Is the Indian Military Capable of Executing Its Cold Start Doctrine?

The Indian Army’s Proactive Doctrine, colloquially known as the Cold Start Doctrine (CSD), made headlines earlier in this year when new Chief of Army Staff General Bipin Rawat publicly acknowledged the doctrine for the first time in an interview. It remains unclear whether his comments were officially sanctioned.

To many analysts, the remarks came as a surprise given that the Indian Army had apparently scrapped its limited war concept following then-Chief of Army Staff General V.K. Singh’s public announcement that CSD did not exist, although he did acknowledge that the Indian Army possessed a “proactive strategy” for war with Pakistan.

CSD was reportedly devised following the Indian Army’s failure to mobilize a timely response to the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament. India’s mobilization along the so-called Line of Control (LOC) in Kashmir, codenamed Operation Parakram, occurred at a slow pace and it took three weeks for the Indian military to move 500,000 troops and three armored divisions and support units (the so-called Strike Corps) to the border. (The Indian military also sustained around 400 casualties during mine-laying operations.)

The delay allowed the Pakistan Army to mobilize and move 300,000 troops, including its two strike corps, the Army Reserve North and Army Reserve South, to the contested border. Lacking strategic surprise, the Indian military withdrew after a ten-month standoff. In after action reviews, the military concluded that the size of the strike corps made them difficult to maneuver and that the so-called Holding Corps’s lack of offensive capability was a serious handicap for quick military actions against Pakistan.

As a result, CSD was developed by the Indian Army in 2004 to facilitate smaller scale, rapid, and decisive conventional offensive operations into Pakistani territory in the event of a Pakistani-sponsored asymmetrical attack on Indian soil. The intent was to allow India to strike before the international community could actively intervene, and below the threshold at which Pakistan would feel compelled to launch nuclear retaliatory strikes to repel an Indian invasion. It is still unclear what CSD specifically entails, and senior Indian officers have purposefully remained ambiguous about it.

It appears that offensive operations in the spirit of CSD were carried out in September 2016 when India conducted “surgical strikes” against terrorist camps in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The operation involved a heliborne unit and Indian Special Operations Forces, which, given Pakistan’s strong air defenses in the region, made some analysts skeptical about the precise nature of the operation. (Notably the Indian government decided not to implement CSD following the 2008 Mumbai attacks).

Yet in its purported classical (and most ambitious) conception, India’s limited war strategy under CSD calls for armored thrusts into Pakistani territory supported by mechanized infantry formations and air power within 48-72 hours of the outset of a military confrontation with Islamabad. These blitzkrieg-style operations would heavily depend on close coordination between the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force given the pivotal role close air support and overwhelming conventional firepower would play in such a campaign.

Consequently, to make this invasion force nimbler and easier to coordinate, the Indian Army was reorganized. First, the army decided to strengthen its holding corps (the Pivot Corps) stationed along the LOC with new offensive capabilities: division-sized integrated battle groups (IBG) consisting of artillery, armor, and aviation elements capable of limited offensive operations.

Second, the Indian Army also decided to disaggregate the three strike corps into division-sized IBGs and move them closer to the border. These IBGs, equipped with artillery, armored personnel carriers, main battle tanks, and infantry fighting vehicles, would be capable of launching limited strikes (50-80 kilometers deep) into enemy territory supported by air power.

However, according to public sources, these structural and organizational changes have only been partially implemented. Further, there is very little public evidence that the Indian Army is capable of executing CSD in the event of a new military confrontation between India and Pakistan.

Next to the ambivalent results of a number of Indian wargames practicing various aspects of CSD in the last few years, a cursory look at Indian military hardware reveals major deficiencies and capability gaps that would hinder the current execution of large-scale offensive operations against Pakistan.

For example, the Indian Army still lacks a sufficient number of operational modern main battle tanks (MBT), in particular T-90SMs, the most advanced version of the T-90. Also, the majority of the indigenously developed third generation Arjun MK-I main battle tanks are currently grounded due to various technical problems and missing spare parts. An upgraded version of the Arjun is currently under development but it is unclear when it will become operational.

Furthermore, the Indian Army lacks self-propelled tracked howitzers for close artillery support.  Only in May 2017 did the Indian Ministry of Defense decide to go ahead with the purchase of the first batch of 100 modified K-9 Vajra 155 mm/52 caliber guns. Overall, the Indian Army will need at least 250 self-propelled guns for its strike corps. In addition, the Army lacks advanced mobile air defense systems to cover the advance of armored forces.

Even more critically, the Indian military has been suffering from a chronic ammunition shortage for the past 17 years. Current ammunition levels would only last for ten days of high intensity war. The Indian Ministry of Defense has taken step to address this problem, by, for example, purchasing 66,000 anti-tank shells from Russia in 2014, but new ammunition is only slowly trickling in to replenish depleted stocks.

Additionally, the Indian Air Force currently lacks the close-air support capability necessary for swift armored thrusts into Pakistani territory. The inter-service rivalry, partially influenced by the fact that CSD is a product of the Indian Army, has made integration and synchronization of air-ground operations challenging (air assets of the Indian Navy only play a minor role in CSD). The Indian Air Force also insists that its principal mission remains air-to-air combat and strategic bombing.

Joint-service warfare as required by CSD also mandates a network-centric warfare capability: the ability to coordinate geographically dispersed forces (including unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites) with advanced communications technology in a timely manner. However, the Indian military is only slowly building up a robust capability in this field. Indian reconnaissance, intelligence, surveillance, and target acquisition capabilities would also currently not be able to support a full-scale and swift implementation of CSD.

Next to the low operational readiness rate of most Indian military hardware and the lack of modern equipment, the most glaring deficiency may be the lack of thousands of trained military officers.

Looking at all of these deficiency and gaps, it is perhaps fair to conclude that CSD is still in an experimental phase and remains a “mixture of myth and reality,” as a leaked 2010 assessment by the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi concluded. Yet India’s opponent cannot take comfort in that assessment.

Indeed, Pakistan has taken the threat of CSD seriously and has built up its tactical nuclear weapons arsenal on the one hand, and shored up its conventional military response on the other hand. In response to CSD, the Pakistani military has also adopted a so-called New Concept of War Fighting (NCWF) in order to improve inter-service coordination and reduce the mobilization time for the Pakistan Army. Some Indian analysts worry that Pakistan at this stage can mobilize more quickly than India as a result of NCWF.

Should Pakistan indeed be capable of mobilizing its conventional military forces more quickly India, the principal purpose behind CSD — deploying overwhelming conventional forces across the Pakistani border before the Pakistani military could exploit its defensive and geographical advantage — would be void. It would call into question the whole rationale behind the Indian military leadership’s embrace of a doctrine that not only apparently fuels the buildup of Pakistan’s conventional and nuclear forces, but also ups the chances of political and military miscalculations on both sides in the event of a major crisis.