by Abhijit Iyer-Mitra

The Supreme Court’s judgement forcing the military to incorporate women, while salutary from a gender perspective, is deeply problematic operationally. Primarily because this reinforces India’s inability to organically develop legal positions based on ground reality. Rather we cut and paste anthropologically inappropriate solutions from the West onto a situation that can’t absorb them with calamitous consequences later on.

In the West there has been two main enablers of women getting full parity in the military. The first has been technology and the nature of war; the second and related to the first, has been a resolute focus on the human being — especially CSAR (combat search and rescue) of stranded troops.

As the then German Defence Minister Ursula Von Der Leyen (Now President of the European Union) — herself a pioneer of women's representation in the military — said in New Delhi at an event hosted by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) on June 16, 2015, “the only difference between men and women is sheer physical strength, otherwise, women bring a whole different perspective and different solutions to any combat situation”. In practical terms Von Der Leyen is referring to studies that seem to suggest a particularly interesting trend: that women have an oblique approach to achieving desired outcomes. This is particularly relevant to modern combat which focuses not on ‘bravery’ (which usually leads to disasters like the charge of the light brigade) but rather on achieving objectives with the least possible casualties.

Now let’s see how this intersects with modern combat.

The West has decisively moved away from actual physical combat, preferring an air-centric model, which emphasises long distance, stand-off fighting. This of course has been a traditional balancing act starting from arrows versus swords to long spears and pikes versus swords.Today, as has been seen in the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars, planes go in and remove and obstacles to ground forces. In short, ground forces have much reduced fighting to do. Even here the driver of combat is no longer sheer brute force, but intelligence. Knowing where ones enemy is coming from, what they intend to do, how much damage you've inflicted on them and where to hit next.

These are the determinants of victory and these, in fact, skew the equation in favour of women, given their ability to pick up on subtle changes, multi-task and fuse information mentally. In short, in a western combat paradigm, giving women parity is not just a convenient token of gender equality, it is a critical operational imperative that significantly improves the probability of success.

Contrast this with India, where intel and information management play a minimal role, we still rely on ground-centric warfare that results in heavy casualties and frequently require sheer brute physical strength (which as the German defence minister said is the only disadvantage that women face vis-à-vis men). For example, we are yet to get solid evidence of damage caused to the Balakot terror complex; we were taken by surprise the next day by the Pakistani counter attack; we still rely on ground forces for most of our combat (Balakot being the first exception) which required direct contact with the enemy; and finally during Kargil, our troops were forced to charge uphill with dreadful casualties and were made to drag enormously heavy equipment such as the FH-77B Bofors howitzers to heights. In short, we neither prioritise intelligent and information warfare paradigms where women shine, and depend heavily on physical strength where the German Defence Minister pointed out women are at a disadvantage.

The next big development has been the evolution of Western CSAR to the point that few if any pilots shot down are ever captured.

The consequences of capture by Islamic State are of course too graphic to describe but can be gauged from what was done to Muath Al Kasasbeh, a Jordanian Pilot captured by ISIS and Hevrin Khalaf, a female Kurdish councillor, captured by Turkey's Al Qaeda allies. Needless to say Pakistan and its proxies have done much the same to captured Indian troops as can be seen with Captain Saurabh Kalia.

It was exactly these developments in CSAR, which have come about because it is the human that is prioritised (and not the plane that the human flies) that allowed the UAE to send in female fighter pilots in anti-ISIS operations. The main enabler of the UAE decision was that it fought as part of a western coalition with advanced CSAR capabilities. Sadly, being a low human development country, India still prioritises expensive platforms over the humans that operate them, and who are deemed disposable.

To sum up, India's war fighting does not meet the western standards that have empowered women. To transpose a western paradigm onto what is essentially an obsolescent, pre-industrial military will have significant consequences down the line.