See, this is the classic confusion between the two subdivisions of 'surprise', namely, tactical surprise and strategic surprise.neerajbhandari wrote:So what according to you will anger Chinese to the extent that suddenly the PLA will decide to neutralize Tezpur? IMHO again, Surprise attack is the one which comes without formal declaration of war but it doesn't mean that there is no trigger for that. The trigger could be anything like a skirmish at the border, downing of the adversary aircraft etc.
Tactical surprise would be when both sides expect war but still one side manages to outmaneuver the other using some ruse or advantage. In most cases this does not result in mass losses on the victim even though he takes losses.
Strategic surprise is another matter altogether. Here one side conceals its intentions to such a degree that the other side expects peace until the moment the shells start dropping. This can involve a series of diplomatic or political or even strategic ruses. Although such cases in history are less, they still show the almost decisive losses that the victim takes that end up fixing the result of the war in the first few hours itself.
Now, while I have enough faith in the capabilities of our armed forces to ensure that a tactical surprise attack results in minimum losses, I have zero faith in our political and intelligence analysts to that level that I am seriously worried about the strategic surprise attack.
It is this latter case that I was alluding to when I said that Tezpur is vulnerable.
The concept of 'triggers' is something that the enemy can use to his own advantage. For example, if both sides realize that a certain event can lead to war, and then both mobilize, then the idea of strategic surprise is worthless. If, however, the enemy decides to not act, but instead act as if it wants to diffuse the situation through diplomacy etc, he can let the trigger pass away into the past and lull the other side into lowering their defences back to peacetime level before deciding to attack. Now, if the other side is smart, and understands this possibility, this won't happen. But with politicians such as ours, falling for something like this is real.
Finally, with BMs and CMs, there is little evidence to show suspicious activity and even then you need massive ISR assets to do the job, which in our case we don't have. If an initial attack is initiated with these measures along with an air campaign, you could have a situation where both sides are fighting an air war even as armies on both sides rush to the border. In this case the side that is taken by surprise and loses space over the battlefield to the enemy can leave his mobilizing ground forces and their marshaling nodes vulnerable to the enemy air force to try and hinder and delay. In this way they can affect the ground war indirectly. In other words, you don't need to mass your people at the border to win the ground war if strategic surprise is achieved, and this in turn allows you to take that one piece of evidence that could allow your plan to be blown before it starts (i.e. the movement of ground forces to the border) and use it against the other side.
-Vivek
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