Discussion on Indian Special Forces

rohitvats · Post by **rohitvats** » 09 Dec 2008 10:18

The excercise is taking place in Belgaum, home to the Commando Training Wing. The Commando Dagger badge is the one worn by Instructors in this institution who themselves would have got 'Instructors Grade' during their commando training.

The other fellow has only the NSG badge. Is not Para qualified.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Dec 2008 11:01

^^^ Major Unnikrishnan apparently got I-grading when he did his Junior Leaders course at Belgaum. Someone on this forum a week or so back, was mentioning about an Unni who was featured on the BBC series 'Commando'....that guy is a different Unni - Rajith Unni (dont know if his name expands to Unnikrishnan though).

Nikhil T · Post by **Nikhil T** » 09 Dec 2008 12:23

Vikram_S wrote:k prasad, with 300-1000 hostages in taj and trident per possible estimate, and 5-10 in nariman house, which comes first? which will cause more massive loss of life? the nsg had to prioritise till second batch of commandos were flown in. great vilasrao deshmukh, military expert, ask for 200 commandos. ultimately 447 were involved in all 3 op.

second.y ---> this business of second guessing NSG on account of "doubts"- folks, the nsg were there and saw ground situation. we have no idea of actual ground situation. they had access to night vision tech and i think the long telescope thingy mentioned before in an article was a thermal imager. they waited to see if they could fix the hostages position and then ingress.

in nariman, the plan was to attack from top and bottom. the top plan was given away by media coverage of airdropped commandos. so they went in from the bottom floors.

also k prasad, the hostages were killed much before nsg arrived. the attack was launched i think because nsg figured out the same after careful observation and decided no point in waiting.

Why didnt the NSG try to smoke these terrorists out ? Maybe they could've used smoke grenades that couldve induced dizziness. I wonder if the NSG has such equipment?

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 09 Dec 2008 12:38

folks are too brought up on discovery channel shows.

notice the windows in nariman house and most other homes in India have a solid iron welded grill on them. so you just cant "rope in" from the roof, kick or latch open the plain glass videshi style window and make an entry. do you "rope in" with a gas torch and spend 5 mins dangling there cutting your way in and terrorist will not respond.

how do you throw grenades when there's every chance it will
bounce back from the window grills

do you throw pungent grenades into rooms wherein you have no idea if there are hostages esp old people, people with respiratory ailments or children?

these are some of the wrong "expert opinions" in print media seen recently. mostly by editorial staff who wouldnt even make a newbie grade here.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Dec 2008 12:47

Singha,

Fully agree.
I brought up the point about window grills in Nariman House some moons back. We are too used to Bruce Willis in Die Hard and Dallas SWAT taking down some drug dealer (in addition to a monotonically decreasing attention span) that we expect CT units to 'magically' take down entire houses in seconds.

The teargas grenades bouncing back due to window grills actually happened during Blue Star when SFF or 1 Para Cdo (I forget which) tried to use them against the Akal Takht.....all the grenades fell back on the assaulters with expected results.

Aditya G · Post by **Aditya G** » 09 Dec 2008 13:44

[quote="nikhil_t]Why didnt the NSG try to smoke these terrorists out ? Maybe they could've used smoke grenades that couldve induced dizziness. I wonder if the NSG has such equipment?[/quote]

NSG used sulphur gas(?) in Black Thunder II.

Prior SFF had used a gas in Op Bluestar

Lalmohan · Post by **Lalmohan** » 09 Dec 2008 16:55

Aditya G wrote:[

smoke and stun grenades were used throughout - please read the different reports on this and other threads

nishug · Post by **nishug** » 09 Dec 2008 17:39

Raja Bose wrote:Singha,

I brought up the point about window grills in Nariman House some moons back.

I was about to ask about those windows. I saw one NSG jawan tried to break the glass of a window or may be he was trying to push the curtain using some very crude makeshift tool, he tied a stick to a pole and was trying very hard. But it was apparently very difficult for him to do whatever he was trying to do.

NSG is supposed to be trained and equipped for urban warfare. Are they not expected to face windows, glass, curtains or parapate walls ? Dont they have some non lethal specially designed weapons or tools ... which will break glass, destroy curtains without flames and smoke ?

What terrorists had to do to obstruct view of NSG was to shut the glass panels and pull the curtains.

sum · Post by **sum** » 09 Dec 2008 18:55

Could someone throw light on the SAG of the TN police?

Pictures of them with the Eng cricketers in Chennai show them having para-wings and balidan badges!!!! Googling isn't helping much.

They seem to be a mean force by the looks of it. One pic of a SAG sniper on the roof of the MAC stadium:

HariC · Post by **HariC** » 09 Dec 2008 20:58

Raja Bose wrote:
I brought up the point about window grills in Nariman House some moons back. We are too used to Bruce Willis in Die Hard and Dallas SWAT taking down some drug dealer (in addition to a monotonically decreasing attention span) that we expect CT units to 'magically' take down entire houses in seconds. .

Man, you took the words right out of my mouth/keyboard!!!

HariC · Post by **HariC** » 09 Dec 2008 20:59

nishug wrote:
Raja Bose wrote:

NSG is supposed to be trained and equipped for urban warfare. Are they not expected to face windows, glass, curtains or parapate walls ? Dont they have some non lethal specially designed weapons or tools ... which will break glass, destroy curtains without flames and smoke ? .

You forgot the key operating word - Window Grills. How do you tackle that?

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Dec 2008 21:59

HariC wrote:
nishug wrote:
You forgot the key operating word - Window Grills. How do you tackle that?

I snatched words out of your keyboard/mouth, ^^^^^^now you are putting words in my mouth/keyboard as revenge (just kidding!)

Nesoj · Post by **Nesoj** » 09 Dec 2008 22:01

You forgot the key operating word - Window Grills. How do you tackle that?

I understand that normal procedure is to covertly use a couple of grappling hooks to attach a steel wire to the window grills.
Steel wire attached to a high power vehicle. When set-up - the vehicle pulls out the window from its settings, at which time the commandos drop in.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Dec 2008 22:07

nishug,

The issue is not just the obstacles themselves (window, grills, mesh) but the extremely exposed positions where they are located. You can take any of them down, but all of it requires time, and in such exposed positions, time is something assaulters dont have. Anything which takes more than 2-3 seconds will make the assaulter a sitting duck (or if you prefer a hanging duck) since he will be literally hanging in front of the window while doing his thing. Add to that, our the oafs who make up our DDM who broadcast the assault on live TV and took away the element of surprise. During Nimrod, SAS were lucky: terrorists not monitoring broadcasts, were definitely not well-trained, windows were large glass windows, no grills. The SAS just took 'em down with sledge hammers), balconies to stage assault off once you get down from roof etc...even then one trooper got tangled and got burnt during initial entry. In such fluid situations it takes very little for things to go totally FUBAR thats why they train train and train and hope for the best.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 09 Dec 2008 22:09

Unfortunately the area around Nariman House is way too congested to allow large vehicles the space to pull off grills (also note how small the windows are.....harder to quickly get thru for someone wearing CT kit, BPJ etc.) without getting shot.

Nesoj · Post by **Nesoj** » 09 Dec 2008 22:25

It seems that there are 2 scenarios being played -
1) that the hostages were already dead
2) that the hostages were alive

in the 1st event, where the only operation was to 'clean' up, the NSG could have gone ballastic, using heavy firepower - grenades, bazookas etc to eliminate the terrorists that were holed up - need not have taken so long, too much delay seen.

in the 2nd event, where hostages were supposed to be alive, time should not have been wasted and an immediate simultaneous assault from bottom-up and top-down should have been attempted, rather than giving time for the terrorists to consolidate and set up traps. -- Again, too much delay seen

Ankit Desai · Post by **Ankit Desai** » 09 Dec 2008 22:59

Nesoj wrote:It seems that there are 2 scenarios being played -
1) that the hostages were already dead
2) that the hostages were alive

In case of Nariman House NSG knew that all hostages were dead from an intercept conversation between Terrorist and their boss in Karachi. And near by building are so close to call that you can't fire a smoke granede through Grill and if we saw that encounter than NSG already blew Grill away of that perticular floor.

About Taj than, yes we can understand health condition of elderly and children but by not smoking floors the valuable time NSG lost could be used to save more civilian who were killed during that time, we had persons ready to shift in hospital in case smoke effect senior citizen and children.

The only reason I can buy for Taj is, it has 400+ rooms to clean out by NSG.

Ankit

nishug · Post by **nishug** » 09 Dec 2008 23:18

Yes HariC, Nesoj I am talking about obstacles including grills. Now how that can be done ... I am not an expert on that, but as we are discussing we can think of some possibilities ... say a rotary cutter mounted on a pole ... now I am not saying buy a cutter from market and tie it to a pole ... thats why I said specially designed weapons or tools. May be they can use some small explosives which can be put there by pole with a camera. Look these buildings are not heavily fortified buildings, these are normal buildings. These grills are not engaged in RCC. To pull them you dont need high power vehicles, they can be pulled using simple machines [ u know levers].
[chorone aisi grills aasanise todi hui manine dekhi hai yaar]

Anything which takes more than 2-3 seconds will make the assaulter a sitting duck
(or if you prefer a hanging duck) since he will be literally hanging in front of the window while doing his thing.

Yes Raja I understand that, sure we donot want to send our soldiers in hram's way.Congested areas and all that are part of urban warfare, that is why the need of specially designed weapons or tools. I cant believe that once we know the requirements our engineers cant come up with a solution

As Raja told we faced this situation back in the 80s. It is surprising that we did not learn from our experience.

Aditya G · Post by **Aditya G** » 10 Dec 2008 08:15

Nesoj wrote:in the 1st event, where the only operation was to 'clean' up, the NSG could have gone ballastic, using heavy firepower - grenades, bazookas etc to eliminate the terrorists that were holed up - need not have taken so long, too much delay seen.

Yeah, and get killed. But hey these guys have joined the army to die right?

vdutta · Post by **vdutta** » 10 Dec 2008 09:06

Nesoj wrote:
You forgot the key operating word - Window Grills. How do you tackle that?
I understand that normal procedure is to covertly use a couple of grappling hooks to attach a steel wire to the window grills.
Steel wire attached to a high power vehicle. When set-up - the vehicle pulls out the window from its settings, at which time the commandos drop in.

Ditto.. i was thinking about that. They could have brought hydraulic cutters to cut iron angle of the windows or pulled it through a vehicle. i saw someone waiving a white piece of cloth from that window. they could have been saved it guess.

vdutta · Post by **vdutta** » 10 Dec 2008 09:10

I have one question. Did NSG have those little camera kit which can be slided from under the door to take a peek inside?
Those could have come handy in room to room search/rescue and made the whole procedure faster. that could have been used to see around the corner too without getting noticed.

Nesoj · Post by **Nesoj** » 10 Dec 2008 13:00

Is there anything like a 360degree mobile wireless bluetooth infrared webcam cum remote controlled fragmentation grenade ??

Reason is, such a device can be rolled into corridors, without exposing oneself, and monitored on a notebook. In case any terrorist is seen walking down / entering corridor the grenade can be triggered off.

The whole gizmo should not be larger than a 'cricket ball' as webcams with bluetooth are nowadays highly miniaturized.

Such devices can be used to secure areas and avoid terrorists running around. Anyone ever heard of something like this ??

Rahul M · Post by **Rahul M** » 10 Dec 2008 15:08

http://www.splsteel.com/defence-armor-products.html

pvt co making some much needed gizmos.

Aditya G · Post by **Aditya G** » 10 Dec 2008 21:23

Compiled a list of Vikas regiment battalions:

4 Vikas
5 Vikas
7 Vikas

This could mean we have at least 7 battalions.

Btw can someone explain how is Vikas Regiment different from SFF? It doesnt make any sense to use the words interchangeably so there must be some reason.

Me thinks Vikas is an army designation used to 'fit' SFF personnel into their scheme of things.

Hiten · Post by **Hiten** » 10 Dec 2008 21:36

Nesoj wrote:Is there anything like a 360degree mobile wireless bluetooth infrared webcam cum remote controlled fragmentation grenade ??

Other than the exploding grenade part, this will fit the bill - Eye Ball R1

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 10 Dec 2008 23:25

Aditya G wrote:Compiled a list of Vikas regiment battalions:

4 Vikas
5 Vikas
7 Vikas

This could mean we have at least 7 battalions.

Not necessarily.

rohitvats · Post by **rohitvats** » 11 Dec 2008 10:27

Compiled a list of Vikas regiment battalions:

4 Vikas
5 Vikas
7 Vikas

This could mean we have at least 7 battalions.

Btw can someone explain how is Vikas Regiment different from SFF? It doesnt make any sense to use the words interchangeably so there must be some reason.

Me thinks Vikas is an army designation used to 'fit' SFF personnel into their scheme of things.

Aditya G: IA does use the Vikas Regiment name for the SFF units/battalions. But interestingly, the vehicles have civilian registration (may be because they are part of Cabinet Secreteriat, but that is more of an educated guess)

I have no idea on the number of battalions but it can/cannot be 7 battalions. the strength is supposed to be at 10,000, which will suffise for 7+ battalions@850men/battalions.

Prabu · Post by **Prabu** » 11 Dec 2008 18:02

One basic question ? Do our special forces have wire cables fitted with camera's ? We have always seen it as a common tool used in english movies by comando's to tacle any hostage like situation. Even Air conditioner ducts are commonly used to barge in to the room and give a element of surprise. Guru's pls respond.

Aditya G · Post by **Aditya G** » 11 Dec 2008 18:44

An old article on the scheme to replace NSG by CISF for VIP duty. Wonder what happened to this?

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Indi ... urpg-1.cms

Now, Black Panthers to guard VIPs
25 Mar 2005, 2219 hrs IST, Mohua Chatterjee, TNN

NEW DELHI: Move over Black Cats; make way for the bigger cats - Black Panthers. The country's commandos usually spotted protecting VIPs and VVIPs
will no longer be called Black Cats. Instead, they will be known as Black Panthers.

National Security Guard (NSG) commandos - called Black Cats - who have been deployed to protect the VIPs for want of commandos in any other para-military force in the country, will soon relinquish the job and be replaced by commandos from the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF).

"The CISF commandos, trained over the last two years, have decided to call themselves Black Panthers," a home ministry official said.

The NSG commandos -- never happy with the task of protecting VIPs -- will go back to their original job of being a specialised battle-ready strike force to take up any anti-terror, anti-hijack operation or any other similar crisis. In fact, the elite force was raised for this very purpose.

"It is not really fair to have them protect individuals but we had to do it because there were no trained personnel in the other para-military forces," the official said.

It was two years ago that a group of minister (GoM) finally paid heed to the NSG's lament and decided to bring in CISF for VIP security duty. This is considered to be an ideal arrangement for CISF has been feeling underemployed since many of the PSUs have been sold off or have shut shop.

The Black Cats became a permanent feature of Delhi's landscape in the wake of Punjab militancy. They became symbols of the growing reach of the terrorist groups. Soon however, a Black cat cover came to be conceived as a status statement with few politicians ready to let go of the commandos assigned to them even as others came up with different alibis for having their own retinues. The bug caught on with state governments also raising their poor cousins who in many cases would sport only black so much so that some private security agencies also gave their personnel black dungarees.

kaangeya · Post by **kaangeya** » 11 Dec 2008 19:25

Can we stop using these ridiculous names like Panthers, Cats etc? It sounds like we are talking of College and professional sports teams. The men whom we are talking about are quite unaffected by it all. Remember that interview with the NSG in the bus with that breathless reporter from Times TV? The NSG kept talking about how they went about the Op and repeatedly talked about the "Main cheez...". At the end of the interview as the guys left, he said, "Koi problem nahin. Pakistan, Afghanistan... sab samhalenge!"

And is there any plan to induct women into our special forces like they do in the movies?

Avinash R · Post by **Avinash R** » 11 Dec 2008 19:47

Aditya G wrote:An old article on the scheme to replace NSG by CISF for VIP duty. Wonder what happened to this?
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Indi ... urpg-1.cms

mayawati was protected by this force for few months but the nsg was again put in charge of her security due to hightened security concerns.
LeT hates her so much that they want her dead.
2 plans to kill her by LeT have been foiled.

Avinash R · Post by **Avinash R** » 11 Dec 2008 19:59

NSG commando loses eye in 26/11, not spirit
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/mu ... &type=News

dinakar · Post by **dinakar** » 11 Dec 2008 21:09

sum wrote:Could someone throw light on the SAG of the TN police?

I think he is from TNCF(Tamil Nadu Commando Force) which is frormed after the reorganization of TN special security group.TN also has another special force called STF which is famous for operation Cocoon. The STF personnel of the force, are trained in the prevention of hijacking, insurgency, terrorist activities, kidnapping of VIPs for ransom etc. It is also used for anti-naxalite operations all over the state.

Nikhil T · Post by **Nikhil T** » 11 Dec 2008 23:54

Things moving pretty fast now on QRTs within Delhi:

After airport terror scare, CISF gets 4 cars

ith the CISF reportedly failing to chase down unidentified gunmen who fired in air at IGI Airport on December 5 due to old cars, DIAL has now provided the security personnel four new cars.

Sources said that on December 5, unidentified gunmen fired shots near Gate No 4 of the airport in early morning and fled in a Qualis. They said CISF failed to chase them down in its old Maruti Gypsy cars. The new cars have been provided to CISF's Quick Reaction Teams so that they can effectively tackle such incidents in future.

92 quick reaction teams for Delhi
Custodians of the Capital

Gerard · Post by **Gerard** » 12 Dec 2008 04:08

Mumbai siege turns spotlight on crisis within NSG

Conventional military thinking dominates elite force, insiders say

somak · Post by **somak** » 12 Dec 2008 04:58

The NSGs are supposed to wear Fire retardant NOMEX clothings. It appears to me that they wear conventional cotton wears.
Lack of ballistic goggles lead to lost of an eye of a NSG jawan.

Mihir · Post by **Mihir** » 12 Dec 2008 07:23

Prabu wrote:Even Air conditioner ducts are commonly used to barge in to the room and give a element of surprise.

That would be impossible. There are too many things in the way - dampers, turn vanes, fans, flow stations, etc.

Plus, ducts themselves are too small to crawl into. As small as six inches at times.

PranoyG · Post by **PranoyG** » 12 Dec 2008 10:45

Well I was just looking at the pics of IPS using the FN FAL - lots of criticism going on about them being ill equipped so I was just wondering whether the Kel-TEC RFB would be a better replacement - it uses the same magazine as the FN FAL so would be cheaper to induct....if not for them why not for special forces use?

http://world.guns.ru/sniper/sn75-e.htm

Nesoj · Post by **Nesoj** » 12 Dec 2008 13:58

Ill-equipped ??

I saw a picture of a commando on this forum, climbing a ladder / scaffolding with his rifle secured on his shoulder with 'rope' - is this standard ?

Anshul · Post by **Anshul** » 12 Dec 2008 14:17

Improvisation would be a better word.Stop nitpicking on the NSG.The force has delivered with all it has got.Lets not compare them with the slick and crisp looking commandos we see in tomb raider and S.W.A.T.

At any given location...the mission commander works within certain limitations.Most of us aren't even aware of the very layout within the Taj and Nariman House.The guys did a great job.Reports state the that the terrorists had spec-forces training.This speaks oodles about the challenges the NSG and Marcos faced.These guys get better with each operation.Its a big learning for them.