The Kargil war between India and Pakistan in May 1999 effectively constituted the world’s first hot war between two nuclear armed nations. In its wake, the war sparked a series of radical changes. Pakistan’s clandestine operations shocked India’s political, military, diplomatic, and intelligence establishments. The United States, then led by President Bill Clinton, swung into action to broker a truce. Although the war ultimately remained below the nuclear threshold, it still registered roughly 500 fatalities on the Indian side and an even higher number on the Pakistani side. In the years that followed, scholars and soldiers produced first-hand accounts and detailed analyses that offer crucial lessons for both defense and diplomacy.
For its part, the Indian government undertook a flurry of internal appraisals to ascertain why the war happened and how the weaknesses in the Indian response could be plugged. Chief among them was the Kargil Review Committee (KRC), headed by K. Subrahmanyam, a former bureaucrat and doyen of strategic studies in India. After months of prolonged assessment, the Committee produced a succinct and radical report, suggesting reforms across six domains: (a) India’s security architecture, (b) its intelligence gathering and processing capabilities, (c) its counterterrorism and border management, (d) its defense budget, modernization, and war preparedness, (e) its nuclear policy, and (f) media relations and information.
The changes triggered by the Kargil war and the KRC report were subsequently influenced by additional factors. Internally, the political willingness of Indian leaders as well as India’s economic and political stability played a part in the reforms being considered seriously. Externally, the accretion of operational experience through successive episodes of conflict with Pakistan and incidents of terrorism added to lessons learned from Kargil. More recently, newer challenges emerging from China have also continued to trigger changes to India’s defense establishment.
Yet, even after 25 years and despite these transformative changes, the KRC’s recommendations still remain a work in progress. While the KRC’s work was wide-ranging and comprehensive, this piece will focus only on the committee’s findings and recommendations, and India’s progress towards those recommendations, in two major areas — (a) apex decision-making and the role of the military, and (b) modernization and war preparedness.
Building a Robust Apex Decision-making Apparatus
Prior to the Kargil War, the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Cabinet Secretariat would collate inputs from domestic and external intelligence agencies, military intelligence, and the external affairs ministry to prepare a final brief for the prime minister. A month prior to the Kargil War, a new National Security Council (NSC) was instituted with a national security advisor (NSA) at its helm. While the new architecture was still in a fledgling state at the time of the war, the KRC recommended the NSC’s evolution into a robust institution.
Toward this end, the KRC asserted that India needed a full-time NSA since managing national security is a demanding task. At the time, Brajesh Mishra, a former diplomat, concurrently held the posts of the NSA and the principal secretary to the prime minister — an arrangement that continued until 2004. Since then, India has had a full-time NSA. However, the NSA’s role and selection has been contingent on the prime minister’s desire. For instance, the administration of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh toyed with the idea of devolving the NSA’s internal security portfolio to a separate advisor. In general, Indian prime ministers have typically appointed either a senior diplomat or a law enforcement or intelligence officer as the NSA. Unlike in many western countries, civilians are generally kept away from the national security architecture in India.
The Kargil war between India and Pakistan in May 1999 effectively constituted the world’s first hot war between two nuclear armed nations […] For its part, the Indian government undertook a flurry of internal appraisals to ascertain why the war happened and how the weaknesses in the Indian response could be plugged.
Meanwhile, to further strengthen national security decision-making, the NSC has now been divided into three parts: the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) that aids the NSA; a National Security Advisory Board (NSAB), which is a civilian body of former officials and academics who share inputs on national security with the NSA; and the Strategic Policy Group (SPG) headed by the cabinet secretary, which comprises all major bureaucrats, service chiefs, and advisors to the prime minister. However, the functioning of the NSCS has largely remained opaque and low-profile. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, in the last few years, the NSCS has expanded its personnel and profile with an additional NSA, three deputies, a military advisor, and a maritime security coordinator. Some of these expansions — for instance, the introduction of a maritime security coordinator — have more to do with India’s evolving threats and interests than with the KRC’s recommendations.
While the Indian government had made some much-needed changes in line with the KRC’s suggestions, the apex security architecture has two further areas for improvement: internal cohesion and external input-seeking. On the first point, observers have expressed doubts over the smooth functioning of the NSCS and coordination between the multiple bureaucratic and military nodes that process inputs and generate security advice for the prime minister. On the second point, apart from the relatively minuscule body of the NSAB, the national security system should also benefit from India’s sprawling think-tank network and independent expertise to generate different response options, perspectives, and cost benefit analyses on any policy issue.
Reforming the Military’s Role in Decision-making
In its report, the KRC further raised the issue of the armed forces’ limited participation in the Indian decision-making process. The KRC expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that the top leadership of the armed forces was kept outside the apex government structure. In the KRC’s view, it was undesirable that the military leadership devoted more time to operational aspects than long-term planning. It was equally discontented with the hierarchical nature of decision-making within the forces, which, it argued, ought to incorporate more inputs from the lower rungs of the services. The KRC also stressed the necessity of better civil-military liaising at all levels for smoother coordination and communication during conflict.
While the KRC highlighted the need to ensure better inter-services cohesion, it fell short of proposing the post of the Chief of Defense Staff (CDS), which was explicitly recommended by a subsequent ministerial report. This new role would ensure greater and more effective inter-services coordination as well as act as an external interface with the political leadership, in line with the KRC’s recommendations. But it was not implemented for a long time due to internal turf wars within the services. The post of CDS was finally instituted in 2019. This new post functions as the head of the tri-services, the principal advisor to the defense minister, and the ex-officio secretary for the newly-minted Department of Military Affairs. In recent years, the Modi government has also undertaken a larger restructuring of the armed forces to address concerns regarding their lack of jointness. One of these changes is the theaterization of commands, which fulfills the KRC’s suggestion of operational integration at the command level.
However, these changes have spawned other concerns. In particular, some veterans feel that wearing three hats concurrently is “a demanding combination of roles” for the CDS. But the Modi government’s long-term plan envisages a number of deputies to assist the CDS and ease this burden.
The move towards theaterization and the creation of an effective CDS to address gaps in India’s agility in times of war have been a long time coming and the government acknowledges that these institutional changes will take a while to get right. According to Defense Minister Rajnath Singh, New Delhi’s restructuring plan — which includes everything from organizational overhaul to asset redistribution and commands — could take up to two decades. For the incumbent CDS and his successor, a long road lies ahead in reorganizing India’s colossal armed forces, fostering readiness for composite combat, and attuning the military to the wider rejig in the national security architecture.
Modernizing and Improving War Preparedness
In the area of combat preparedness, the KRC and other witness accounts highlighted glaring inadequacies. According to the memoirs of General VP Malik, who served as the army chief during the Kargil War, the lack of lighter weapons, winter clothing, spares, and ammunitions marred the Indian Army’s fighting prowess. To add to these troubles, India’s Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) and various Ordnance Factory Boards (OFB) could not keep up with the pace of weapons and equipment demand during the crisis.
While ammunitions and reserves are now required to last 40 days of full-scale warfare, shortfalls continue, compounded by bureaucratic hurdles. In 2000, Malik complained that only a paltry 0.5 percent of the allocated budget could be used for procurement over three months due to bureaucratic red tape. Since then, the rules for procurement and acquisitions have seen periodic revisions, but not adequately addressed the problem. The political class is equally culpable because big-ticket acquisitions from the West have previously embroiled governments in corruption scandals, which has made the bureaucracy more risk-averse. For instance, the Howitzer has been described as “the most useful weapon during the Kargil war” and the backbone of conventional land warfare. But India did not acquire it for 30 years because of a past scandal involving the government of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
In response to these procurement challenges, the Modi government has pushed for indigenization of weapons and defense equipment, but local production has not responded rapidly enough. For example, the indigenously produced Arjun Tank was planned immediately after the 1971 war with Pakistan but entered into service only in 2005. These decades-long development timelines have resulted in continued dependence on Russian weaponry, especially with regard to equipment such as tanks for which Russia has a relatively better turnaround time.
On its part, the KRC had encouraged a balance between indigenization and modernization. It noted, “While self-reliance and indigenization are sound principles, the availability of critical equipment in time of combat is the supreme consideration that must govern acquisition policy.” To this end, the KRC suggested that the defense ministry should think beyond the straitjacketed options of either making equipment from scratch or buying them off the shelf from abroad. Subsequently, the government began to explore means to buy foreign equipment but manufacture it in India through technology transfer agreements, offsets, and most recently, coproduction. The Modi government has also pursued the corporatization of OFBs in order to require them to compete in an open market for government contracts instead of guaranteed requisition. This will force OFBs to be more efficient and competitive.
To complement these reforms, India would need greater budgetary allocation. In the 25 years since Kargil, India’s absolute defense budget has more than quintupled from just under USD $14 billion to over USD $81 billion, but it has still stayed steady between 2.5 percent and 3 percent of GDP. The growth in outlay also does not reflect in capital acquisitions since over half of the defense budget goes toward pensions and salaries for India’s standing force of roughly 3 million. To ease this burden, the Modi government introduced contractual recruitment in 2022 via the Agnipath scheme. But this has faced popular backlash in states where army jobs are seen as a pathway to socioeconomic mobility. Additionally, in the last couple of budgets, the government has also made a separate allocation for capital acquisitions, R&D in deep tech and other emerging technologies, and border infrastructure in order to improve its deterrence and defense innovation capabilities.
A Long Road Ahead
The Kargil War spawned a series of studies and reports in its wake to help the Indian establishment reckon with its mistakes. In addition to the KRC report, there was also a range of other specialized reviews, including by a Group of Ministers, the Indian Army, and four Task Forces. In this regard, the Kargil War and the KRC report left a unique legacy. No prior war had thrusted the Indian establishment into such a fundamental rethink of its national security design, doctrine, deployment, and discipline. More importantly, veterans, journalists, intelligentsia, and academics all participated in this national churning.
The Kargil War and the KRC report left a unique legacy. No prior war had thrusted the Indian establishment into such a fundamental rethink of its national security design, doctrine, deployment, and discipline.
However, progress on these reforms has been erratic and episodic and the modernization of India’s national security system remains an unending quest. But if New Delhi wants to project force across the Indian Ocean and become a major exporter of arms and security, it must put its house in order. Revamping national security decision-making, intelligence, defense, and border management is an arduous task that will test the nation’s political sagacity and professional expertise at every step. As Subrahmanyam and his committee warned in their conclusion, there is danger in clinging to any long-established status quo, and procrastination has cost nations dearly.
Also Read: India’s 2024-2025 Defense Budget: Incremental Progress at Best
***
Image 1: Firdous Nazir/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Image 2: Ministry of Defence, Government of India via Facebook
