Nagrota attack: Let’s make mobile commando units the arrowhead of army ops

The suicide attacks at Nagrota and at Samba on Tuesday morning highlighted the urgency of reorienting war tactics radically.

The key first response to such attacks is what the army calls a QRT (quick response team). Within minutes (zero minutes, ideally) after such a surprise attack gets going, the nearest QRT is meant to spring into action and take on the attackers in combat. That’s how it has worked in several of the attacks over recent months.

A QRT responded on Tuesday morning, just as another one had at the Uri brigade headquarters on 18 September, and during the attack on an army convoy on the highway at Baramulla on 17 August.

The way warfare is developing, war planners must examine how QRTs can become more central to the army’s range of tactical options.

The reason for this proposition is that suicide attacks and other forms of surprise attacks have emerged as the chief method of offence over the past quarter of a century, and seem likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. As in the past, shelling at the Line of Control and the border continues to be another major tactic in what passes for peace time. We ought, however, to come to terms with the fact that this is not peace. Undeclared war by other means (call it proxy war if you like) has become more or less the norm. It was in play in — or over — Kashmir from 1989 to 2005 and has returned with intensity over the past couple of years.

To be sure, it has been intertwined with an indigenous freedom struggle each time, but the Pakistani Army has taken on the Indian Army and the Indian State in tandem with that indigenous struggle. One might even say it has done so under the cover of the indigenous struggle — a point that a group of Kashmiri journalists made volubly to Pakistan’s High Commissioner to India not long ago.

It is the need to refine army tactics for that proxy war, rather than for the indigenous struggle, that the long series of recent attacks have brought into focus.

Most modern armies have evolved from the armies of Europe and West Asia, which were conceptualised around infantry and cavalry. Horse cavalry gave way to tanks exactly a century ago. The nature of war underwent another sea-change after the Second World War. Nuclear weapons brought deterrence into play. However, armies have remained organised in the same ways, based on the same concepts about how wars are fought.

That changed radically in the battlefields of Afghanistan during the 1980s. Rag-tag forces with non-standard equipment but extraordinary mobility took on a superpower army, and forced it to withdraw.

No doubt the orientations of surrounding populations played a key role — vast support for those rag-tag groups, and antagonism towards the superpower.

Then came another phase of war — symbolised by the aeroplane attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre on 11 September, 2001. Surprise of every sort was the hallmark of this phase of neo-warfare. Surprise attacks can take various forms. And there has been no dearth of surprise tactics in Kashmir — from the emergence of suicide strikes to the coordination of public demonstrations and militant attacks.

The army has responded in many ways. It spawned the Rashtriya Rifles for internal security operations, for example. However, in many ways, RR has become little more than a variation of army units. The idea of the QRT needs to evolve now. Small, highly alert, extremely mobile, units should, ideally, be able to take on militant groups even before the latter get to their targets. Small units, tiny in terms of the strengths to which armies have got accustomed, should be able to operate relatively independently — the way contemporary attackers do.

Like them, these units would need to be trained for commando operations and survival so that they could operate without the sort of logistical and other sorts of vast support systems that armies are used to.

Of course, such units would need to be backed by far more sophisticated intelligence inputs than now seem to be available.

Given the inertia that sets into any established way of functioning, it will be very difficult to conceptualise — leave alone operationalise — refined tactics of the sort that the situation requires.

It is time the various flatulent security think-tanks put what minds they have to work on this challenge.

So far, they have done precious little to help the nation face these cutting-edge challenges.