The Indian Air Force is now entering its 75th year and, as if to mark this event, former air chief, Anil Tipnis, finally broke his silence about what went on at the top echelons of the armed forces during the Kargil war in the summer of ‘99. Coming after the memoirs of then army chief, General V.P. Malik, and then foreign minister, Jaswant Singh, Tipnis’s observations — if they do not lead to unnecessary recriminations — could provide valuable insights into a crucial period of Indian military history.

The former air chief wrote his piece in the Force magazine. The piece can be read at two levels: as an account by an air chief of what went on, and as a personal account of experiences and perceptions of the war. The latter is a gripping human interest story which we need to remember when we expect our chiefs to act in a super-human manner. But what is far more important is the issue of India’s management and its decision-making processes during the Kargil war.

A dispassionate reading of the three accounts — those of Malik, Jaswant Singh and Tipnis (hopefully, George Fernandes will also come out with his memoirs) — one finds that there is a common thread that should reassure even the most cynical that our system of managing the higher defence of the country in a complex situation where the enemy initially had all the cards is exceptionally sound. In fact General Malik clearly writes about the perfect synergy at the political-military levels of the management of defence. The problem has been what Malik termed the fog of war. The most important lesson here is that a lot of that fog came from our prevailing mindsets.

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.

The second major issue that comes up is that of intelligence and its failure. The problem here is not so much of information (which undeniably has been deficient), with the IAF not being in the picture and Army HQ receiving photo-recce confirmation of Pakistani army helicopters on our side nearly 72 hours after they were located by R&AW. But there is the larger problem of a lack of independent assessments, especially of military-significance data. We still don’t know which is the institution that undertakes national and/or military assessment of information and intelligence. Unless the Defence Intelligence Agency now builds up a large cadre of analysts and is regularly fed with data by the agencies, and it provides its output directly to the Chiefs of Staff Committee, we will keep suffering from this crippling deficiency.

The writer, a retired air-commodore, is director, Centre for Air Power Studies