One element of that mindset was the expanding belief that future threats would essentially be terrorism-centred “low-intensity-operations”. This itself had emerged after the dramatic victory in 1971, after which the prospects of a regular “conventional” military-to-military war was seen as remote. But it would affect the Indian Air Force and the Indian Navy much less since their normal medium of operations is fundamentally different, while the Indian Army is getting increasingly sucked into the internal security role. So you have the air force top brass getting edgy about the trend from very early on, while the army top brass looked at the developing situation in terms of jihadi infiltration — the dominant experience of previous decades.

But there apparently was another mindset problem: the thinking in the army that all it needed from the IAF was attack/armed helicopters (or ‘flying artillery’), a demand the army had been fighting to acquire integrally over three decades of peace. The air chief is categorical that he told the army that he would support its demand for aerial fire-support; and he would go along with the officiating army chief to the defence minister to say this. But he insisted that political authorisation was a prerequisite. Unfortunately, long-held misperceptions led to public expression from many quarters that the IAF had “refused” to support the army, which had resulted in avoidable casualties!

But the war also demonstrated that this fixation had not led to a serious study of air power (the Indian Army maintains the second largest air force in the country) and its attributes, looking at helicopters more as flying artillery than a component of air power. Air power, as Jaswant Singh says, has greater “visibility” (but is in reality much more than that), and hence is escalatory. What needs to be understood is that if it is escalatory, we need to ensure that we retain the initiative and dominate the process of any escalation. In effect this would require taking steps that deny the enemy choices to escalate rather than being ourselves caught unprepared. This is why it is necessary to have the political leadership take this decision on sound military-strategic advice. But the central point is that the foreign minister was apparently instrumental in denying permission to the use of the IAF when this was considered at the Cabinet level on May 18, 1999.

... contd.