Himalayan News Service

New Delhi, April 10:

Top commanders of the Indian Army will begin here on Monday a four-day meeting that could redefine the contours of its operations with a new war doctrine to reflect changing realities. The bi-annual Army Commanders’ Conference will also consider organisational changes in the upper echelons to better manage information flow and ways of reducing the 13,000-shortfall in the officer cadre of the million-strong force, the world’s third largest standing army.

“The new war doctrine has been under evaluation for some time and we will now put it to the army commanders for fine tuning,” Major General Deepak Samanwar, additional director general (public information) at the Army Headquarters, told reporters today. The army chief, General NC Vij, will chair the conference. The chiefs of the five regional commands, the Army Training Command, the principal staff officers at Army Headquarters and the heads of the army’s various arms will attend the conference.

The new doctrine envisages a paradigm shift from the existing concept of a strike corps leading an offensive to more compact and rapidly deployable integrated battle groups that pack the same punch, Samanwar explained. The need for the new doctrine was felt even as Operation Parikram, the massive deployment ordered in the wake of the December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, was underway.

Defence planners discovered to their horror that it took almost a month to fully deploy the army’s three strike corps — a situation that would have been disastrous in the event war had actually broken out, Samanwar said. Discussions will also be held on re-designating one of the two deputy chiefs as Deputy Chief of Army Staff (Information Systems and Training).