Rs_singh wrote:1. Grab land? Ah, you see, in the army, you learn to dominate physically or dominate by obs.
Please elucidate how domination by observation helps when the use of firearms, particularly artillery shelling, is not resorted to. If the PLA were to resort to artillery shelling, then they have to be prepared for an Indian response in kind.
Col. Vinayak Bhat (R) has filed a report that shows that Chinese radar positions can observe our helicopter flights to Siachen. I don't expect this to prevent us from continuing routine air maintenance of our posts.
A quick look at PLAGF pos should reveal to you which territory they’ve denied to us and where they can move fwd. I won’t go into the details, it’s freely available on twitter.
I have looked, Sir. Tried to correlate those positions in the Depsang Plains to terrain on Google Earth. What I see from news reports is that there may be a choke point that prevent our patrolling to PP 10, 10A, 11, 13 etc but there are also reports, specifically from Nitin Gokhale that there are alternate approaches that bypass that too. In any case, even that chokepoint is only valid as long as no firearms are used. I can't tell from Google Earth (the version I have allows detailed terrain scans only as late as 2009) whether those points are actually defensible in a firefight.
As far as the Chinese intruding further into our territory in Depsang is concerned, that is even more curious because the terrain is so broken up that apart from encirclement by infantry, it seems their options are even more limited. Whereas, if India were to cross further West and North, the terrain becomes considerably more favorable for armour deployment. In addition, the Chinese armour build up on their side of the LAC is more vulnerable to Indian artillery interdiction.
So I am all ears for some pointers.
Aside: There is a position named Alpha III, which on one set of maps is marked as a Chinese position but from the approaches looks like it should be an Indian position.
2. I’m not sure why the persistent reference to op parakram. Op parakram was a response to an act of aggression to deter further aggression. This build up iIS the act of aggression itself. .... Perhaps you can explain this a bit better to me if I’ve misunderstood you but I don’t see the equivalence here.
I am not drawing a moral equivalence between the two, if that's what you are concerned about. It's rather of the stalemate that ensues when the enemy deployment matches one's own.
Aside: I don't agree with your assessment that Op Parakram was intended to deter further aggression from Pak (none was forthcoming); even the official line is that it was intended to be punitive, coercive diplomacy to extract concessions. However, this is a line of discussion that will distract from the current scenario, so let's leave this be.
3. The EN has a narrow window to hit us. Besides there are several internal political compulsions for the CCP to survive. I’ve said before, this is Soviet Union 1989.
How do those internal compulsions assess the possibility of a bloody stalemate, if shooting starts? At the moment the CCP can declare victory to its internal audience (the map of China west of Finger 4 is visible). It may be a tad bit different if a shooting war results in significant Chinese casualties and no permanent gains of territory?
Our public opinion will turn sour once coffins start coming back. GOI is answerable to the people, after all. We saw this in IC814, and again in Kargil, most recently
Public opinion turned sour in India during Kargil??? Perhaps it turned sour in Pakistan once their coffins came back.
More recently, in this stand-off public opinion turned even more nationalistic after the clash in Galwan on June 15.