1/5/2023 0 Comments R insurgencyOur junior officers have shown remarkable courage and sense of responsibility in field operations. And tactically, maybe it can be called that. So a tense, fragile state of no war, no peace, barely held together by several divisions of troops is celebrated as a victory. Yet nations and armies continue to prepare, arm and organise themselves exactly along the lines of large scale pitched battles, while facing a dramatically different guerrilla warfare on the ground in Kashmir Valley. The classical war model of two or more nations pitting its military against each other is long passé. Or that the tactics of the ‘last war’ no longer hold relevance for the next one. The first is because they don’t even acknowledge that they are losing. Large nations lose small wars because of three reasons. Before them, the Soviet Union, which held more than a dozen nations in its iron grasp, could not subdue a ragtag of Afghan warlords who pushed back the mighty Soviet army with World War II weapons.Ĭloser home, the Indian armed forces, which routed nearly a 100,000 Pakistani troops and sliced Pakistan into two halves’ in 1971, has been struggling with insurgency in Kashmir for over two decades now. The mighty American army - which bludgeoned its way through German defences on D-Day, wrested Europe from the Nazi control and crushed the Third Reich - is haplessly embroiled in Afghanistan. This manifests itself in a classic paradox nations with large armies lose small wars. The old military proverb that “Generals fight the last war” illustrates a common trap of strategic thinking – the propensity of expending energy on past battles, instead of reorganising for new challenges.
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