Keywords: Theaterisation, Theatre Command, Jointness, Kargil Review Committee (KRC), Op Sindoor, National Defence Academy (NDA), Defence Services Staff College (DSSC), Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Goldwater–Nichols Act

Introduction

The first part of this discussion looked at why jointness matters — the habits and mindsets that must precede structure. This part turns to how those ideas might evolve in practice. Having observed the Air Force’s journey from both maritime and joint vantage points, I find its caution doctrinally sound — not defensive, but disciplined. What appears to some as resistance is, in fact, professional logic: the instinct to preserve flexibility, unity, and clarity of command as one enters significant efforts at integration. Understanding why the Indian Air Force (IAF) thinks as it does is essential before judging what must change — and how the Service can, in fact, lead the process.

The Air Force Perspective

The IAF’s position is rooted in doctrine, not defensiveness. Indeed, air power is, by design, a single, flexible national instrument. Aircraft and sensors can shift across fronts within hours, concentrating effect where it matters most. Dividing those assets among multiple theatre commanders could fragment effort and dilute unity. Command of the air, therefore, must remain a national responsibility.

Such caution reflects professional discipline. Air power thrives on agility, but agility depends on coherence. As Brigadier General J. D. Hittle observed in The Military Staff: Its History and Development, the true strength of command lies in firm direction from the top combined with initiative at every level.[1] Centralised planning and decentralised execution remain the bedrock of effective operations.

Recent Air Chiefs have consistently urged that doctrine, networks, and training must come before structure.[2] That sequence is sound. It reminds policymakers that integration should enhance agility, not erase it. From my own experience in joint planning environments, this emphasis on sequencing is professional caution rooted in operational realism.

Historical Models of Balance

History offers lessons in how strong commanders and strong staffs can rationalise the contradictions that are the military.

South East Asia Command (SEAC): Admiral Lord Mountbatten relied on his Chiefs of Staff — Brigadier Francis Festing and later Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Browning — to knit together Army, Navy, and Air operations across a vast, under-resourced theatre. As Arthur J. Marder notes in Old Friends, New Enemies: The Pacific War 1942–1945, even Admiral Lord Mountbatten’s clashes with Admiral Sir James Somerville showed that shared Service identity cannot replace structured oversight.[3]

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF): In Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder turned coordination into unity. Drawing on lessons from the Middle East, Tedder urged a unified air command and direct access for ground commanders to call air support.[4] It was this blend of central planning and frontline flexibility that made SHAEF an exemplar of joint command.

Patton and Weyland: The partnership between General George Patton’s Third Army and Brigadier General Otto Weyland’s XIX Tactical Air Command demonstrated real jointness. Their staff shared maps, radios, and urgency. As David N. Spires notes in Air Power for Patton’s Army, their effectiveness came from shared education, mutual trust, and a clear divide between central planning and decentralised execution.[5]

Montgomery and de Guingand: General Bernard Montgomery’s close partnership with his Chief of Staff, Major General Francis de Guingand, showed how command and dissent can coexist productively. De Guingand tested assumptions, filtered information, and ensured that plans aligned with the commander’s intent — precisely the role envisaged by Scharnhorst and Moltke, two military geniuses who offer many lessons two centuries later.[6]

From these cases flows a consistent truth: empowered staff strengthen, rather than weaken, command.

The Modern Staff Logic

As Charles Edward White notes in The Enlightened Soldier, Scharnhorst conceived of the General Staff as “a system of brains” — a collective intellect designed to ensure that strategy was tested by logic rather than driven by personality. Scharnhorst created the General Staff as a professional counterweight to command officers trained to test plans, challenge assumptions, and ensure that decisions followed logic, not impulse.[7] Moltke refined this idea: staff officers were to think, not just assist, and to exercise independent responsibility within the commander’s intent.[8] This institutionalised professional dissent makes it a form of discipline rather than disobedience.

Institutional Balance through Staff Design

For the Indian Air Force — operating alongside an Army of far greater size and presence — balance must come from institutional design, not numerical equivalence. Mass cannot be matched, but structure can offset scale. The Prussian reformers Scharnhorst and Moltke demonstrated that intellect could compensate for numbers: a “system of brains” where analysis, critique, and command coexisted in productive tension.

India can adapt that principle through a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) supported by an empowered Vice Chief of Defence Staff (VCDS). The CDS–VCDS axis could serve as an institutional counterweight — one focused on direction, the other on disciplined dissent — ensuring that strategy benefits from dialogue, not deference. For the IAF, this balance may be necessary to preserve its culture of procedural precision and doctrinal clarity within a joint framework that values questioning as much as compliance.

The Commonwealth Legacy and Its Limits

The Indian military did not inherit the Prussian model; it inherited the British one — efficient, orderly, but wary of internal debate. In Britain (and in colonial India), aristocrats and senior officers long commanded not just with strategy but with rank and class, treating staff as advisers rather than partners.

At Waterloo, Prussian liaison to the headquarters of Wellington General von Müffling urged two British commanders to seize a fleeting opportunity against Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. Both agreed, but refused to act without written orders, fearing court-martial if they did. Wellington later confirmed that such an initiative would indeed have been punished. It was a system built on control, not trust.[9]

That instinct would carry into the Royal Air Force (RAF) through its Army lineages, and from there to the Indian Air Force. The RAF headquarters were organised by functional branches — operations, plans, maintenance, and administration — without a system of an empowered Chief of Staff. The design delivered efficiency but discouraged institutional challenge. The IAF inherited this form almost intact: precise, methodical, and professional, yet inclined toward compliance rather than contest.

Managing Large Air Formations vs All-Domain Forces

The IAF’s centralised command model is highly effective within the air domain. Large formations drawn from different bases can be tasked as a single instrument, with tight vertical control ensuring precision and responsiveness. From personal experience, such centralisation works superbly in air operations, where speed and concentration are decisive.

But managing an all-domain force is a different challenge. Air operations shift in hours; land and maritime campaigns unfold over days; cyber and space effects operate on entirely different temporal scales. A Commander responsible for land, sea, air, cyber, and space must orchestrate effects, not simply allocate sorties. That requires a lateral staff structure where domain specialists plan together, share data, and challenge each other’s assumptions in real time.

Air component planning thrives on centralisation; joint command thrives on collaboration. The task before the IAF is not to abandon its precision but to extend it — to translate air-power discipline into a joint habit of dialogue and co-design. Only when staff from every Service can think, argue, and decide together will India’s theatre commands move from intent to effect.

From Coordination to Command

The relationship between command and staff is, as noted earlier, not just structural but also symbolic. Rank conveys authority, but how command interacts with staff reveals the maturity of that authority. Before the Ajai Vikram Singh Committee reforms, hierarchy made this distinction clear: the staff advised, command decided. After rank parity blurred those lines, the Army has notionally reintroduced clarity through distinct command and staff streams — reaffirming that direction, not designation, defines authority.

As India now attempts to design integrated commands, this semiotic balance becomes critical. Theatre commands will require staff who can question without overstepping, and commanders who can decide without silencing debate. That equilibrium — advice without rivalry, command without insularity — is what will turn integration from structure into strategy.

India’s reform journey — from the Kargil Review Committee (1999) to the Group of Ministers (2001), the Naresh Chandra Task Force (2012), and the Shekatkar Committee (2016) — culminated in the creation of the CDS and the Department of Military Affairs (2019). The Inter-Services Organisations (ISO) Act (2023) added a legal framework, but one primarily administrative; it governs people and discipline, not missions or operational direction.

Five years on, we have coordination without command. Authority is dispersed among four coequal Chiefs, leading to caution when decisiveness is required. Theatre Commanders remain three-star officers, junior to the four-star Service Chiefs whose forces they must lead. In a hierarchy-sensitive military, this imbalance weakens confidence and clouds authority.[10]

The Goldwater–Nichols Act (1986) in the United States resolved the same issue by raising theatre commanders to four-star parity, aligning rank, responsibility, and remit. India can learn from the logic of that Act— consistent with the Commanders-in-Chief (Change in Designation) Act (1955)[11] — without creating a politically sensitive “supreme commander.” Aligning rank, responsibility, and remit is not cosmetic; it is the foundation of credible command.

Toward a Balanced Joint System

There are glimpses of what this could look like. Air Marshal K. K. “Timmy” Nohwar’s tenure as Chief of Staff at the Andaman and Nicobar Command — the only time an Air Officer has held that post — proved that when officers step outside Service silos, the quality of joint planning improves. This is as told to me by his Commander-in-Chief, Andaman and Nicobar Command (CINCAN).

Building on such precedent, India could:

(a)         Get the post of CDS, like so much else in defence reform, to be rotational. Jointness isn’t rocket science — it’s just common sense, applied consistently.

(b)          Appoint a four-star VCDS from another Service as the CDS’s counter-ego, safeguarding diversity of perspective;

(c)         Transform HQ IDS from a coordinating secretariat into a Joint Staff HQ, the analytical and doctrinal core;

(d)         Legally distinguish Administrative Control (ADCON) from Operational Control (OPCON);

(e)       Create a Permanent Joint Operations HQ under the CDS with regional hubs (pilot projects could be a maritime command and possibly the Central Command);

(f)     Establish a Joint Operations Fund, ring-fenced under parliamentary oversight, to finance ISR, cyber, logistics, and training, gradually pooling Service budgets.

Such steps would shift reform from paperwork to purpose — where law provides the foundation, structure provides direction, and funding provides the muscle.

Conclusion — From Clarity to Coherence

As a person who has pushed Critical Thinking from about 2015 till recently at the faculty and students of DSSC, Wing Commander Raja’s work is valuable in helping restore factual clarity to a debate too often clouded by sentiment. But clarity is only the beginning. Five years after creating the CDS, we still have coordination without command — structure without synthesis.

For jointness to mature, India must separate ADCON from OPCON, build a permanent operational core, align rank with responsibility, and embed joint education early in Service careers.  The IAF, with its tradition of disciplined planning and mission precision, is best placed to lead this evolution.  If it can carry its internal coherence into the joint arena, India’s Armed Forces will move decisively — from coordination to command, and from clarity to coherence.

*****

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Notes:-

[1] J. D. Hittle, The Military Staff: Its History and Development (Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1961; Kindle ed.), p. 2.

[2] Air Chief Marshal A. P. Singh, remarks at Ran Samvaad, Mhow, August 2025.

[3] Arthur J. Marder, Old Friends, New Enemies: The Pacific War 1942–45 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

[4] Stephen E. Ambrose, The Supreme Commander (New York: Doubleday, 1970).

[5] David N. Spires, Air Power for Patton‘s Army (Washington, DC: USAF History and Museums Program, 2002).

[6] Francis de Guingand, Operation Victory (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947); Nigel Hamilton, Monty: The Making of a General 1887–1942 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981).

[7] Charles Edward White, The Enlightened Soldier: Scharnhorst and the Militärische Gesellschaft in Berlin, 1801–1805 (New York: Praeger, 1989; Kindle edition).

[8] Helmuth von Moltke, Moltke on the Art of War: Selected Writings, ed. Daniel J. Hughes (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1993; Kindle edition).

[9]White, n. 7.

[10] Sudhir Pillai, “Theaterisation Reform Is Stuck on Ranks and Roles — India’s Military Needs Clarity,” The Print,  September 25, 2025, https://theprint.in/opinion/theaterisation-reform-is-stuck-on-ranks-and-roles-india-military/2750307/. Accessed on October 27, 2025.

[11] Ministry of Law, Government of India, “The Commanders-in-Chief (Change in Designation) Act, 1955. Act No. 19 of 1955,”   May 03, 1955,  https://www.indiacode.nic.in/repealedfileopen?rfilename=A1955-19.pdf. Accessed on October 28, 2025.

The post From History to Myths — A Naval Officer’s Dialogue Part II: From Coordination to Command — Designing India’s Joint Future appeared first on CAPSS India.

Keywords: Theaterisation, Theatre Command, Jointness, Kargil Review Committee (KRC), Op Sindoor, National Defence Academy (NDA), Defence Services Staff College (DSSC), Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Goldwater–Nichols Act

Setting the Stage

Among the many contributions to India’s debate on jointness are two essays on the Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies (CAPSS) portal by Wing Commander A. Pichipoo Raja. His earlier piece, “Revisiting the Eight-Decade History of Indian Jointness: Drawing the Right Lessons from Op Sindoor,” [1] traced the evolution of India’s inter-service integration. His later article, “08 Myths in Indian Debates on the Theatre Command,”[2] builds on that foundation—trying to bring discipline to a discussion that has often been shaped more by sentiment than by evidence.

Both essays mark a welcome maturity in professional debate and, in an oblique way, remind us that the Air Force’s caution is often misread. What some see as reluctance is, in truth, doctrinal logic: a concern for coherence, unity, and agility. Before judging what needs to change, it is essential to understand why the Indian Air Force (IAF) thinks as it does—and how it could, in fact, lead India’s transition to genuine jointness.

Early Roots of Jointness

In his first of the two articles referred to here, Wing Commander Raja suggests that the idea of theaterisation arose to address India’s “lack of jointness,” tracing its roots to 1944, when he links the origins of jointness to the founding story of the National Defence Academy (NDA), using the Sudan Block donation as a symbolic anchor. That is partly right, though the deeper roots lie in Britain’s wartime experience.

The campaigns of 1939–45 showed how badly the Services faltered when they operated in silos. The setbacks in France, North Africa, Greece, and the Far East were not just tactical defeats—they were failures of coordination between the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Only after repeated reverses did joint planning and staff education become central to success. By the time of Normandy and Burma, integration had matured: General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Europe and Admiral Lord Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command demonstrated how air-land-sea cooperation, properly institutionalised, could turn friction into synergy.

As an alumnus of the NDA, I still remember quiet Sunday mornings spent in the library after breakfast—hours lost in military history that gave us our first authentic taste of joint thinking. Has that early exposure in jointness at the NDA fully percolated to the echelons of the Indian Military?

The DSSC and Its Limits

India established the Defence Services Staff College (DSSC) at Wellington even before the National Defence Academy (NDA) came up at Khadakwasla. Its core focus, however, has mainly remained single-service — given the Army’s central role under an Army Commandant and its mission, much like Quetta before it, to prepare junior staff officers for mid-level formations.

This was not for lack of vision. The second Commandant, Major General W. D. A. Lentaigne, had to take it up with the then Governor-General, Admiral Lord Mountbatten, to convince the Defence Minister that the new college had to be tri-Service — a move the Army initially resisted but one that made DSSC India’s first real step toward integrated professional education.[3]

Over time, DSSC has evolved into a respected postgraduate, mid-career institution, yet its joint curriculum remains more a conversation than a culture. General Lentaigne himself once remarked, “I only wish the Army could cut down its syllabus and also get more time for research and discussion.”[4] The college’s history notes that as Army subjects multiplied, the Naval and Air Wings pressed for greater combined and joint instruction to balance their programmes.

It is not the aim of this submission to get into the subtleties of words used, like training and education, but readers would benefit if they read through the author’s writings on the subject.[5]

Personal Ties and Professional Distance

Wing Commander Raja notes the personal bonds among recent Chiefs — NDA coursemates and Sainik School Rewa classmates — as examples of natural synergy. These connections are real, but they do not automatically create operational integration. If friendship alone could guarantee jointness, India would have achieved it long ago.

When the government accepted the Kargil Review Committee (KRC) and Group of Ministers’ (GoM) recommendations to establish the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), the three Chiefs then in office were all my own NDA contemporaries. Yet that did not by itself deliver integration. At the highest levels, professionalism outweighs personality. Structures, doctrine, and accountability—not nostalgia—bind the Services together.

I saw this clearly as Chief of Staff at the Andaman and Nicobar Command. One Commander-in-Chief and the Lieutenant Governor were, coincidentally, classmates at Sainik School Rewa—the very school Wing Commander Raja mentions. Yet their conduct was always defined by role, not relationship. Professional distance kept both focused on duty. Familiarity can ease communication, but it never substitutes for institutional design.

Revisiting the “Eight Myths”

Raja’s 08 Myths article aims to clear the fog that surrounds the theaterisation debates. It succeeds in re-centering the argument on evidence rather than emotion. But the real task is to link these “myths” to the broader history of reform—from the KRC and GoM to the Naresh Chandra Task Force and the Shekatkar Committee. Together, they form India’s official reform continuum. Once accepted in principle by the government, their recommendations gain directive weight even if implementation remains uneven.

Seen that way, the debate should not be about whose view prevails but about how to build common purpose. The aim here is not to impose a non-IAF perspective, but to offer, for an Air Force audience, a structured way forward—a method amid the noise.

Lessons from Kargil and Sindoor

Readers seeking a deeper anchor might look to my chapter “Lessons from the Andaman and Nicobar Command” in Force in Statecraft: An Indian Perspective. It recalls the winter of 1998–99, when Pakistan’s Operation Badr led to the Kargil War and to two separate Indian responses—Operation Vijay by the Army and Operation Safed Sagar by the Indian Air Force.[6]

As AVM Arjun Subramaniam notes, had the Army involved the IAF from day one, a single integrated plan could have exploited both Services’ strengths and covered their weaknesses. That insight remains strikingly relevant. Operation Sindoor again showed individual brilliance within each Service but exposed the absence of a unified design. The lesson from Kargil and Sindoor alike is not about our people or platforms, but about how we plan together. True jointness requires shared understanding, confidence, and a structure that aligns authority with purpose.[7]

Myths and Realities of Reform

Wing Commander Raja’s effort to separate fact from belief is valuable, but facts must be translated into design. Major General Alok Deb makes this point in “Kargil and its Impact on India’s National Security.” [8] His reading of the KRC and GoM reports shows that, even if the term “theatre command” wasn’t used, the intent toward integration was clear. The committees’ reforms—the Integrated Defence Staff, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the Strategic Forces Command, and the Andaman & Nicobar Command—were all steps toward jointness. The CDS and the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) represent a significant political step that places the onus on the militaries to get their act together.

For a fuller view, readers should explore the Journal of Defence Studies special issue “National Security since Kargil,” which offers a 360-degree review of India’s progress two decades after the conflict.[9]

Raja is also correct that reform in India has evolved through context and experience, not declarations. Our path to jointness has been deliberate, incremental, and built through learning rather than slogans.

The claim that India’s jointness “problem” lacks empirical proof confuses the absence of audit with adequacy. Without a structured review, neither strengths nor gaps are known. India still lacks cross-service mechanisms to analyse operations collectively. Lessons remain trapped within individual Services and seldom shape doctrine or training. A Joint Operations Review Board (JORB) under the National Security Council Secretariat—or the CDS—could fill that gap, turning anecdote into evidence.  The Army’s Headquarters Army Training Command (HQ ARTRAC) has a Lessons Learnt system, but do we have a joint Lessons Learnt system?

Learning from Others

Raja’s reading of the United States (US) experience is broadly correct but incomplete. Unified Commands existed well before 1986; what the Goldwater–Nichols Act changed, as Gordon Nathaniel Lederman explains in Reorganizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Goldwater–Nichols Act of 1986, was alignment, not architecture.[10] The Act enforced clarity—who commands, who is accountable, and who advances for joint performance. It linked professional reward to joint competence and turned what had been an organisational chart into a living system.

The caution that theaterisation alone cannot deliver jointness is well-taken. Structures succeed only when supported by doctrine, education, and incentives. The lesson from abroad is not imitation but adaptation—building systems that fit our realities while preserving each Service’s ethos and aligning all to a common strategic purpose.

Beyond Structure

Theatre commands are meant to unify command—to bring planning, resources, and execution under one operational authority. That purpose is sound and long overdue. But unity of command is not the same as unity of purpose. Real jointness grows from shared education and professional incentives that make officers think and act as one, even when they wear different uniforms. Without that intellectual and doctrinal foundation, theatre commands risk becoming hollow frameworks—united in form but divided in spirit.

The final myth—that theaterisation is politically driven—needs nuance. In China, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) 2015 reforms certainly strengthened Party control, yet they also produced real operational integration.[11] Under Xi Jinping’s centralised leadership, structural change combined with a genuine “military intellectual revolution” born of debate, international study, and relentless field experimentation. Political will can push reform, but professional depth must sustain it.[12]

The Way Ahead

Taken together, these insights repair the record but leave open the core question: how do we turn factual clarity into functional reform?

If the first part of this debate has explained why jointness matters—the habits of thought, education, and incentives that must underpin reform—the next must ask how those principles can work in practice. Understanding the IAF’s reasoning is essential here. Before prescribing change, one must first appreciate the logic behind its caution: a perspective shaped not by reluctance, but by doctrine, experience, and operational prudence.

*****

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Notes:-

[1] A Pichipoo Raja, “Revisiting the Eight Decade History of Indian Jointness: Drawing the Right Lessons from Op Sindoor,” Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies (CAPSS), October 03, 2025, https://capssindia.org/revisiting-the-eight-decade-history-of-indian-jointness-drawing-the-right-lessons-from-op-sindoor/. Accessed on October 26, 2025.

[2]A Pichipoo Raja, “08 Myths in Indian Debates on the Theatre Command- A Ready Reckoner for the Pursuit of Informed Discussions,” Centre for Aerospace Power and Strategic Studies (CAPSS), October 10, 2025, https://capssindia.org/08-myths-in-indian-debates-on-the-theatre-command-a-ready-reckoner-for-the-pursuit-of-informed-discussions/. Accessed on October 26, 2025.

[3] R. D. Palsokar, A History of the Defence Services Staff College, Wellington (New Delhi: Natraj Publishers, 1997), pp. 56-58.

[4] Ibid., p. 90.

[5] For earlier discussions on this subject, see Sudhir Pillai, “Faculty at DSSC – A Necessity of Professional Military Education,” Trishul Journal 17, no. 2, Spring 2015; Sudhir Pillai, “Schooled to Think,” Force Magazine, January 2018; and Sudhir Pillai, “Change with Times: Indian Professional Military Education System Needs Urgent Reform,” Force Magazine, November 2020.

[6] Sudhir Pillai, “Lessons from the Andaman and Nicobar Command,” in Force in Statecraft: An Indian Perspective, ed. Arjun Subramaniam and Anil Chopra (New Delhi: National Defence College and KW Publishers, 2021), pp. 283–305.

[7] Ibid., p. 285.

[8] Alok Deb, “Kargil and Its Impact on India’s National Security,” Journal of Defence Studies, vol.13, no. 3, July–September 2019, Kargil and Its Impact on India’s National Security. Accessed on October 25, 2025.

[9] National Security Since Kargil, Journal of Defence Studies vol.13, no. 3, July–September 2019, Journal of Defence Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, July-September 2019 – MP-IDSA. Accessed on October 25, 2025.

[10] Gordon Nathaniel Lederman, Reorganizing the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Goldwater–Nichols Act of 1986 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999).

[11] Brian Lafferty, “Civil Military Integrations and PLA Reforms,” National Defence University Press, February 05, 2019, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Media/News/News-Article-View/Article/1748777/civil-military-integrations-and-pla-reforms/. Accessed on October 25, 2025.

[12] Sugiura Yasuyuki, “The PLA’s Pursuit of Enhanced Joint Operations Capabilities,” NIDS China Security Report, 2022,  https://www.nids.mod.go.jp/publication/chinareport/pdf/china_report_EN_web_2022_A02.pdf. Accessed on October 25, 2025.

The post From History to Myths — A Naval Officer’s Dialogue Part I: The Idea of Jointness: Beyond Structure and Slogan appeared first on CAPSS India.