The Integrated Defence Staff (IDS) of the Indian armed forces released the joint doctrine for the Indian armed forces (JDIAF-2017) in April 2017. This was not the first such document, a classified version having 1 been circulated in 2006. It was, however, the first such extensive public statement of India’s approach to joint warfare. Unlike some other countries, India does not publish a national security strategy or defence white paper that is made available for public scrutiny. Absent such a document, a public joint doctrine for the armed forces is perhaps the closest to an official articulation of Indian thinking on how various instruments of force combine to meet national security objectives. 2 However, the joint doctrine has disappointed many. Scholars, former practitioners, and other observers widely derided JDIAF-2017 as an incoherent, poorly-edited, and lacklustre document, part of which even appear to have been plagiarised from other sources. One former service 3 chief went as far as to call it “anodyne, farcical and premature”. The most substantive criticism of JDIAF-2017 has focused on its “armycentric” approach, with very few substantive ideas around military 4 jointness and a narrow view of key external threats.

This paper highlights six key sets of problems with JDIAF-2017. The rest of this introductory section describes key external and internal security challenges that ought to have provided context to the doctrine. In the next section, the paper examines JDIAF-2017 as an element in the Indian national security planning process. It compares Indian defence planning with the American structure to tease out the broader role of the joint doctrine in the Indian system, and argues that the lack of a codified national security strategy continues to hobble both jointness and defence planning. The third section examines the continental view of threats enunciated in JDIAF-2017. It argues that Pakistan looms large in Indian defence thinking and connects the joint doctrine to India’s recently-avowed proactive, limited-aims strategy designed to address a Pakistan-related contingency. The paper argues that JDIAF- 2017 has sent incomplete and conflicting signals regarding a putative limited-aims strategy.

A consequence of a continental view of threats is an army-centric joint doctrine that fails to pay sufficient attention to the role of the other two services. This issue is reprised in the fourth section, along with an examination of the role of US Army’s Air Land Battle doctrine in shaping JDIAF-2017. Key areas of divergence between JDIAF-2017 and the Air Land Battle doctrine are also highlighted in this section. Given that any Pakistan-related military operation would be carried out under a nuclear overhang, the fifth section examines JDIAF-2017’s treatment of nuclear issues and their relationship to conventional war. In particular, it teases out new and so-far unexamined issues that the joint doctrine brings out vis-à-vis Indian nuclear command and control and force posture. The sixth section deals with the near-absence of forceprojection issues in the joint doctrine, even though in November 2017, the IDS released a follow-up Joint Training Doctrine that contains interesting observations about force projection and interoperability with friendly foreign countries. That document is examined in the penultimate section. The paper closes with a summary of the issues discussed in the paper.

JDIAF-2017 comes at a key moment in the evolution of India’s strategic environment. Seventy years into independence, India’s national security challenges remain as severe as ever. The long-running insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir worsened sharply in the summer of 2016. Analysts frequently observe that the violence in the Kashmir Valley in 2016 was comparable to the outbreak of the insurgency in the region in the early 1990s. The year 2016 also saw a series of attacks on Indian military installations in Kashmir and Punjab. One such attack, in September 2016 in Uri, led the Indian Army to launch publicly avowed cross-border raids – widely labelled “surgical strikes” – against militants in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Leftwing extremism continues to be a concern in the Indian heartland. In April 2017, an attack by Maoist extremists killed 25 Indian paramilitary 5 personnel, the worst such attack in recent years.

The 2003 informal ceasefire between India and Pakistan has continued to erode. In 2016 alone, there were as many as 449 incidents of cross-border firing on the Line of Control (LoC), up from 152 the 6 previous year. In recent years, the India-China relationship has considerably worsened with the emergence of multiple disputes. China has blocked India’s membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group, repeatedly prevented the UN Security Council from sanctioning the Pakistan-based terrorist Masood Azhar, and expanded its economic and military footprint in Pakistan through the so-called China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, including in India-claimed Gilgit-Baltistan. The most serious confrontation between the two countries emerged in mid- 2017 when China tried to construct a road in the Doklam region claimed by both Bhutan and China, close to the Siliguri Corridor (which is strategically sensitive to India, owing to the access it gives India to the Northeast through a narrow strip between Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh). This construction activity led to a tense two-and-half month standoff between Indian and Chinese troops – the worst such 7 incident in almost three decades. China’s growing presence in the Indian Ocean region, including a new military base in Djibouti, is a further challenge for India.

In the face of these challenges, it is clear that Indian institutions remain far from the inter-service integration that has become the norm in many Western military powers. In a nod to the global trend towards jointness, India established an Integrated Defence Staff (IDS) in October 2001, as a staff for the relatively weak Chairman of the Chiefs of 8 Staff Committee (COSC). The IDS took the lead on the first joint doctrine of 2006, with over a half-dozen further, more specialised ones – 9 10 on subjects from amphibious operations to electronic warfare – produced in the next several years. It is widely recognised that the IDS “has little impact on how India formulates and implements its military 11 policies.” One former Indian officer concludes, with diplomatic phrasing, that “a review of HQ IDS’s endeavours since 2001 would indicate difficulties being experienced in forging jointness and 12 integration in planning processes and structures.” Another analyst, a retired general, argues that the “headless” IDS “serves little purpose,” largely because “all issues of any consequence are dealt with by the civil 13 officials of MoD.” Yet another view, expressed by a former senior Indian Army officer, is that joint operations are essentially singleservice operations in phases, and that jointness is present at the tactical 14 level without a higher-level document or guidance driving it. During the Modi government, early indications of interest in a post akin to that of Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) have fizzled out, as so often it had in the 15 past. India has established a few other tri-service bodies, such as the Defence Intelligence Agency, as well as joint commands, notably the Andaman and Nicobar Command in 2001 and the nuclear-tasked Strategic Forces Command in 2003. Yet these, like the IDS itself, “own” no military assets, and are therefore institutionally weak in relation to 16 the individual services. Gen. Sundararajan Padmanabhan, army chief 17 from 2000–02, described the IDS sans CDS as “an exercise in futility.” Gen. JJ Singh, army chief from 2005–07, has said Indian jointness is still “in a state of transition from single-service entities”, with “a long 18 way to go on the road to further integration.” This is the broader context to JDIAF-2017 which the rest of the paper will analyse in detail.