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Editor’s Note
Can India afford multiple theatre commands before it has adequately equipped even one integrated theatre? Air Marshal R Nambiar (Retd) challenges Gen Shivane’s sequencing, arguing that scarce combat assets should not be fragmented into geographic silos. He calls for a stronger focus on force modernisation, jointness and national power before expanding the command architecture.
Lt Gen AB Shivane’s plea for careful sequencing of Integrated Theatre Commands is well-intentioned and professionally sound on its own terms. Yet it proceeds from a faulty premise that India can ill afford at present. The claim that multiple geographic theatre commands are both inevitable and desirable is logically flawed, given the severe shortage of vital air-power assets.
A closer look at resources, economics, and the actual character of recent operations suggests revisiting dogmatic utterances claiming that theatreisation would be the magical panacea for all the problems that ail our defence forces.
India has air assets and budgetary bandwidth essentially sufficient for one theatre – the India theatre. Grandiose multi-theatre constructs, however elegantly sequenced, risk becoming expensive organisational theatre at a time when the nation must first put its economic house in order and raise the living standards of its people.
India’s nominal GDP per capita stands at roughly $2,800 according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) World Economic Outlook (April 2026) projections. That places the country firmly in the lower quartile of global rankings, in the company of several sub-Saharan African nations. Hundreds of millions of Indians still struggle with basic nutrition, education, healthcare and employment. Defence spending, even after recent increases, hovers around 2 per cent of GDP.
Within that constrained envelope, the Indian Air Force operates with 31 squadrons against a long-stated requirement of 42. Critical capabilities -modern fighters, airborne early warning, mid-air refuelling and long-range precision munitions – remain severely short.
To carve limited air assets into permanent geographic parcels under separate theatre commanders is to dilute the one advantage air power possesses: flexibility and the ability to concentrate force rapidly across axes.
A nation that cannot yet equip a single cohesive air arm adequately has no business designing elaborate multi-theatre architectures that presume abundance.
The strategic logic advanced for theatre commands – unity of command, optimised resource use and preparedness for two-front contingencies – is attractive only on paper. In practice, it collides with hard arithmetic.
One reason advanced by so-called pundits of defence reforms is that China has theatreised, so we should do so too; however, they fail to mention that the Chinese Western Theatre alone is larger than India itself and is backed by vastly superior resources, infrastructure, and industrial depth.
Also Read Lt Gen AB Shivane Article : The Architecture of Change: Sequencing India’s Transition to Integrated Theatre Commands
China’s military expenditure dwarfs India’s; Pakistan’s force structure, though smaller, is optimised for its western front. India cannot simultaneously match either adversary in high-intensity theatres with its current inventories.
Recent operations reinforce the point. Balakot and Operation Sindoor demonstrated stand-off strike, layered air defence and information management. They did not, however, showcase seamless joint theatre-level campaigns of the kind multi-command architectures are meant to enable.
Success rested more on political direction, intelligence fusion, diplomatic management, and the calibrated use of limited assets than on a redesign of geographic command. The lessons point less towards fragmenting scarce resources into theatres and more towards a genuine whole-of-nation approach that integrates military, economic, technological, diplomatic and societal instruments under clear national priorities.
A whole-of-nation approach does not begin with redrawing command boundaries. It begins with a National Security Strategy that forces hard trade-offs: western border versus northern border, continental posture versus maritime investment, self-reliance versus immediate readiness. Without such a strategy, organisational reform becomes an exercise in rearranging the same constrained resources.
Theatre commands without joint doctrine, interoperable networks, common logistics and adequate platforms merely create new headquarters that consume staff and attention while the capability gaps remain.
The “valley of transition” that Gen Shivane rightly warns against is not merely organisational turbulence; it is the opportunity cost of diverting scarce political capital, bureaucratic bandwidth and financial resources into structural change when those same resources are needed for capability accretion, indigenous production and economic growth.
Theatre commands, in India’s present circumstances, risk becoming a waste of resources for several additional reasons. They generate extra layers of headquarters, staff appointments and supporting infrastructure without adding a single extra aircraft, ship or artillery piece.
Skilled officers and specialists – already in short supply – are pulled from operational units into new bureaucratic posts, reducing rather than enhancing combat readiness.
Parallel communications networks, logistics chains and intelligence fusion centres must be built or duplicated, consuming capital that could instead be used to buy platforms or munitions.
The transition itself creates periods of command ambiguity and inter-service friction that adversaries can exploit, while the promised efficiency gains remain theoretical until the force structure itself is quantitatively adequate.
Historical experience within India shows the pattern clearly: formations such as the Mountain Strike Corps were raised with genuine intent, yet the joint architecture, logistics depth and enabling air support that would have given them decisive effect were never fully realised. Multiplying theatres before closing these foundational gaps simply multiplies the same shortfall across more organisational boxes.
The argument that reform and readiness must proceed simultaneously is seductive but incomplete. Readiness today depends far more on filling squadron shortfalls, modernising the Army’s firepower and mobility, expanding naval presence in the Indian Ocean, and building resilient supply chains than on the precise shape of the command organogram. Personnel policies, joint training and digital backbones are necessary, yet they will deliver limited returns if the underlying force structure remains quantitatively and qualitatively inadequate.
A pilot maritime theatre may appear low-risk, but even that experiment will demand staff, communications infrastructure and resource-allocation mechanisms that compete with more urgent modernisation priorities.
There is also a bigger institutional risk. Decades of ACR-driven conformity and single-service pipelines have produced capable commanders but limited strategic candour. Pushing theatreisation as the defining reform of this decade risks repeating the pattern of announcing structures without the enabling architecture. Until India closes the gap between declared intent and actual capacity, further organisational complexity will amplify rather than resolve existing frictions.
None of this is an argument for permanent stasis. Jointness must deepen. Service-centric silos that impede multi-domain operations must be broken. Professional military education needs an overhaul so that officers think beyond their parent service. A Joint Services Act that clarifies operational command authority is overdue.
These are real and necessary tasks. They do not, however, require the creation of multiple geographic theatre commands as the centrepiece of reform. The wiser sequence is the reverse of what is often proposed: first expand the resource base through sustained economic growth and targeted capability development; then, from a position of greater strength, design command structures that the force can actually sustain.
India’s primary strategic task remains the creation of national power -economic, technological and social – that underwrites military effectiveness. A country whose average citizen lives on an income comparable to that of the poorer nations of the world cannot pretend to the force-structure luxury of richer powers.
Theatre commands look modern and purposeful. They may eventually prove useful. At present they represent a distraction from the harder, less glamorous work of building the platforms, the industrial base, the logistics depth and the societal resilience that any future conflict will demand.
Foolish dreams based on grandiose thoughts need to be put on the back burner until the economy is placed on a firmer footing and the average Indian’s standard of living is lifted out of the lower quartile.
The destination of greater jointness is not in dispute. The path that prioritises organisational form over substantive capacity is. India must first ensure it has the air assets, the budget and the national strength for one coherent theatre – the defence of India itself – before it multiplies headquarters in the hope that structure will somehow magically conjure up capability. In the end, our adversaries will respect combat power far more than the elegance of our command charts.
Air Marshal R Nambiar (Retd), Former C-in-C of Western Air Command
