scholar warrior

Book Reviews

The Future of Land Warfare

Michael E. O’Hanlon
Brookings Institution Press, Washington D.C, 2015, $ 32

Michael O’Hanlon, a prolific writer and senior fellow specialising in defence

and foreign policy issues in the Washington D.C based think-tank, ‘Brookings’
has been a proponent of humanitarian military intervention and muscular
peace operations. He authored a book on this subject in 1997 titled Saving
Lives with Force. With this 2015 book, he carries forward his conviction of the
utility of large ground forces in an insightful and well researched analysis of
the future of the world’s land armies. The book is about the future size and
shape of American land power. O’Hanlon makes a case against cutting ground
forces whenever budget cuts are applied. He argues for land forces that are at
least the same size or even slightly larger than those currently fielded by the
United States.
To make his point the author has carried out scenario building of various
potential wars the US may have to fight and the conflict and humanitarian
assistance tasks that the United States may be forced to undertake, roughly from
2020 to 2040. These would be both for its own security and also because, as the
preeminent power, it cannot shirk its duties to maintain peace and harmony in
the world.
The author starts with the historical, strategic and technological factors
which have affected the size and shape of American ground forces. He then
analyses the shape that real, latent or imaginable conflicts may take in the future.
He builds up scenarios with Russia, China, in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa

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and the Americas. He notes that most wars today are civil wars fought within
states by ground forces. Interstate-wars may be rare but when they do occur they
generally involve a heavy concentration of ground combat forces. The illustrative
scenarios that O’Hanlon considers in which large conventional forces may be
necessary are as follows:
yy Deterring Russia from contemplating attacks against the Baltic states.
yy Conflicts involving Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Nigeria, and Mexico which could pose systemic and large-scale disruption to
“the global order and to American interests”.
yy In an Indian context, a large ground force is required for helping South
Asia cope with a shaky ceasefire after a potentially catastrophic nuclear
war between India and Pakistan. O’Hanlon acknowledges that India may
appear to be adamant against such an idea today. “But things could change
fundamentally if such a settlement, and such a force, seemed the only way to
reverse a momentum towards all-out nuclear war in South Asia”.
yy For deterring China from considering an unfriendly future role on the Korean
peninsula and handling an asymmetric threat in the South China Sea with
the construction and protection of a number of bases in the Philippines and
elsewhere.
yy For fighting a war between Chinese and American land Armies which is the
only credible scenario of a large-scale encounter in the future.
yy Handling the aftermath of a major and complex humanitarian disaster
superimposed on a security crisis—perhaps in South Asia.
yy Coping with a severe Ebola outbreak not in the small states of West Africa but
in Nigeria, at the same time that, that country falls further into violence.
yy Addressing a further meltdown in security conditions in Central America.
yy Protecting bases in the Philippines.
yy Deterring Iran from using weapons of mass destruction with the implied
prospect of a ground invasion conveyed through having such a capability.
yy Restoring order in a place like Saudi Arabia or Syria.

With this background, he assesses the requirement in terms of numbers

for the United States Army. The author points out that in force planning, it
is less embarrassing to have more forces than you need than it is to have
fewer. O’Hanlon cautions against the overconfident view that big wars can
be avoided and, consequently, ends by making a case for a million-soldier
Army.

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The salient points that come up as he carries out his analysis are, firstly,
the mistakes made in 2003 in Iraq were not due to the fact that no one in
Washington DC anticipated or predicted the outcome there, but because
those who offered warnings about this outcome were ignored and pushed
aside by decision-makers who had already decided. The situation later
became bad as nation-building remains apparently as much beyond American
understanding and capability. Secondly, no nation or group of nations has the
power to deny any nation the right to decide for itself on matters of national
security and defence, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(NATO). If NATO was to, and is to, retain its meaning and place on the world
stage, it has to keep its doors open to membership by any nation that meets
its criteria. In the face of a Russian invasion and occupation of even a portion
of the territory of a NATO member state, a NATO failure to respond militarily
would sound the death-knell for the alliance. Thirdly, Obama’s successors
will find themselves dealing with a post-Putin Russia that knows no other
paradigm for interacting with the West than the aggressive one bequeathed
to them by Vladimir Putin, and lastly, China’s role and actions in a future
Korean Peninsula crisis must not be seen as limited to militarily propping
up the regime. It is already clear the Beijing does not relish being confronted
with a wave of refugees from North Korea in the event war breaks out on the
peninsula. The US should deter China from considering an “unfriendly future
role” on the Korean peninsula.
The book is a plea on behalf of Armies which in the West are increasingly
being treated as the poor relations of naval and air forces. Beleaguered Army
chiefs, are getting increasingly despondent listening to the “no boots on the
ground” mantra. Even as pundits say the Islamic State of Syria (ISIS) and other
terror groups can only be beaten by ground forces, desperate to put the bad
experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan behind them, governments are placing
their bets on drones and Special Forces, fast jets, “smart” bombs, and missiles.
Therefore, in today’s U.S. defence policy debates, big land wars are out. Drones,
cyber weapons, Special Forces, and space weapons are in. Accordingly, Pentagon
budget cuts have homed in on the Army and ground forces: this, after the long
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, seems like an appealing idea.
O’Hanlon states that it is not so easy to simply declare an end to messy land
wars. A survey of the world’s trouble spots suggests that land warfare has more
of a future than many now seem to believe. O’Hanlon advises against betting
too heavily on unmanned systems, cyber warfare, and special operations in

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the defence of the United States. He concludes that the size of the US Army,
which some commentators—notably senior members of other branches of
the armed forces—want to slash, should stay where it is now: about 500,000
active duty soldiers and 550,000 reservists. His conviction that the reservists
and National Guards cannot reach the level of training of the active duty
soldiers comes through many times in the book. The size of the Army should
be such that it has the capability to wage one major “all-out regional battle”
while “contributing substantially” to two multi-year, multilateral, operations.
This ‘1+2’ mission as he calls it, requires a significant active duty Army. He
states that nothing about trends in technology suggests a radical change in
how forces are sized and structured for most ground missions and goes on
with the observation that in the modern world it is not practical for a country
to build up capacity to wage two large ground wars at a time. To this end, the
book is of interest to Indian planners whose focus has been on ‘two and a half
front’ wars. The book is recommended for planners and practitioners of land
warfare.

Lt Gen GS Katoch, AVSM, VSM is Director General, Perspective Planning at Army HQ, New Delhi

Kashmir: The Vajpayee Years

AS Dulat and Aditya Sinha
HarperCollins Publishers India, New Delhi, 2015,
342 pp, INR 599

The year 2015 marked the completion of 25 long years from the advent of
militancy in Kashmir as it is often considered to have begun with the kidnapping
of Rubaiya Sayeed on December 08, 1989. Rubaiya, then a 23-year-old medical
intern, and the daughter of Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, India’s Home Minister,
was returning home from the Lal Ded Hospital, Srinagar in a mini-bus when she
was kidnapped by the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). Soon, the
success of this hostage trade-off made kidnapping an everyday occurrence in
Kashmir. The intended target could be kidnapped in the morning and released
in the evening. This recently-released book is full of such revealing yet frank
narrations of the ground situation in Kashmir through its most turbulent years.

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Amarjit Singh Dulat has a unique perspective of internal as well as external

intelligence as he has spent nearly thirty long years in the Intelligence Bureau (IB),
and later went on to head the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW). His involvement
with Kashmir coincided with the rising tide of militancy as he was posted to head
the IB in Srinagar in 1988 and later headed the IB’s Kashmir group on his return
to Delhi in 1990 before becoming R&AW chief. Subsequently, he joined the Prime
Minister Office (PMO) under Prime Minister (PM) Atal Bihari Vajpayee and dealt
exclusively with Kashmir, including the peace initiatives advanced by the Vajpayee
Government. In fact, his job description was to ‘monitor, manage and direct’ the
government of India’s peace initiative in Kashmir. Since leaving the government
in 2004, he has been very active on the Track-Two circuit with Pakistan, along with
few retired Army Generals. The other author, Aditya Sinha has been the Editor-in-
Chief of the New Indian Express and DNA.
The focus of the book is on the political leanings, internal compulsions and
complex affiliations of Kashmiri separatist leaders and the political parties. The
author highlights the strategy, including the backdoor methods of getting the
separatists back from Pakistan to kick-start the political process. He reveals that
R&AW got Abdul Majid Dar back to India and thereafter tried to rekindle the
political process by getting Shabir Shah and Yasin Malik released and then talking
peace. Finally, the 1996 Assembly election was the masterstroke as it revived the
nearly-dead political process and broke the back of the militancy. The author
opines that if these elections had not been held and Dr Farooq Abdullah not been
roped in to contest, terrorism would have continued for another decade.
The author also informs that he repeatedly met Abdul Gani Lone soon after
he returned from the US in 1999, and asked him to contest the 2002 Assembly
elections. Abdul Gani Lone thereafter tried to convince the Hurriyat of the
“relevance of elections”, but did not succeed. Soon he was killed, apparently on
orders of the Inter-Services Intelligence’s (ISI’s) Hurriyat political handler Brig
Abdullah of the Pakistan Army. Similarly, according to the author, Mirwaiz Umar
Farooq’s father Mirwaiz Farooq was killed by the militants because “he was in
touch with National Front Railways Minister George Fernandes”. However, in
2003, Mirwaiz Farooq had favoured autonomy, open borders and a bus service
between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad which laid the foundation for the Vajpayee
government’s parallel parleys with Pakistan and the Hurriyat. A conclusion may
be drawn by the reader from these narrations that any separatist not towing the
narrow ISI line is at grave risk of elimination by pro-Pakistan terrorist groups
operating in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).

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The Indian Army finds repeated mention in the book. The author informs that
it was Dr Farooq Abdullah who initially introduced Kuka Parrey to the Rastriya
Rifles. Kuka Parrey, an erstwhile folk-singer turned militant thereafter went on to
lead a force of counter-insurgents called Ikhwan-ul Muslimoon, which was one
of the Army’s success story in Kashmir. As regards the Kargil War, he sidesteps
the issue of “intelligence failure”, and, consequently, of the responsibility of the
intelligence agencies; and instead blames the Army for not sending out regular
patrols. However, the author is not critical of the Army and focusses mainly on
intelligence aspects, particularly in maintaining the channels of communication.
The book follows an easy chatty style and often repeats the importance of
talking to all the stakeholders, irrespective of their political affiliations or their
separatist leanings. This is perhaps a reflection of Mr Dulat’s own friendly
personality and the ability to engage people of all shades and win over their
confidence. This image is further reinforced by a quote from Professor Agha
Ashraf Ali, a noted Kashmiri educationist, who told him, “You were sent to disrupt
the Kashmir movement in the friendliest possible manner”. In spite of the friendly
manner, the importance of engaging hardcore separatists as well as borderline
separatists towards greater political participation cannot be underestimated.
The information provided in the book is immensely useful in understanding
the dynamics and under-currents of counter-terrorist operations in J&K.
The book also traces the transition of the terrorist movement in J&K from the
home-grown and Kashmir-centric JKLF to the pro-Pakistan tanzeems like the
Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) and Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT). The book is proof of
how ‘mainstreaming people’ and giving the Kashmiris a role has been the most
effective strategy to stabilise the conflict and bring peace. The Indian Army, in
particular, has also attained the upper hand as, while it is neutralising terrorists
with an ‘iron fist’, it is also winning the locals over by various people-centric
activities. The book is highly recommended reading for all Army officers who
wish to understand the behind-the-scene dynamics of Kashmir and their impact
on the ground situation. It is a useful addition to libraries and of great value to
all readers, including non-military are who look for the human stories in every
conflict; this human-centric book shall provide several answers which have
eluded many previous history-centric books on Kashmir.

Reviewed by Col Shailender Arya. The views expressed are personal.

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