NEW DELHI: The new Modi-led NDA government must shed its hesitancy to undertake concrete reforms desperately required in the defence arena, from right-sizing the 15-lakh strong armed forces and formulating a coherent national security strategy to boosting the private sector’s role in arms production and plugging critical operational military gaps through faster acquisitions.

The Modi government over the last five years did take several initiatives and incremental steps but largely balked at the kind of systemic transformation that was needed, with requisite follow-through, to overhaul the country’s entire defence establishment.

“The new Raksha Mantri (defence minister) should get cracking on several fronts…threats from China, Pakistan and hybrid warfare will remain major strategic challenges. Some work has already been done on finalising an overarching national security strategy,” said a top official. 

The armed forces certainly need more money to plug their critical shortages, ranging from fighters and helicopters to submarines and minesweepers, with only about 25% of the annual defence budget being left for modernisation due to the ballooning salary and pension bills. “The top priority is for the Army, Navy and IAF to achieve ammunition stocks for 10 days of intensive fighting. Some procurement for this `10 (I)’ are already underway,” said the official.

But the three Services also need to jettison their turf wars and move towards genuine integration and theatre commands to both save scarce resources as well as prepare themselves for technology-intensive futuristic wars. “If they do not agree, it must be rammed down from the top by the political leadership,” said another official.

The 12.3-lakh strong Army also needs to right-size by drastically slashing its non-operational flab to get the desired teeth-to-tail combat ratio. The blueprint is almost ready, with the first batch of reforms to flatten the Army headquarters in New Delhi already on the table for Cabinet approval.

Then, there are the larger reforms to transform the Army into a leaner and operationally versatile force, which will include manpower cuts of 1.5 lakh personnel over the next six-seven years to save Rs 6,000-7,000 crore annually in revenue expenditure, as was earlier reported by TOI.

Another area crying out for reform is the defence production one, with India continuing to languish in the strategically-vulnerable position of being the world’s largest arms importer. This will entail jolting the DRDO, Ordnance Factory Board, defence PSUs and shipyards out of their continuing slumber as well as encouraging the private sector to jump into defence production in a mission-mode manner.

But as is evident from the failure to kick-off any major “Make in India” defence project in the last five years as well as the much -touted “strategic partnership” policy, which was meant for the private sector but has been virtually usurped by the public sector, it will require a lot of political determination.

Then, of course, there is the pivotal reform of a chief of defence staff (CDS) post, still missing in action despite the GoM report after the 1999 Kargil conflict strongly recommending it. Subsequent commissions, including the Naresh Chandra Task Force in 2012 and the Lt-Gen DB Shekatkar Committee in 2016, also pitched for such a tri-Service chief, even though diluted versions of it. The time for change has come.