The Military Superchief

With the Cabinet Committee on Security clearing the post of a Chief of Defence Staff, India is finally on the road to an empowered, integrated military command

- Sandeep Unnithan

The contours of independent India’s biggest military reform are slowly becoming apparent. On December 24, the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) approved the creation of the post of India’s first Chief of Defence Staff(CDS) along with a significant new organisation within the ministry of defence. The Narendra Modi government had left the defence ministry (MoD) untouched in its first term, but the prime minister did stress the need for reforms in higher defence management in 2015. “It is sad that many defence reform measures proposed in the past have not been implemented. This is an area of priority for me,” he told a joint conference of commanders on board the aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya in 2015. In his second term, he has taken up this unfinished agenda.

The Department of Military Affairs (DMA) is the second most significant aspect of the reform because it vests real power with the defence forces. All three service headquarters currently function as ‘attached offices’ of the department of defence, headed by the powerful defence secretary (who is part of the civilian bureaucracy). ‘India is perhaps the only major democracy where the Armed Forces Headquarters are outside the apex governmental structure,’ the landmark Kargil Review Committee headed by strategic analyst K. Subrahmanyam noted in 2000. The defence secretary is currently chief advisor to the defence minister on all matters of policy and administration, and is the first among equals among four other secretaries in the MoD.

Chief of Army Staff General Bipin Rawat, now seen as the front runner for the post of CDS, knows the limits to the powers of a service chief heading an attached office. His plan to radically restructure the army, by cutting down troops and raising new departments, is yet to take off because it hit a bureaucratic wall in the MoD this year.