shiv wrote:RajeshA wrote:Many Indians are perfectionists. Their conditions for going to war, or to assassinate some terrorist, etc. should meet all the conditions. There should be no international fallout. There should be no "failure" - in fact nothing that can be construed as failure by some journo anywhere in the world. There should be threat of nuclear war. It should be a clear war. India should not be seen as anti-Islamic. There must be a final solution to the Pakistan problem. We need to have full control over the fallout from war, etc. etc..
We have in fact pushed ourselves into a corner through these preconditions. But all these preconditions are simply to set the bar very high, so high that we and reality never can reach there.
Rajesh you are wrong. You just have not read about military planning, good and bad. There is plenty of material, but your interests and reading are clearly different. There is no other way to plan war.
shiv saar,
what you speak of is tactical planning for war. What I speak of is specifying the mission aims for the war within a political context.
shiv wrote:It is easy to talk war and retaliation when you ignore the fact that you are sending some men to their deaths. How many men you keep sending and for how long and to what end becomes a political problem. So this rhetoric about "perfectionist" and "self defeating" is just that - rhetoric to post a contrarian argument and one ignorant of military planning at that.
That is not to say that leaders have not thought the way you think. But they lose wars. the US has lost many wars in this way but has glossed over them. Vietnam, was a great example. Afghanistan is one more. But let me just point you to a quote from a book that I posted in the mil forum in another context.
That is ingenious.
We Indians don't really allow the Indian Army to make political statements or threaten adversaries or anything of the sort. We consider that as the Indian Military going beyond its brief. That is considered the sole preserve of the political leadership.
On the other hand when civilians start speaking of war and peace, the critique is made that we don't appreciate the severity of war and we should not talk about it 'light-heartedly'!
Thus the discussion is throttled from both sides!
We are NOT talking about military planning. We are talking about formulating the right response to the threats we face and encouraging the political leadership to make the resources available to the military to meet those aims.
When I speak of "perfectionism", I speak of political leadership not willing to accept the political fallout resulting from any Indian muscular intervention in Pakistan. You however understand this as my criticism of "detailed military planning". Two different things.
The issue is that the "perfectionists" are looking for a magic bullet strategy to deal with Pakistan. There is no such thing. Whatever strategy we use, there would be some fallout. We may not succeed in killing the beast completely. We may not achieve everything we set out to do. Such an outcome is interpreted as abject failure. This is the wrong attitude, in my view. Perhaps our first bullet will only injure the beast or may just provoke it, but it would change the status quo. If we are good at planning, we may make full use of the new circumstances and use another bullet.
I think the expectation of full control over the situation is "perfectionism". In no war, can one have complete control over its progression. That is the nature of war. One has to be nimble and improvise.
It is the uncertainty and variability surrounding war that paralyzes the intellectual, who believes that he needs to sort out all equations first before jumping in. That doesn't work, because after the first minutes of the battle, the situation changes and new variables pop up anyway.
However the focus is not on the military campaign here. The focus is on the political aims of a conflict, and IMO as the political costs would rise, our political leadership would just have to buckle up and face them as they arise - be it in international diplomacy, be it due to resources, be it due to internal vote-bank considerations, etc.
