Defence ministry trims Army flab; 57,000 soldiers to shift to combat roles

Shekatkar Committee reforms to shave Rs 25,000 cr off defence budget

The lead photograph in this article has been changed to make it more relevant to the story.
The Army currently deploys more soldiers on non-combat administrative and supply chain duties than in the trenches in wartime.

On Wednesday, to increase what the defence ministry terms the Army’s teeth-to-tail ratio by putting a larger percentage of soldiers on the frontline, Defence Minister Arun Jaitley ordered 65 reforms to the structure of the military.

Improving the teeth-to-tail ratio involves whittling down administrative and logistic units that support combat operations, and redeploying the manpower thus saved into combat units. The defence ministry says the 65 reforms must be completed by December 31, 2019, involving “redeployment and restructuring of approximately 57,000 posts of soldiers and civilians.”

These reforms are part of the 99 measures recommended by the Lieutenant General (Retired) D B Shekatkar Committee, which former defence minister Manohar Parrikar constituted in 2015. The committee submitted its report to Parrikar on December 21, 2016.

The committee discovered that the Army’s teeth-to-tail ratio was an unsatisfactory 1:1.15. That means every 100 combatants directly fighting the enemy had 115 soldiers supporting them logistically and administratively.  The committee aims to improve the teeth-to-tail ratio to 1:1 or better.

The committee noted in its report that accepting its recommendations over the next five years would shave Rs 25,000 crore off the annual defence budget.

The defence ministry says it sent the committee’s recommendations to the military for studying their feasibility and making an implementation plan. Business Standard learns the Army recommended the implementation of 80 reforms. Now, in what the ministry terms “the first phase of the reforms”, 65 of those are being implemented.

The cuts announced on Wednesday are to signals units that handle communications, equipment repair echelons, supply and transport units, including animal transport (mules), supply echelons for rations, ammunition and equipment, and the closure of military farms and Army postal establishments in peace areas.

Enabling such cuts are technological advances in digital communications, improved road infrastructure across the country, the availability of transport vehicles with higher carrying capacities, and the availability through civilian wholesale markets of rations, fuel and equipment in border regions where the Army needed to be self-sufficient in earlier times. 

The Army’s massive manpower – some 38,000 officers and 1.1 million soldiers – has been a drain on its budget, leaving insufficient money for equipment modernisation. The pressure to restructure manpower has increased over the last decade, with the Army adding 80,000-90,000 soldiers for two new mountain divisions and a mountain strike corps for the China border.

Now more personnel are needed to establish ‘new generation warfare’ organisations like the proposed ‘cyber command’ and ‘aerospace command’. With the Prime Minister making it clear to the top military command in December 2015 that increasing the military’s size was no longer an option, the 57,000 troops saved by the new reforms could be redeployed to these organisations, say military sources.

Senior military officers, speaking anonymously, point out the defence ministry has only picked the low-hanging fruit from the Shekatkar Committee recommendations, bypassing the deeper structural reforms that require political will. There is no move to introduce the recommended tri-service command, which would generate not just operational advantages but also savings by eliminating redundancies in the three services. Nor is there any move towards setting up tri-service ‘theatre commands’ as China’s People’s Liberation Army has recently done. The ministry is silent, too, on the committee’s proposal for more tri-service training establishments.

Ministry officials, echoing a familiar refrain, say the deeper reforms have not been implemented “because they require discussions with, and consensus amongst, a larger number of stakeholders.”

Nor is there any move towards the committee’s recommendation to institute a ‘roll-on plan’ for capital expenditure, which would enable unspent capital allocations from one year to be rolled over to the next year to prevent it from lapsing due to procedural delays in concluding procurement contracts. Year after year, the military surrenders thousands of crores of unspent capital allocations – at the end of 2016-17, the military surrendered just short of Rs 7,000 crore.