manjgu wrote:Picklu wrote:
It may appear counter intuitive but doing lesser things overtly gives better result than doing greater things covertly. This is one of the main reasons (other being weapon sale) why US, USSR and Oiros advert their weapons capability and kill record instead of keeping the specifications secret. The psyops effect. Perception is more influential than reality and hence needs at least equal amount of resource to manage perception as reality.
The ability of defiance depends on moral and for better result we need to sap the moral of the enemy, which we did only in 1971. In all other times like 48, 65 and even 2002, we have done equally well militarily but there were no such overt surrender and hence the enemy lived to fight another day.
The only time we shattered their moral were in 71 and they were quiet for sometime but later got emboldened by Chinese nuclear umbrella.
This is the reason why I am so critical on Feb 27 air operations. We did great militarily but not overtly and hence the napakis are jumping up and down on every media. Had we delivered a bigger thappad, their opposition of article 370 would have much subdued. You can get a similarity in the behavior of paki cricket fans during world cup in the last 5 years, before and after their winning champions trophy beating us in final.
I would say, managing paki diplomatic riposte on article 370 is equally import, if not more, than managing their military riposte via terrorism. By giving them oxygen on Feb 27, we have emboldened them to push diplomatically against article 370 in greater vigor. It has also emboldened our desi Jaichands in Kashmir by making them think that Pakis are our equal militarily and hence they are being vocal about their preference for independence with impunity with the courage that pakis will support them and will be able to defend against us. It is a wrong perception on their part of course but as it has been proven again and again that perception, not reality, molds the action.
well the Pakis have spun 1971 as a victory as they have spun all military confrontations with India.
I am fairly informed on Ind-Paki war and I have not come across anywhere pakis have claimed '71 as victory. Even if one or two such sample exists (you can never be sure of lal topi antics), from most of their own accounts, 1971 is an overwhelming public shame for them and they are hell bent to take revenge on us.
manjgu wrote:99% of Pakis think they won at kargil and it was Clinton who saved India from certain defeat!!!
Pakis have span Kargil as victory as mentioned by myself (I quote my own
"In all other times like 48, 65 and even 2002, we have done equally well militarily but there were no such overt surrender and hence the enemy lived to fight another day. "), so not sure what you are disagreeing with. It would not have been easy for them to do had we overtly taken over some of their populated areas post Kargil, btw.
manjgu wrote:So I dont agree with ur assessment.
I am not advocating stopping covert action, I am advocating along with covert, more overt action which we lack as of now.
Our previous covert actions have not yielded better behavior from them.
What has changed recently is our "overt claim" of action as surgical strike and balakot. Even for these actions, visible overt proof is lacking IMHO (Again, not saying they didn't happen but pointing out the lack of undeniable unrefutable proof to really rub their nose in overtly and IAF agrees btw, as their own
post action assessment identified this area as their shortcoming). So, again not sure what and why you disagree. Do you think we do not need to hit them
overtly? Or our current overt(minuscule) actions are sufficient and no need for any improvement?
manjgu wrote:When a army owns a country, they have to work extra hard to preserve their H&D.
Here you are actually agreeing with my point that hitting them overt will give bigger and better result. Because it will make their work to preserve H&D that much hard.
manjgu wrote:We should be doing things both covertly and overtly to the maximum.
Agree. However my point is our overt action is far far lagging compared to our covert action and we need to improve in this area. Killing them covertly does not cause any problem for them as they have a fairly large uneducated suicidal young male population to replace any loss.
manjgu wrote:If u had bombed balakote with high explosives, they would have shown some other place as the madrassa etc etc.
How easily pakis would have been able to spin had we used a bomb to flatten the building? While they can say something else is the madrasa, they can't deny that we targeted one of their building and bombed it to smithereens. They can't say we dropped bomb hastily on some tree and ran away, right?
Let me quote IAF's own assessment report
hereThe choice of the weapon — i.e. the Spice bomb that penetrates a target killing people inside rather than over a fragmentation weapon — was also seen as a negative given that the IAF did not have much evidence by way of pictures to prove that the Balakot strikes actually took place, the IAF report said. A fragmentation bomb would have flattened the structures that would have been easier to present as evidence, it said. This comes in the face of questions being raised in the international media about the efficacy of the IAF strikes given satellite pictures that showed that the structures the IAF said they had hit in Balakot, were seen to be standing intact.
manjgu wrote: We must as a country have only objective, to ensure breakup of Pakistan and pursue it with single minded focus. Do all that is to be done covertly and overtly.
Without breaking the moral of the enemy there is no way to defeat them. Dropping nukes on Japan didn't cause significant military destruction, just destroyed their will to fight anymore.
Near home, in 1971, the the action that caused immediate surrender of paki forces in east pakistan were bombing of governor's house; again, it didn't degrade them militarily, it just exposed their inability to protect any area controlled by them and effected enough browning of pants to sign the surrender document on the dotted line.
Only in total war, you get a chance to annihilate the military of the opponent and total war is not going to happen anywhere in globe anytime soon.