The incoming Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Lt Gen NS Raja Subramani, takes over at a time when the Indian armed forces are sitting on the cusp of a technology-led transformation. His almost three-year tenure — that begins on May 31 — is expected to focus on executing these big-ticket changes, besides ushering in administrative and structural reforms initiated by his predecessors.
India is looking to progressively add space-based assets, have greater precision in fire power, introduce longer-range missiles, and acquire next-generation planes, warships and submarines, while being backed by a variety of armed drones, including those which can remain in air for hours. These new technologies need to work seamlessly across the three services, using a common communication network.
The incoming Chief of Defence Staff, Lt Gen NS Raja Subramani, takes over at a time when the Indian armed forces are sitting on the cusp of a technology-led reset. Photo courtesy: Ministry of Defence
On the strategic front, Gen Subramani’s tenure will overlap with the recent urgency in efforts by India and China to work out a solution regarding their disputed boundary. The military will be advising the Government on the contours of the boundary along the Himalayas, if that is to be demarcated.
Theatre commands, a reality
The incumbent CDS, Gen Anil Chauhan, whose tenure ends on May 30, has submitted a formal proposal to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) on having geographically-defined areas designated as ‘theatre commands’ — with a military commander heading it and controlling all war-fighting assets like planes, helicopters, guns, tanks, equipment and manpower.
Gen Subramani faces the task of converting the theatre command blueprint into an operational reality and ensuring it shortens the decision-making loop for a simultaneous two-front scenario with Pakistan and China. While institutional and cultural friction between the services needs to be ‘ironed out’, rapid technology, logistics and doctrine integration now have a focus on joint, multi-domain campaigns.
A key debating point is the division of strategic assets of the Indian Air Force, including Sukhoi-30MKI jets fitted with the BrahMos missile, mid-air refuellers and surveillance planes.
Air Vice Marshal Manmohan Bahadur (retd), former Additional Director General of think-tank Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies, says IAF’s combat assets and combat enablers would, for the next two decades, be too few in number to be ‘allotted’ to different theatres. “The new CDS must ensure that no matter what type of structure is decided, the potency of Indian air power is not diluted by its fragmentation into smaller packets.”
The forces are looking to integrate across multiple verticals — operations and intelligence capability development, communications and information technology, operational logistics, training, maintenance, support, human resources, administration and legal.
On paper, this looks easy, but on the ground, it requires major administrative and operational changes which Gen Subramani is expected to carry out.
Operational challenges
Gen Subramani would have the immediate task of getting the Joint Operations Centre up and running. It will direct a collective war-fighting effort of the three forces. The defence space agency is to be expanded into a full-fledged command with a massive addition to assets.
Promotion paths and career progression have different yardsticks of assessment in each service and they don’t help integration. Analysts suggest a need to establish mandatory joint service career tracks for officers, and create tri-service promotion boards for senior postings.
A common service legislation is being readied that will do away with the Army Act, IAF Act and Navy Act, respectively. This will erase the differences each Act has in making assessments and doling out punishments, if any.
The Inter-Services Organisations (Command, Control & Discipline) Act, 2023, promotes jointness in the Indian armed forces by empowering ‘theatre commanders’ with authority over personnel from all three services. This unifies the disciplinary chain but will be effective only when the transition is complete and ‘theatre commands’ are established.
Importantly, the tenure of Gen Subramani will also see the 8th Central Pay Commission giving its report, an important aspect of civil-military pay parity. It is also expected to address the issue of non-functional upgrade (NFU) — given to the civilian bureaucracy and the police, which results in a hiked pay band after a certain number of years of service. Armed forces personnel do not get the hiked pay band.
The MoD, while responding to a petition seeking NFU, turned down the proposal and suggested to the Supreme Court that the 8th Pay Commission be allowed to decide on the matter.
Space tech upgrade
The CDS, Gen Anil Chauhan, while addressing a ‘defence space’ event in April, noted that “a failure in space would force India to fight blind, while success would allow it to fight with foresight”. He argued that artificial intelligence must sit at the core, and not at the periphery, of a space architecture.
Operation Sindoor last year marked its first brush with the application of space capabilities in warfare.
Lt Gen AK Bhatt (retd), the Director General of the Indian Space Association (ISpA), an apex industry body created to be the collective voice of the Indian space industry, says space has emerged as a critical domain of warfare. “This dimension of war is not only a separate essential domain, but permeates and effects battles on land, air and sea. Creation of a Space Command has become imperative,” adds Lt Gen Bhatt, who is working with the private industry on making satellites for the military.
Post Operation Sindoor, military officials accepted that China provided Pakistan with real-time tracking and targeting information. India used both public and private space-based capabilities in planning and executing the operation.
The military now plans to have 52 dedicated satellites under a programme called ‘space-based surveillance’ for this job — 26 of these satellites will come from the private sector and the rest from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). At present, the Indian military also uses commercially available foreign satellites, which is not a very reliable scenario.
Space-based operations have two aspects — one is intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The second is called ‘positioning, navigation and timing’, or PNT in military parlance. Positioning is the aspect that provides precision guidance for missiles, smart bombs, and artillery. Navigation is used by ships, aircraft, drones and land vehicles. Timing synchronisation is crucial for encrypting communications, securing data networks, preventing friendly fire, and coordinating network operations.
The PNT systems need to integrate space, terrestrial and inertial inputs, anti-jam, anti-spoof capabilities, quantum secure communication links, and ingenious encryption protocols immune to external vulnerabilities.
The MoD, under ‘Mission DefSpace’, has asked the private sector to address 75 specific technological challenges, covering critical gaps in signal intelligence and persistent surveillance.
Communication and command
A Defence Communication Network (DCN) has been set up for the exclusive, secure and state-of-the-art communication network. The DCN is a step towards ensuring network centricity across the three services and Strategic Forces Command. The network provides converged voice, data and video services to the three services based on a secured system with adequate redundancy.
However, at the operational level, secure networks of the Army, Navy and IAF are still separate, having different encryptions, radios and datalinks and these ‘don’t talk to each other’. For example, a Colonel commanding a unit along the Line of Actual Control with China has a direct secure line of communication with his seniors. However, the Colonel does not have a direct line to his IAF counterpart in the same sector manning air assets like jets, planes or UAVs.
The CDS office is now working on having a ‘joint communication architecture’ needed for administrative purposes, targeting solutions besides logistics.
During Operation Sindoor, the term ‘Sambhav’ was referred to. It is an acronym for ‘Secure Army Mobile Bharat Version’. This is an indigenously developed, 5G-ready, end-to-end secure mobile ecosystem launched to secure communication on the move. It provided real-time secure command and control at the level of higher decision-makers at service headquarters. It is being upgraded to allow compatibility with satellite uplinks and encrypted cloud services.
The Chief of Defence Staff would also be setting up a ‘defence strategic communication agency’. This will be used for effective communication with the public and countering narratives.
