]

India’s elite anti-terror force NSG plans to go hi-tech

India's elite anti-terror force, the National Security Guard (NSG), is planning to acquire the technology and equipment used by the United States Navy Seals in the operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, the most wanted man in the world.

The technology had enabled US President Barack Obama to watch the live footage of the Al-Qaida leader being shot in the head. The footage was taken from a camera attached to the helmet of a Navy Seal. The Seals are Special Operations Force of the US.

Taking a cue from the operation, codenamed "Neptune Spear", that took place in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 1, 2011, the NSG has now planned to use the same technology for their Special Force operations as well. The state-of-the-art equipment includes voice-data-video transfer, "mesh variety" communication devices, health-monitoring system, and body and head armour that is capable of protecting a man from the bullets fired from an AK-47 rifle. All these technologies have been integrated to form the "Future Black Cat Commando System".

The system is presently under consideration by the government. The NSG will soon have a "test bed" to check the functioning of the system, which will be done by a "hit" (a squad of six to seven commandos) right up to the highest level of the top-level commanders.

In a "hit," each troop will be equipped with a computer. The helmets have night vision goggles, which also have a night-vision camera that can be switched on or off. "The computer will send the live camera footage to the command centre via a commercial satellite. The commanders, who are monitoring the "hit," can change the plans of an operation in real time," said an official.

This will also allow commanders sitting at the command centre to pass orders directly to the "hit" as well as receive requests from the commandos through the latest communication system called the "mesh or gridded variety".

"The mesh variety allows the commandos of different "hits" to communicate simultaneously with each other and their commanders sitting thousands of miles away. They all are on the same radio channel. It is like a conference call over a telephone that will enable coordination of effort in case there are more than one "hit" operating. The radio devices that are presently with the NSG allows only one person to communicate at a time," explained the official.

A mesh variety radio is attached to a commando's uniform. The radio is connected by a wire to the headphones and a mouthpiece close to the jaw. The communication device uses the bone conduction technology, which is the conduction of sound to the inner ear through the skull bones. "They will allow hands-free operations enabling the commando to fire his weapon even while communicating," said the official.

The video transfer and the communication devices have been approved by the government for digital secrecy, implying that a conversation cannot be monitored or the system penetrated. "Messages being passed on the present radio handsets with the NSG can be intercepted easily. So radio silence or restricted conversation has to be maintained when the enemy is nearby," said sources.

The future commando system will also use the state-of-the-art "level-3 alpha" helmet and body armour, capable of taking the hits from the 7.62 mm bullets of the AK-47 assault rifle. The Glock pistols and MP5s, the two primary weapons of the NSG, will also be equipped with the latest sights.

The commandos will also have a health-monitoring system in the form of a wrist band. "It monitors the vital organs such as the heart and the brain. The commanders will have a monitoring system, which will show if a commando has been killed or is still alive," said the sources.

Bharat Electronics Limited has been tasked to procure the equipment. "The system is in a good stage of development. Until now, we have tested individual pieces. After the "test bed," there will be further trials. Once the trials are complete, the entire NSG force will be equipped with it," informed the official.

Future Commandos

The state-of-the-art equipment includes voice-data-video transfer, “mesh variety” communication devices, health-monitoring system, and body and head armour that is capable of protecting a man from the bullets fired from an AK-47 rifle
The NSG will soon have a “test bed” to check the functioning of the system, which will be done by a “hit” (a squad of six to seven commandos)
In a “hit”, each troop will be equipped with a computer. The helmets have night vision goggles, which also have a night-vision camera that can be switched on or off

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2013/20130613/nation.htm#4

[Singha]

I have some doubts if such devices will be able to communicate from deep inside concrete buildings and narrow alleys in india. sounds good on paper but operational experience might not be so.

[jayaaren]

<SNIP>I thought SRG was to support SAG. As for GIGN, note that EPIGN has now been folded into it. Also for large scale ops, GIPN & RAID are used to back them up.

So, you've been reading about the GIGN on the net? Should have done before you started talking about NSG and what should be and what should not be. Having said that, did you forget to read this part:

The total man power was expected to increase to about 420 soldiers in 2010. The reorganization goal was to enable the deployment of a 200 strong unit, trained together, for large-scale interventions, such as a Beslan-type mass hostage-taking - in French they're called POM (Prise d'Otage Massive).

So, the much vaunted GIGN can manage 200 strong team at any time. And this has been done with the objective to manage Beslan type of assault in France. Now, ask yourself this - how will the same GIGN tackle assault on three targets like Taj/Trident/Chabad House simultaneously?

Another important point - is the training level of GIGN/EPIGN/RAID similar? May be, GIGN & EPIGN have somewhat similar levels, but will all of them be trained to GIGN level and accordingly qualified?

On the SAS, note that only officers have short terms while all other ranks have fairly longer terms.

So, will the rotation of the officer cadre not have negative impact on the organization? And that too, a true-blue SF of SAS type?

To answer how rotation impedes effectiveness "Once you revert back to regular infantry or other units or even SF units after NSG, your training is then according to what these units do. One in always in should be the norm. Pray what can be achieved by a dispersed body of men. You have 10 men in NSG now and then they go back to 10 different units. They then train for what these units do. How are they going to function in the former NSG role after 1 year."

Men can do two tours of duty in NSG (IIRC) - so when they come back, they undergo refresher courses. The body of knowledge resides with-in the organization. As I have pointed out before, many organizations do this. Given a preference, I would want the NSG to have a permanent cadre but the same is not possible given the nature of the organization. If IA had been tasked for CT/HRT of NSG type, it would have created a battalion or two under the Para SF for such a task and rotated men from SF through it.

The issue with NSG is more of Command and Control and overall orientation of the force. The dual civil-military leadership and its placement under the MHA are some of the most pressing issues. The force was to be under Cabinet Secretariat but ended up being under MHA with its own set of problems.

NSG suffers from the very same malady which afflicts every SF in this country - the strategic thought behind nurturing and utilizing Special Forces. When Indian Army has not been able to get its act right with respect to SF, it is difficult to accept anything happening anytime soon from politicians and babus.

You're missing the point on GIGN which is that GIGN now includes EPIGN and is backed up by GIPN & RAID and such would have sufficient numbers for any incident involving large numbers. This means that yes they are in place specifically for multiple incident responses. As for the training, GIGN as the primary HRT unit is trained to the highest level while EPIGN, RAID & GIPN receive similar HRT training although not to the same levels as GIGN who are created as purist HRT.
As for the SAS. it has always been run by its NCOs and so to answer your question - no, officer rotation would not impact unit effectiveness
As for rank and file rotation, I'd rather have a team of permanent operators rather than training them, deploying them and the sending them off elsewhere only to have them come back and train again. Reasons are Time factor and as you said numbers.
On the subject of strategic thinking, i do hope all the Babus read our posts in the faint glimmer of hope that it knocks some sense into them

[Raja Bose]

Dont know if this was posted all in one place before...

NDTV episode on the NSG

Part 1


Part 2

[Brando]

Have the Para's been deployed in rescue operations in Uttarkhand ?

http://www.vancouverdesi.com/news/will- ... it/576321/
Lt. Gen. Chait said the best army officers have been deployed for the rescue operations and each one of them was equal to four men.

“Those 200 men are equal to 2,000. They are the most elite forces of the army,” he said.

[rohitvats]

^^^Elements from 50 Para Bde have been deployed to the region. This includes men from the Field Ambulance (Army Medical Corps) integral to the Para Bde. I saw pics posted on Official IA Facebook page of rescue efforts and maroon berets from AMC were visible. Plus, one of the news channel carried a report about men from Para Bde waiting at Dehradun for Mi-17V5 to carry them to forward areas, IIRC.

[wig]

from the tribune, chandigarh,

Hence, helicopters are the only option left. A dozen helicopters have been dedicated to this stretch. Army paratroopers could not be sent earlier as the only way out of the valley is the river which was raging amid rainfall for the past three-four days.

excerpts

Specialised mountaineering teams of the Army, ITBP and National Disaster Relief Force (NDRF) today slithered down from helicopters into the flood-ravaged valley. The teams have been tasked to climb the mountains that rise from the narrow valley and look for survivors.

Today was the first time that weather conditions were conducive for helicopters to operate in the area which is at an altitude of 10,000 ft and above.

Top sources confirmed to The Tribune that “search parties have located a few survivors who have climbed the mountain slopes to save themselves. Some of them are so fatigued that they don’t have the strength to climb down from the precarious mountain ledges on which they are perched”.

The attempts to drop food packets and water failed at some places in the valley as there is no space for the Army helicopters to manoeuvre.

“Pilots reported that food packets rolled down the ledges eluding the survivors,” a senior functionary said.

At other places, instant energy bars, medicines, biscuits and water have been provided to the marooned so that they can regain their strength.

One way out for survivors is that the troops bring them down to the helicopter landing spots. The second option is that troops climb the ledges and help the infirm, elderly and sick.

At present, there is no place to even land a helicopter given the slush. The rescue teams - trained to survive for days on their own - will also have to prepare helipads.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2013/20130621/nation.htm#2

[wig]

Paratroopers and mountain trained teams of special forces, normally deployed for mountain combat, have been air dropped near Kedarnath to look for survivors. Each of the teams is equipped to survive on its own for seven days.

excerpt

Army lands the first helicopter at Kedarnath Temple; special forces’ teams air dropped near Kedarnath to look for survivors

and

A heavylift Mi- 26 from the Chandigarh-based 126 Helicopter Flight landed at Gauchar with 30 barrels of fuel and 70 paratroopers

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2013/20130622/main1.htm

[Singha]

livefist has some pix of it. I had never seen one of the interior earlier. the fuselage looks quite narrow albeit very long for a helicopter. will work for people and sacks of food I suppose. are the men in the maroon berets from the para regiment (50th from agra)?

http://www.livefistdefence.com/2013/06/ ... nters.html

the interior of the only thing remotely its size the CH53 is likewise quite narrow
http://i257.photobucket.com/albums/hh21 ... 53E-05.jpg

[Surya]

the brawny Sardar stands out

[Singha]

about as wide as he is tall. probably tear anyone's arms out of socket if he wanted.

[rohitvats]

IAF has deployed the 3 x C-130 a/c for the rescue efforts.

NDTV (Nitin Gokhale) carried interview with the Squadron CO after they landed in Dharasu, Uttarkashi from Hindon AFB. The CO said they used all the on board sophisticated avionics and navigation equipment to make the landing. The visibility was under 1 kilomter. The airstrip length in under 1,000 meters; the a/c brought in 8,000 liters of fuel for choppers. A Mi-26 had airlifted a fuel bowser from Sarsawa to this location.

Location of Dharasu: http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=30.58 ... ch=dharasu

Here is a more detailed account of the event:
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/uttar ... eststories

Indian Army also inducted paratroopers into remote areas where it was difficult for choppers to land. The men slithered down from choppers.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3muxZ98 ... e=youtu.be

Pics:

From what I have been able to understand, IA used Para (SF) team to located people who had migrated to higher reaches in the mountains to escape the flooding. Plus, there are some areas which remain completely inaccessible due to terrain and these SF teams are being used to reach out to these locations. Chopper pilots have reported about inability to even drop food packets as they seem to be rolling of the edges into ravines. There are reports of IA teams having pinpointed people in these regions and are trying to bring them to lower reaches where choppers can evacuate them. These SF teams it seems are in LRRP mod with provisions for 7-days.

[VinodTK]

From Time Of India: Central nod for 'Black Cats' training campus near Hyderabad

HYDERABAD: If everything goes as per plan, Hyderabad will turn into a training hub of the elite 'Black Cats' by mid-2014. With the ministry of home affairs (MHA) giving its nod and sanctioning Rs 533.68 crore a few months ago, the National Security Guard (NSG) officials are gearing up to set up the Southern Regional Center (SRC) at Ibrahimpatnam for training commandos .

With the state government also handing over 600 acres at Ibrahimpatnam, the SRC is likely to be ready by next year. Tender notices have already been issued for civil works, which would be overseen by the Central Public Works Department. With this, Hyderabad would have an NSG hub at Trimulgherry as well as the SRC for training 'Black Cats'. As of now, nearly 300 commandos, ready for anti-terror operations round-the-clock, are stationed at the NSG hub at Trimulgherry. Similar hubs are in place in Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.

The proposal to set up a state-of-the-art NSG training centre at Ibrahimpatnam on the lines of NSG Manesar training centre has been pending for over three years. But the MHA officials, in their annual report released recently, announced the release of funds for developing infrastructure. "Post the 26/11 Mumbai terror strike, four regional hubs of NSG were operationalised in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kolkata to reduce reaction time. A regional centre at Hyderabad is also being raised, for which 600 acres of land has been acquired. MHA has conveyed sanction of Rs 533.68 crore towards the construction of this Southern Regional Centre, NSG at Ibrahimpatnam," the MHA report said.

With this, the state would have two trained anti-terror striking forces. Besides the NSG, the Andhra Pradesh police's OCTOPUS, which also has a training facility at Ibrahimpatnam, has a strength of over 250 personnel. NSG and OCTOPUS personnel, who undergo a gruelling training, including handling sophisticated weapons,

are sent back to their parent department once they attain the age of 35, ensuring that the force remains young and fighting fit.

[ManuT]

Yudh Abhya 2013

[Austin]

India Evades Action on Special Forces Command

The Indian government has shelved a proposal to establish a separate Special Forces Command, according to Defence Ministry sources — a move that drew sharp criticism from military officials and analysts.

The proposal to establish a Special Forces Command was made last year by a select panel on national security called the Naresh Chandra Committee.A decision on the proposal was rolled over to the next government, after the general elections in early 2014, said a Defence Ministry official, who gave no reason for the move.

“The prime minister continues his silence and the defense minister has no gumption to take up for unified command of the borders,” said Prakash Katoch, a retired Indian Army lieutenant general and special operations expert. “The government of India may take a couple of months, if not years, to take a decision to establish a Special Forces Command, and even if they do, will come up with another white elephant with little strategic advantage.”

A lack of clarity on the role of the special ops forces may be one reason for the government’s indecision.

“The Indian concept of employment of special forces has yet to graduate from that of tactical in support of conventional operations to strategic employment, as the US [Navy] SEALs,” or the British Special Air Service, said Rahul Bhonsle, a retired Indian Army brigadier general and defense analyst. “This will have to be a political decision and would require a high degree of strategic sophistication, which I do not think the Indian political leadership is displaying for now.”

An Army official said India’s special ops forces — which number about 10,000 troops from the Navy, Air Force, Army and paramilitary units — have been used only for conventional warfare and internal security threats. The officer argued the special ops forces should be used for strategic tasks, such as deterrence against irregular threats and asymmetrical warfare.

“Asymmetric war is not launched against the military, but a nation,” Katoch said. “Special forces must be central to asymmetric response, but in the current context, we neither have the political will nor even the military will, and hence have not been able to establish deterrence to this asymmetric war.”

Bureaucratic barriers also may have played a role in the government’s inaction.

“The Indian bureaucracy, which supposedly handles these issues, has neither the expertise nor the structure needed for the purpose. The reluctance to allow the creation of a professional body can only be attributed to the bureaucracy’s fear of losing their clout and turf,” said Venkataraman Mahalingam, a retired Army brigadier general and defense analyst.

Special operations will play an increasingly significant role in future conflicts, an MoD official said. The special ops forces are to be equipped with advanced weaponry and command, control, communication and intelligence systems, the official said. Sources in the Army, however, said there have been delays in buying specialized equipment and weapons.

“Everything is planned for, but we are not following the system of ‘packaged equipping.’ If an assault squad does not have the complete package of equipment as authorized to it, the combat potential will obviously be commensurately less,” Katoch said.

[member_23455]

“Special forces must be central to asymmetric response, but in the current context, we neither have the political will nor even the military will, and hence have not been able to establish deterrence to this asymmetric war.”

+1 to Lt. Gen Katoch for having the intellectual honesty to not lay all the blame at the door of the netas and babus. Of course nice guys like him are part of the problem--an SF-capability at a strategic level needs champions who can play the dirty political games to get their dreams realized.

...but as the Army showed with their chopper fight, it can be done.

[rohitvats]

IA is house divided when it comes to SF. It first needs to set it's house in order.

[Rahul M]

do you see a possible expansion in para or para(SF) to cater to the MSC's ?

[vaibhav.n]

Rahul,

There have been talk of movement in this area of late and tried to discuss this with Rohit too, things are still not pukka. However, things do look up. The new raising as and when they come online, will benefit the MSC tremendously.

[Surya]

seperate the SF into its own regiment pronto - get it out of the hands of the Para generals

then once quality is the focus the SF strategic doctrine outlined by so many sharp folks needs to be implemented

[Rahul M]

thx vaibhav, any more details would be nice.

Surya ji, yeah, I have been dreaming of a 'meghdoot regiment' for sometime now.

[Surya]

vaibhav -- your contacts are superb so caution

rahul one wishes ..

for that Army HQ has to intervene forcefully - for decades its been treating this as an internal para fight

Its not - and the last few generals starting with Vij have really dropped the ball

[Karan M]

Vaibhav, how is the perception of quality now? Have any measures been taken to address concerns of the reduced probation/training time.

[vaibhav.n]

thx vaibhav, any more details would be nice.

Surya ji, yeah, I have been dreaming of a 'meghdoot regiment' for sometime now.

Rahul,

Things are still at a conceptual stage right now, but we can surely see a airborne element added to the MSC. The size of it could be as big a new Parachute/Air Mobile Brigade(Part of a Corps Reserve) to a single SF Battalion. Having C-130's at Panagarh gives weight to this theory. A new SF Battalion is also under raising and could go operational in the 2014-15 timeline.

My own understanding is that ,the Commitment for other SF units for CI Ops has also been stabilized in the last couple of years, with each unit asked to provide an Assault Team(Para SF equivalent of an Infantry Coy) for each of the RR CIF Formations. This gives them time for Refit, Training, CI Duties and will provide breathing space. We will possibly now see each Field Army with an SF Battalion with the Northern and the Eastern Command with 2 SF Battalions owing to the large AoR for each of them on the opposing fronts that they control. IA has set an internal goal for 10 SF Battalions, most would be new raisings from now on.

Karan,

This is a very difficult question, and i am surely not qualified to answer this. Things are on the move and have taken across multiple fronts by standardizing the Training Regimen at the Special Forces Training School which is now a Cat A establishment. More exposure is also being given at as many Cross Training Exercises. More specialized skill-sets are also being groomed, the boys are definitely more savvy than your regular jawan technologically, linguistically also. With new raisings on the horizon, culling from existing units is inevitable.

Moreover, there is a distinct difference in the way SF units are led in the West and in the Sub-Continent at large where officers still led ops till the Team Commander level unlike in the US where Captains and above only move to command and will not lead men into battle. The good or the bad is for you to decide.


Legend:
For the uninitiated a SF Battalion Organisation will be: Assault Squad<Assault Troop<Assault Team.

[Karan M]

Thanks Vaibhav

[anjan]

I understand the general enthusiasm for SF but how are they supposed to be employed in the Indian context? What would an Army do with 1 battalion of Paras? Or are they meant to be employed only for recce/sabotage tasks in which case an Army has no access to regular Para? Eastern command with little/no armour can hardly employ regular Paras whereas Western command could possibly really use them in numbers. I'm really confused.

[member_23455]

I understand the general enthusiasm for SF but how are they supposed to be employed in the Indian context? What would an Army do with 1 battalion of Paras? Or are they meant to be employed only for recce/sabotage tasks in which case an Army has no access to regular Para? Eastern command with little/no armour can hardly employ regular Paras whereas Western command could possibly really use them in numbers. I'm really confused.

This statement will leave a lot of us confused. Could you explain the correlation?

As for the overarching "how will SF be deployed in the Indian context?"...it may be easier to first establish how it should not be deployed as it has often been deployed in the Indian context - as elite infantry, as a quick reaction reserve, and even for general UN peacekeeping ops.

[anjan]

This statement will leave a lot of us confused. Could you explain the correlation?

The classical employment of Paratroopers is to hold objectives till linkup with a thrust by regular forces. Without it Paradrops will be contained and eliminated by the enemy once surprise is overcome. Generally objectives are in depth. The key is quick punch-through and linkup . Usually this requires armour and terrain conducive to quick movement of ground forces. Or with say Crete you have linkup by sea/air.

As for the overarching "how will SF be deployed in the Indian context?"...it may be easier to first establish how it should not be deployed as it has often been deployed in the Indian context - as elite infantry, as a quick reaction reserve, and even for general UN peacekeeping ops.

So who's going to do the regular Para tasks? Paratroopers are very much para-trained infantry and I would think there is a requirement in that role.

[rohitvats]

Actually, vaibhav's post gives data-points about what is wrong with SF scenario in India -

1. Focus on CI Ops by Para SF has been one of the major factors responsible for the way things have gone wrong about Special Forces in India. Para SF have been from day one considered as some sort of super-infantry and used through-out their existence for direct-action kind of roles. They tried to mold 1 Para SF on lines of SAS and made it AHQ reserve but nothing came of this exercise - subsequently, all the SF battalions changed into same organization as 1 Para SF.

2. Ironically, the only SF authorized cross-border action is Special Group and not Para SF (this is from open source) and it comes under Cabinet Secretariat and not IA - a committee floated towards re-organization of SF structure in IA recommended taking over SG from R&AW but we don't know what became of this exercise. By all accounts, this is the only true SF formation in India with large recruitment base and capabilities.

3. When the militancy broke out, all the 3 SF battalions got sucked into it - 21 Para SF was raised for NE later again considering the COIN responsibilities. In all these years, the Para SF came to seen doing only CI Ops which was considered as only slightly different from what other infantry units (Para Regiment battalions being prime example) were doing.

4. There was no differentiation in deployment or use of Para SF and if one spoke to Para boys, the usual refrain was, 'Hum bhi to yahi karte hain...isme kaun si badi baat hai'. The extra allowance one got as SF trooper was an added and BIG incentive as well.

5. And pronto - you had the comical scene of mass scale conversion to Para SF. Just compare the tight control of number accretion of SF operators in US Armed Forces - they knew quality cannot be mass produced and takes time. On our side, I've heard of plans to raise 1 x SF battalion for each Corps - all this again points to use of Para SF for direct actions or shallow insertions inside enemy territory. Whatever happened to centralized control of precious assets - No wonder IA has not managed to raise the Special Operation Command!

6. 12 Para was to be raised as Parachute Infantry battalion but from what I understand, it is also now a SF battalion. And more are to be RAISED!!!

Sorry to say this but in their present form, I consider Para SF as something like RANGER Regiment in US Army with limited special operations capability. We are nowhere close to Green Berets or Delta Force or SAS. I would consider we lack as thorough and detailed training regimen as other countries - even SSG - a direct consequence of large numbers and lack of clarity of purpose.

Please remember that Special Forces are not only about operators - we may have best of operators who through sheer hard work and individual capability get things done. Same goes for individual level of weapon or kit. You can give the best small arm or communication equipment to your SF battalions but that still does not make the cut.

What we lack is thought process and organizational level of understanding with Indian Army - The Special Forces structure has to deliver rather than individual operators or even commander or battalions.

[Rahul M]

thx for the gyan people. so still no chance of separating para from SF in the near future.


@anjan, please read what people are saying. of course para are para-trained (duh !). what people are saying is that currently there are two standards of training in para regiment and it undermines proper use of the better trained para(SF).

as for your question, I guess para would do para jobs and SF would do SF jobs.

@rohit, also, from what I could gather, most US SF units are under strength. one NYT report few years back put total # of GB at a little less than 4k. it took one full year to achieve expansion from 3850 to 3950 !

[member_23455]

This statement will leave a lot of us confused. Could you explain the correlation?

The classical employment of Paratroopers is to hold objectives till linkup with a thrust by regular forces. Without it Paradrops will be contained and eliminated by the enemy once surprise is overcome. Generally objectives are in depth. The key is quick punch-through and linkup . Usually this requires armour and terrain conducive to quick movement of ground forces. Or with say Crete you have linkup by sea/air.

Got it...so let's leave the SF part out of it and consider if non-SF para is still relevant. Short answer:Yes. But...

1. As far back as 1971 in the East, it was the Indians who displayed in textbook manner that opening a "second front at the back" could be done with airmobile infantry/vertical envelopment. They also did a para-drop at Tangail for good measure. The increasing proliferation of vertical lift capability means paras no longer have a monopoly on this capability/tactic.

2. Military planners have been studying classic behind enemy lines mass drops from Crete to D-Day to Market Garden, to even at a stretch...Mitla Pass. Since such ops require everything going to plan, especially on a delicate timetable, and in war nothing goes to plan, such ops are becoming increasingly marginalized. but...

3. The 101st Airborne did do air assaults in both GWI and II where the enemy's combat power had already been reduced significantly, and there was high degree of confidence that the linkups would happen on time. But we have seen British paras come in by sea on the Falkands, and the French para units in various African hotspots choosing to airdrop against a non-peer enemy.

As elite infantry and rapid reaction forces, a non-SF para force is always useful, just maybe not as important a cog as it used to be.

Sorry to say this but in their present form, I consider Para SF as something like RANGER Regiment in US Army with limited special operations capability. We are nowhere close to Green Berets or Delta Force or SAS. I would consider we lack as thorough and detailed training regimen as other countries - even SSG - a direct consequence of large numbers and lack of clarity of purpose.

Please remember that Special Forces are not only about operators - we may have best of operators who through sheer hard work and individual capability get things done. Same goes for individual level of weapon or kit. You can give the best small arm or communication equipment to your SF battalions but that still does not make the cut.

What we lack is thought process and organizational level of understanding with Indian Army - The Special Forces structure has to deliver rather than individual operators or even commander or battalions.

The Americans, with the most advanced doctrinal and capable SF-structure in the world also throw in a few headscratchers. The 75th Ranger Regiment is actually a Tier-1 component as part of JSOC, even though it is nowhere near DEVGRU, 1 SFOD-D (Delta), and 160 SOAR in selection, training, and gear. Because it provides extra muscle in certain ops like Mogadishu, it's fit in somehow.

Green Berets are not only Tier-2, their specialization has always been what US SOF doctrine called FID - Foreign Internal Defence, basically, training and "advising" third party forces. Since 9/11 they have become more of the "door-kickers" that the SEALs were.

Since warfare evolves, all these units keep evolving. Since armor and SF got brought up earlier, there is a fascinating instance of a combo of M1 Abrams tanks and Delta operators running amok in GWII, showing how "out of the box" one needs to be in this business.

We guys, have regressed, in the name of increasing capability.

[Surya]

Sorry to say this but in their present form, I consider Para SF as something like RANGER Regiment in US Army with limited special operations capability

except maybe the original 4 whose COs held out for some time - over time I am sure they will succumb to the Para Generals pressure

[Viv S]

Sorry to say this but in their present form, I consider Para SF as something like RANGER Regiment in US Army with limited special operations capability. We are nowhere close to Green Berets or Delta Force or SAS. I would consider we lack as thorough and detailed training regimen as other countries - even SSG - a direct consequence of large numbers and lack of clarity of purpose.

Actually with the increasing number of SF battalions, the parallels with US SOF organisation has increased if anything. Note the 'Green Berets' i.e. US Army Special Forces are fairly large as well - 20 battalions (recently scaled up from 15 battalions), each around 300 strong. They deploy in strength and while they specialize like RajitO mentioned, in Foreign Internal Defense, they've spent most of the last decade on the counter-insurgency circuit , again not unlike our Para-SF units.

Then you have the rapid deployment force; 3 battalions, 75th Ranger Regt. Broadly, analogous to the IA's three Para battalions. Elite airborne infantry.

But where the Rangers mesh with the Delta Force, we clearly lack a Tier I unit. There's the SF unit rotating through the Para Brigade, but next time we have an IC814 type crisis, it'll be a toss-up between the Paras and NSG, both being sub-optimal solutions.

[nachiket]

... There's the SF unit rotating through the Para Brigade, but next time we have an IC814 type crisis, it'll be a toss-up between the Paras and NSG, both being sub-optimal solutions.

Why? Isn't that exactly the kind of thing the NSG was raised for in the first place? I don't understand why the Paras would even be considered for it.