War of Words: Making Sense of TV News & Military Jargon amid Indo-Pak Tensions

Much of India’s broadcast news has been serving both gibberish and doggerel for the past few years. The present crisis between India and Pakistan is enabling them to be even more creative: AI-generated fighter aircraft, armed drones, Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAV), Loitering Munitions (LM), battle tanks, and warships are all roaring onto the screens of the viewers. All this while unleashing an entirely new lexicon. In today's tense climate, military reporting courtesy these TV news channels is witnessing a proliferation of attention-grabbing jargon on military, national security, and strategy-related issues. Fake News May be a National Security Threat – 1965 War Is ProofWarfare, which was initially land-bound, gradually began to be conducted in many other domains — seas, electronic medium, air, sub-seas, digital, cyber, and space. However, since inception, at the elemental level, warfare has always comprised two elements, viz, the killing/destruction, and the psychological and/or disruptive campaigns. Even in contemporary times, the killing/destruction is still conducted through kinetic means; whereas cyber warfare, information manipulation, economic disruption, psychological operations, and space operations (as of now) stand labelled as non-kinetic warfare (although cyber tools like Stuxnet can also cause destruction).The joint press conference of the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of External Affairs in the past few days have mentioned India using kinetic and non-kinetic methods as part of the strategy against Pakistan at present.Terrorism, a cheaper form of waging war since times immemorial, has in recent decades, oft been included in the genus of irregular (typically between state and non-state), asymmetric (typically between disproportionate parties) or hybrid (mix of traditional and non-traditional tactics) warfare. The fact, however, is that there is nothing called “irregular warfare”. Considering the brutally violent nature of war, nations don’t set out to wage a “regular war” or an “irregular war” — they just opt for war and all that it entails, with the strategic circumstances dictating the mode(s) of warfare.Moreover, shorn of political correctness, terrorism is just another form of warfare. If one thinks that it is just acts of terrorism that can terrorise people, then they may try out full-scale warfare, or just ask countries which have seen full-scale wars (Russia, Korea, Vietnam, Syria, etc), and assess which is more terrifying for the one facing it.India's Response to Pahalgam Attack May Usher Age of 'Modi Doctrine'The concept of an ‘escalation ladder’, a framework outlining 44 rungs, from ‘ostensible crisis’ to diplomatic posturing to full-scale war including potential nuclear conflict, was propounded in 1965 by nuclear war theorist Herman Kahn in order to introduce a more structured way to envision how wars may progress.The ongoing Indo-Pak conflict has quickly progressed from Kahn’s Stage I of ‘ostensible crisis’ (India pinning the massacre to alleged Pakistan-assisted terrorists) to ‘political, economic, and diplomatic gestures’ (suspension of Indus Waters Treaty, expelling of Pakistani diplomats, and closing of Indian airspace). It then moved on to Stage III, of, ‘solemn and formal declarations’ (‘to pursue the terrorists’) came next, and then to Stage IX, ‘dramatic military confrontation' (precision strikes on nine terrorist locations). The latter impelled Pakistani retaliation, which is well-below Kahn’s Stage XV and XVI, ie, ‘barely nuclear war’ and ‘nuclear ultimatums’, though it seems to be inching up.As would be evident from the ongoing crisis, the notion of 'Controlled Escalation' is misconceived, as many nations, particularly Pakistan, have developed capabilities (for example, irregular operations at the lowest end of the spectrum) to sidestep, rather than match their adversaries step-by-step — which means there’s no clear space to stop escalation at a point where both sides are politically satisfied by each’s operations.A classic example was after Operation Parakaram (2001) when India developed the Cold Start doctrine aimed at enabling punitive strikes into Pakistan while keeping the scale of the conflict limited enough to deny Pakistan justification to escalate. But, in 2011, Pakistan responded by operationalising a short-range-nuclear-capable-missile, ‘Nasr’, a short-range-nuclear-capable-missile it threatens to use even on its own territory against ‘intruding forces’, thereby introduced a nuclear step lower on the ladder.This escalation ladder is also heavily influenced by today’s information and social media environment, with rumours, public emotions/hysteria and associated political compulsions at times driving leaders to skip a few stages.In sum: the escalation ladder is not immaculate, which adversaries can adroitly and confidently clamber up-and-down in a rational environment. Instead, in the Indo-Pakistan context, where conventional forces asymmetry is not very large, there is always this risk of inadvertent escalation once shots are fired, as there is no way for the initiating side to legislate how the other side will respond.'Operation Sindoor': India’s Cross-Border Message Is Loud and CalculatedThis is the ability of one side to be able to control the escalation process and escalate/de-escalate to one’s advantage. 'Escalation Dominance' is possible only when one side enjoys overwhelming conventional forces superiority, and hence can dictate terms right from the onset, and importantly, when the other side is not a nuclear weapons state.Given the overall size of our armed forces and commitments on different fronts, with defence being a stronger form of war and offensive options requiring larger numbers, India may find it hard to fully dominate the escalation ladder against Pakistan.Insofar as nuclear weapons (nukes) are concerned, it’s conventionally the inferior powers who have usually threatened use of nukes in order to deter stronger adversaries.Since the damage nukes can inflict is simply too great and horrible to allow for their use as a credible weapon, nuclear deterrence is fundamentally a defensive strategy for deterring an attack. In nuclear deterrence theory, if there’s perfect stability at nuclear level between two nuclear armed nations, then there is scope for instability at conventional level (ie, conventional wars can be fought); but if there’s instability at nuclear level (ie, fear of First Use/escalation, as Pakistan often threatens), it will tend to enforce stability at conventional levels (ie, fear that a conventional war will escalate to nuclear levels). The prospects for nuclear stability are further clouded by the fact that Pakistan’s nukes are controlled by its military – and a mismatch of perceptions of what India constitutes as ‘limited action’ could sow seeds of escalation, particularly in view of Pakistan's linear shape/limited strategic depth and associated fear of being overwhelmed quickly. Besides, Pakistan would perhaps prefer a quick escalation to a level where the threat of nuclear war looms, and the international community is forced to intervene.An associated issue: if escalation happens, can there be any real winners in a war between contiguous nations even though India’s armed forces are large, well-equipped-and-well-trained?No. Unless the conventional forces asymmetry is several orders higher, both sides will sustain damage to their infrastructure and economy. Besides, developed countries tend to suffer more—just compare Afghanistan (embroiled in fighting since 1979) and Ukraine. Imagine the effect on a populace in a developed city if just the electrical grid, water supply, and sewage pumping are hit.Classically, de-escalation—the opposite of escalation—involves progressively decreasing the intensity and scope of a conflict through actions like strategic communication, diplomacy, curtailing escalation, military disengagement, and so on. True de-escalation requires visible, verifiable, near-simultaneous steps down Kahn’s ladder.However, Russia has a gravely different version of ‘de-escalation’. Post-break-up of the USSR (1991), President Vladimir Putin, faced with NATO’s RMA-enabled military and US interference in Chechnya, issued a new nuclear doctrine in October 2004, which at a conceptual level, borrowed from Thomas Schelling’s seminal books entitled The Strategy of Conflict (1960) and Arms and Influence (1966). This doctrine postulated two missions for Russia’s nuclear weapons, viz, deterrence of a large-scale conventional attack against Russia; but if that attack happened and exceeded Russia’s capacity for defence, then respond with a limited nuclear strike in order to ‘motivate’ the adversary to ‘de-escalate’ the conflict. Importantly, Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine borrows heavily from this Russian doctrine.Both nations face a conventional forces asymmetry, aim to avert war by holding out the threat of “tailored damage” to an adversary through use of nuclear weapons, and thereby “de-escalate” the conflict by making an aggressor weigh the cost he will suffer versus the strategic benefit he may derive from that conflict.'Operation Sindoor' May Halt the War Frenzy But Not For LongThis term has its origins in road infrastructure, i.e., off-ramps which connect an interstate highway to a smaller, local or rural road. Metaphorically, it implies a chance for a leader to change his mind about the path they are on, and out of a bad situation into one which’s acceptable.Used by US politicians, it was popularised by former US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, “The US had sought to provide off-ramps to Putin, but every time… he's pressed the accelerator and continued down this horrific road”.In 2009, General Stanley A McChrystal, then commander of US-NATO forces in Afghanistan, when shown a PowerPoint slide meant to portray the complexity of US military strategy but which looked more like a bowl of spaghetti, remarked wryly, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war”.The buzzwords situation is similar to intellectual spaghetti — pretentious vocabulary and complex gobbledygook leave many none the wiser, and put-off the discerning ones.Just as war and its methods are transforming and evolving, it’s also ushering in a whole new lexicon, but which pays sparse attention to logic or military history. Put simply, the discussion about conflict is being conducted using the equivalent of what could be messages on the back of many Indian trucks. While some justify these buzzwords on grounds that ‘warfare is changing’, the reality is that contemporary warfare is no more complex than historical warfare (as the job of technology is to make things easier), and nothing of strategic substance has changed in the Thucydidean and Clausewitzian nature of war, or the aims and objective of its modern practice.(Kuldip Singh is a retired Brigadier from the Indian Army. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

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As India-Pakistan Remain Tense, a Guide to Decoding the War of Words

Attention-grabbing jargon on military, national security & strategic issues is the new normal of military reporting.

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