Letters: Managing a battlefield

With reference to “A test for the defence minister” by Ajai Shukla (December 5), an effective Land Battlefield Management System (BMS) is a must today to win wars. It helps to create situational awareness real-time, throughout the corps battle zone. This helps to remove the “fog of war” and discern the enemy’s intentions correctly through dispersed analysis of the battlefield inputs. Successful battle operations have to be “intelligence analysis” driven using all our diverse sourcing of battlefield indications in order not to be misled, or to be the victim of too much caution delaying decision-making. The US Army has BMS terminals right down to the infantry company and armour squadron level to create networked synergy and flexible re-grouping and employment of forces swiftly, to meet battlefield requirements. This may not be required in our case, but having full-fledged two-way BMS terminals down to the infantry battalion, armour combat group and artillery fire direction centre levels, which feed inputs from the entire corps battle zone, is a must to achieve supremacy. One has only to study the conduct of the land battle in Chhamb sector in the 1971 and 1965 wars to understand how the battle was lost due to delays in decision-making at the division HQ and corps HQ levels. Rumours carried the day, which resulted in the permanent loss of territory west of the Munawar Tawi. The same type of errors occurred repeatedly in the battles of Tawang, Se-la, Bomdi-la and Walong that we lost during the 1962 Sino-Indian War due to lack of a rustic BMS. J K Achuthan   Thiruvananthapuram

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