The Theatre Command Fallacy

By Gp Capt VP Naik VM

New Delhi. For much of the 20th Century, the armed forces have been organised as geographical entities tasked with protecting threats to a nation’s sovereignty. The Indian Armed Forces are mandated to take on threats from land, sea and air, albeit sequentially, linearly and more importantly, predictably. Shortcomings in India’s war-fighting mechanism have been highlighted by various studies, yet, as a nation, India has failed to address them through timely and relevant corrective measures.

The Kargil Review Committee (KRC) was set up to analyse operational shortcomings and recommend systemic reforms within India’s Higher Defence Organisation (HDO). The 2000-2001 Group of Ministers (GoM) reviewed the KRC report on reforming India’s HDO; however, as a nation, we paid lip service to both reports. Service Headquarters (SHQ) were redesignated as the Integrated Headquarters (HQ) of the Defence Services, without real integration.

Organisations such as the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO) were established to streamline India’s intelligence machinery, yet we have seen subsequent intelligence failures, from Doklam to Eastern Ladakh and from Pahalgam to Pulwama. The National Defence University was supposed to have been set up in earnest, but the idea was dissolved faster than its acceptance. The Integrated Defence Staff (IDS) was created in 2001 to foster tri-service coordination but did not achieve the desired level of ‘jointness’ among the three services; and jointness remained elusive.

In 2011-12, the Naresh Chandra Task Force was set up to review the progress of both the KRC and the GoM reports and clearly stated that the recommendations of both reports were only partially implemented. The task force recommended setting up additional structures, like the Special Operations Command and the Cyber Command. The Shekatkar Committee, in 2015-16, focused on organisational efficiency and optimisation of force structures to enhance joint capability development.

In 2019, after many years of procrastination, the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) under the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was established and a post of Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) was sanctioned and created.[1] China reorganised its Military Regions and created Theatre Commands (TC) in 2016. India’s push for Theatre Commands started in 2019 and is still an ongoing process. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) declared the year 2025 as the ‘Year of Reforms’, to focus new domains like cyber, space, and emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Hypersonics, and Robotics. Jointness and Integration were of course included.

There have been no significant results, other than the setting up of the DMA and the creation of the post of Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS). The Allocation of Business (AoB) rules have remained archaic and out of sync.

While incremental, these reforms have not kept pace with paradigm shifts even in newer technologies in modern warfare. Ministries and Departments of the government continue to function in silos, with little or no convergence, or strategic coherence. Which is why structural and systemic reforms have languished for over two and a half decades.

Old Wine in a New Bottle

In an era characterised by contiguous frontlines, linear logistics movement, slow but sure decision cycles, a gradual transition from peace to war and clearly demarcated, separated domains, the erstwhile large, ambling structures made sense. In the intervening 26 years, warfare has totally transformed.

The Russia-Ukraine War, the Israel-Hamas conflict, Operation Absolute Resolve, Operation Midnight Hammer and the USA’s tariff warfare are testimony to the fact that large, domain-specific and sequential lines of operations are passé. In the Indian context, Theatre Commands should have been created two decades ago, when warfare and technology dictated them. Today, the situation is very different.

Modern warfare is no longer defined by just geography and territory.

It has more to do with the convergence of timing, tempo and effects in multiple domains. The battlespace is not clearly demarcated; it is fused, ambiguous, multi-domain and fiercely contested. Victory is not necessarily reliant on occupation of territory. It stems from the enemy’s structural and functional paralysis, leading to capitulation.

Tomorrow’s wars will not commence with the thunder of heavy artillery fire or the roar of fighter aircraft crossing the International Boundary (IB) and bombing military structures into oblivion. Instead, the war will be initiated by a college student sitting in a small room, wielding a laptop and collapsing the entire combat network of the adversary well before the first shot is fired.

The ongoing US War on Iran is an example. It is about silent cyber attacks on critical information infrastructure, crippling the decision-making cycle of the adversary. The war will address non-military targets to create functional paralysis, not of the armed forces, but of the entire nation and its war-making machinery. No fighter will cross the borders and no soldier will fire a bullet, but the war would have commenced at a pace faster than human comprehension.

Again, the US and Israeli war on Iran is the example.

Modern and future wars would rarely be confined to a particular geography or a particular domain. An airborne strike package could use space assets for communication, terrestrial assets for cyber intrusions, information operations for influencing political behaviour and unmanned kamikaze drones to accurately target strategic, operational, tactical and even political leadership simultaneously.

During Operation Midnight Hammer, not one Iranian aircraft was able to get airborne during the US attack on three Iranian nuclear installations. On the other hand, the humongous loss to both Russian and Ukrainian troops and equipment in the Russia-Ukraine conflict is testimony to how fixation on a two-dimensional map would lead to large-scale attrition with no resolution in sight.

It would be utopian to think that service-specific silos would suddenly disappear in a Theatre Command construct. In fact, these silos would further get embedded in the emerging structures and severely affect operational effectiveness. Silos still exist in American Combatant Commands as well as Chinese Theatre Commands.

Nonetheless, the US has already started downsizing them.

For India, it would become a future imperative to get the entire Indian land mass under one coherent command because of continental safety.

The very basis of creating three additional TCs from an already existing three-force structure appears to be regression and not reform. The future belongs to the ability to create disproportionate effects in multiple domains, and just like it’s a tall task today, it will remain a tall task even with Theatre Commands.

Therefore, to address emerging challenges, India needs to operationalise an Indian Concept of War Fighting, which fuses sound doctrine with dynamic leadership, joint planning with decentralised execution, modern technology with capability-driven acquisition programmes, mission-specific operational logistics with robust and redundant supply chains and adaptive Command and Control (C2).

The Indian Dilemma

The Indian conundrum is peculiar not because of geography but because of the geopolitical situation. While geography mandates massed formations, massed formations alone will not guarantee success. Theatre Commands should have been created two decades ago, when the demands of the situation and technological imperatives dictated them. Unfortunately, that ship had already sailed.

But there’s another one on the way, and India must catch it before bureaucracy and a false sense of security make India miss this one too. It is not about domain superiority but domain complementarity. The emerging model is fairly clear. While massed forces are required to hold ground and launch limited offensives, the entire Theatre Command construct cannot be trained and equipped to fight across multiple domains. Complementing permanent, geographically situated forces, there is a need to develop specialist, mission-oriented and operationally flexible forces to be applied at decisive points ‘when and where’ deemed appropriate.

(Abridged, and citations removed).

Gp Capt VP Naik VM, Senior Fellow, Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies.