India’s military brass will gather in Lucknow on September 4th and 5th for a rare collective brainstorming outside the conventional meeting point under the rubric of the Unified Commanders Conference, which traditionally takes place every two years to brief the Prime Minister. Next month’s confabulation, to be presided over by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, is being described as the Joint Commanders Conference.
Besides Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) Gen Anil Chauhan, all Service Chiefs, Air Chief Marshal VR Chaudhari, Admiral Dinesh K. Tripathi and General Upendra Dwivedi, all 17 Commanders-in-Chief across the three Services and Heads of the two tri-services formations – the Andaman and Nicobar Command and the Strategic Forces Command – will be in attendance, military sources said. They are expected to be joined by the Defence Secretary, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) Chairman, and a host of senior functionaries in the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
The primary objective behind the conference is to present the progress made in the efforts to introduce far-reaching reforms in India’s higher defence management, which were initiated in January 2020, when India’s first Chief of Defence Staff was appointed, and the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) was created.
In nearly two years since he succeeded India’s first CDS Gen Bipin Rawat, current CDS Gen Anil Chauhan and the three Service Chiefs have hammered out the first draft—a ‘basic document’ to achieve jointness and integration of the three services. The three Services have taken baby steps to implement some of the easier changes in preparation for the eventual formation of joint theatre commands meant to increase the combat effectiveness of the Indian military in the ever-changing global scenario and meet myriad security challenges in uncertain times head-on.
Two extensive briefings have also been carried out by the CDS and his Service chief colleagues to Defence Minister Singh and National Security Adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval separately over the past two months. During the discussions, it was apparently felt that wider consultations and more inputs may be necessary to seal the final plan. The Lucknow Conference is aimed not only to bring in the rest of the military leadership on board but also to brainstorm to fine-tune the structure for theatre commands and to arrive at a realistic timeline for rolling them out.
Top Commanders across the three services used to gather every two years to confer amongst themselves and receive higher directions from the Prime Minister under the arrangement of the Unified Commanders Conference. However, two years was felt to be a long gap for the military brass not to meet collectively. Therefore, the new mechanism of the Joint Commanders Conference has been initiated.
As is well known by now, there is a near-consensus on creating three joint commands—a Northern Theatre Command, a Western Theatre Command, and a Maritime Theatre Command—for the Indian military to be future-ready and combat-effective. Many preparatory steps have been taken in the past 20 months to give these formations the necessary legal and constitutional teeth, but much work remains to be finalised for their total implementation.
Nitin A. Gokhale
