May 10, 1999

The Indian Army is preparing for a war made more lethal and intense by the deadly microchip.

By Manoj Joshi

There is a new buzzword doing the rounds in army circles -- RMA or revolution in military affairs. The innocuous phrase barely conceals its menacing import: a quantum jump in the lethality of war, made so by the dizzying advances in technology. The main force behind this is something we deal with every day, the ubiquitous microchip. It's the "brain" of spy airplanes that look like toys, image-intensifiers that turn night into day, missiles so accurate that you can "choose the door to send them through" and cybersoldiers who are working on ways to paralyse enemy power plants and phone networks by "viruses".

Among the most concerned in India is Chief of Army Staff General V.P. Malik, who has been insistently hammering the message that "cyberwar is to the 21st century what blitzkrieg was to the 20th". To take the Indian Army into this brave new world, Malik has begun a restructuring that will dramatically cut the number of troops, but sharply boost their capabilities and fire-power by acquiring and assimilating capabilities to fight a hyperwar -- a combat so intense that the adversary is pummelled without respite. This is a battle where long-range sensors and accurate missiles have eliminated the difference between "front" and "rear" and where either night nor bad weather offers any relief.

Shrugging aside the pull of counter-insurgency commitments, Malik and his colleagues at Army Headquarters have moved boldly. Through a series of measures begun in late 1997, the one million-strong army will have shed nearly 70,000 personnel by the end of the year. In exchange the Government is returning the money thus saved (some Rs 130 crore this year) to the army for modernisation.

What is daunting about taking on this challenge is the rapidity of change. First test-fired in 1987, India's Prithvi missile's on-board guidance computer uses an ancient 8086 chip. Today schoolchildren would sneer at processors of that vintage, if indeed they have heard of a world before Pentium.

But the microchip's impact on warfare goes beyond providing better guidance for munitions and missiles. With enormous amounts of data coming in through sensors like observation satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and battlefield surveillance radars, their processing cannot be done without computers.

Communications is the area where technology has taken a quantum leap as the advent of the cellular telephone has shown. So far the Indian Army's AREN and ASCON mobile and static networks have kept pace with the best. Breaking the command link has the highest priority in modern war. This was done in earlier times by bombardment, but now there are other tools like electronic jammers as well as electromagnetic pulse (EMP) "bombs" that can fry electronic circuit boards and plain old computer viruses.

Is the Indian Army ready for the terrifying battlefield of the future? Conventional wisdom suggests otherwise, and it would not be wrong. The good news, however, is that the army leadership is painfully aware of its vulnerability and is moving fast to remedy it. Last year a classified "it Roadmap 2000" spelt out the objectives and action plan for the spread of information technology in the army. The document has decreed that all its officers and junior leaders will become computer literate by the year 2002.

One major step towards this was taken earlier this year when the Army Institute of Information Technology began its first course at its temporary campus in Hyderabad to teach combat leaders the rudiments of it warfare. Simultaneously, three army technology institutes, two located in Secunderabad and one in Pune, began to introduce it as part of their syllabus.

For the Indian Army, the compulsions to shift towards fighting this hyperwar has come at a convenient time. Since 1996, the army has been in the process of revising the Army Plan 2000, a war plan formulated in the early '80s on the basis of a classified political directive that called on the army to maintain a posture of "dissuasive deterrence" vis-a-vis Pakistan and "dissuasive defence" towards China. Last year's Pokhran II and Chagai blasts provided a much-needed incentive to revise these outdated instructions. But Pokhran II has not changed the army's compulsion to modernise. The ability to deter conventional defeat is an important element in ensuring nuclear peace. "Weak conventional defences imply a greater reliance on nuclear weapons," says an army general.

But "modernisation" is an intimidating task for the army whose commitments, current and future, occupy an incredible bandwidth ranging from insurgents wielding rifles to external adversaries with the ability to launch nuclear or biological war. The starting point for the army's reorientation is the awareness that its offensive forces are not used in a way that could make them an escalator for a nuclear war.

Army Plan 2000 envisaged cutting Pakistan in two by a deep strike reaching -- and even crossing -- the Indus in Sindh. The new plan accepts that such an eventuality could touch off a nuclear war. Huge tank and artillery armies are therefore out and the emphasis will be on smaller highly mobile battle-groups designed to destroy adversary combat capabilities rather than occupy territory.

If the army has its way, the cutting edge of its offensive forces will be attack helicopters and the T-90 currently under evaluation. Agile and heavily defended, the tank also has a gun which can fire a laser-guided missile to knock out other tanks or low flying helicopters at ranges of 1-5 km. But the major twist in this is that the offensive forces may well be there just to mop up. Hyperwar will aim to neutralise enemy offensive forces by long-range rockets and mobile artillery using smart munitions well before they come into visual range.

The key component of the army's effort is, therefore, to acquire sensors that can see deep into adversary territory and do so through night and bad weather. India has the ability to make spy satellites but has inexplicably failed to develop one as yet. In the meantime, the army has acquired the Israeli Searcher UAV that can fly in missions up to 12 hours deep into enemy territory and provide "real time" or continuous target data in the night as well as through cloud cover. Another important acquisition are the French-designed Stentor battlefield surveillance radars, now being licence- manufactured in India, which can track the movement of vehicles and bodies of men at ranges of 20-30 km.

At shorter ranges the army is evaluating thermal-imaging systems to help them track enemy vehicles and soldiers in the dark. These systems convert natural heat emissions of vehicles, human beings and other objects into accurate "pictures" on a screen. Through the history of warfare night attacks have been a chancy manoeuvre, tending more often than not to go awry. Thermal imaging and infra-red vision equipment are now standard equipment on tanks and attack helicopters and the wider availability of such equipment is the key technology in the planning of hyperwar where night offers little respite to the adversary.

Modernisation plans encompass the so-called low-technology area of counter- insurgency as well. The army has begun equipping its troops with modern equipment such as South African Cassipir mine-proof trucks and top-of-the-line direction finding equipment to track militant wireless emissions. It is also preparing to boost surveillance capabilities along the Line of Control using battlefield surveillance radars, unattended seismic sensors and thermal imaging equipment.

One of the major advances in warfighting capability of the Indian Army comes from an unintended spinoff from the US Global Positioning System (GPS). Using a constellation of satellites to provide pinpoint navigational accuracy for the US military, over the years the system has been used widely for navigation of civilian ships, commercial jets and cars around the world. Such navigational information using commercially available receivers has considerably eased a major command task of the any army, Indian or otherwise.

But knowing the location of one's own forces at any given moment is just part of the picture. The other is the ability to communicate through the "fog" of war through links that are proof against disruption and secure from snoopers. The army has taken great strides in strategic communications, that is, between corps and divisional headquarters and battalions, but its tactical equipment used by the infantry is bulky, insecure and unreliable, a fact that its own officers will not deny.

Eventually, the real force multiplier of the reshaped army has to be a soldier of a different genre. Cyber-educating a force that receives most of its troops from the rural areas is a major challenge in them. An important first step in this direction is being taken by the creation of a Junior Leader's Academy at Bareilly to upgrade the skills of junior commissioned and non-commissioned officers, the backbone of the Indian Army's combat-level command system.

The army's steps to restructure itself into a leaner and meaner force are a modest step towards the gigantic task of overhauling India's entire defence apparatus. The real payoffs will come only when the Ministry of Defence modernises its antiquated management structure and the three services are able to abandon parochial concerns to give the country an integrated and hence cost-effective defence system.

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