Operation Sindoor was unlike any conventional mission: Army chief

New Delhi: Chief Gen Upendra Dwivedi has said that Operation Sindoor was akin to playing a game of chess as “we did not know” what would be the enemy’s next move, and though the “test match stopped on the fourth day”, it could have been a protracted conflict.

He also emphasised the importance of “narrative management” in such a scenario as “victory is in mind”, and said, if you ask a Pakistani “whether you lost or won, he’d say, my (Army) chief has become a Field Marshal, we must have won only, that’s why he has become a Field Marshal”.

The Army chief made the remarks in his address at a function held at IIT-Madras August 4. The video of his address was shared by the Army over the weekend.

Without naming any country, the Army chief also underlined the threat perception, and said, “Next time, it may be much more, and whether that country will do it alone, or supported by some other country, we don’t know. But, I have a strong hunch, feeling, that the country will not be alone. That is where we have to be careful.”

The Army chief used the analogies of chess and cricket to emphasise the intricacies of Operation Sindoor, India’s decisive military action launched in May on terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in retaliation for the April 22 Pahalgam attack.

The operation led to a four-day military conflict between India and Pakistan that was halted after an understanding was reached between the two sides May 10.

Using the metaphor of the chess game, Gen Dwivedi said, “In Operation Sindoor, what we did, we played chess. So, what does it mean? It means we did not know what is the next move was, what the enemy was going to take, and what we were going to do. This is something we call… the grey zone. Grey zone is that we are not going for the conventional operations. But, we are doing something, just short of a conventional operation.”

“Conventional operation means, go with everything, take everything you have. And, if you are able to come back, otherwise, stay there. That is called the conventional approach. Here, the grey zone means any activity that is taking place in all domains, that is something we are talking about, and Operation Sindoor taught us that this is the grey zone,” he said.

“So, we were making the chess moves, and he, the enemy, was also making the chess moves. Somewhere we were giving him the checkmate and somewhere we were going in for the kill at the risk of losing our own, but that’s the way life is, all about,” the Army chief said.

Gen Dwivedi emphasised that as far as the grey zone is concerned, it is ever-present and this will remain.

“And, the next war which we are looking at, it may happen soon, and we have to prepare accordingly, and in this we have to fight this battle, non-kinetic one, together,” he said without elaborating.

The Army chief said the military alone will not be fighting it.

“If I look at it, India is facing a two-and-a-half front, and if it is facing the land borders, then keeping in with the psyche of people in India today, currency of victory will remain, as land,” he said.

As far as Operation Sindoor is concerned, the Army chief said the Indian ground forces were “playing chess” and in this board game, something was visible, while something was not visible.

“And, if something that was not visible, maybe other countries were helping to make it visible for the adversary…This test match stopped on the fourth day; it could have gone to 14 days, 140 days, 1400 days. We don’t know, but we have to be prepared for those things,” he said.

In his address, he also underlined the components of a force orchestration an army has, force visualisation, force preservation and force application.

And, Operation Sindoor was a “whole of nation approach”, and the military was given a “free hand” to decide what was to be done, the general officer said.

And, that is the kind of confidence, the political clarity, political direction, for the first time we saw, he said, adding, having no terms of restrictions, raises the morale of the force.

That is how, it helped Army commanders on ground to “act as per their wisdom”.

Giving further details of the operation, he said that April 25, “we visited the Northern Command, where we thought, planned and conceptualised and executed seven out of the nine targets which were destroyed, killing several terrorists.”

On the precision strikes on terror camps, he said it was “wide and deep where we hit the heartland, first time we hit the heartland, of course, our targets were the nursery and the masters”.

This has never been done, and even Pakistan was not expecting that the heartland would be hit, and that’s what came as a “shocker” to them. “But, were we prepared for it? Yes, we were prepared for it, to absorb the blowback which will come up,” Gen Dwivedi said.

On how the battle of narratives was fought during Operation Sindoor, he said the Indian forces countered Pakistan’s strategy in their own way – using social media and other platforms to convey the message to the masses.

This is how you can influence the population. It is the domestic population, the adversary’s population and the neutral population, he said.

“Strategic messaging was very important, and that’s why the first messaging that we did was, justice done. That hit the maximum, I am told, in the world today, the number of hits which we received,” Gen Dwivedi said.

He further said today, globally, 56 conflicts are going on, involving a total of 92 countries, adding, this strategic continuum of persistence will continue to grow.

“As far as we are concerned, we share two borders, and both borders, you can call it live, semi-live, in whichever terminology you can look at, but these potential adversaries have the capabilities to orchestra a kind of war, which we have to face together or one by one, that we cannot say for sure, as of today, but capability-wise, we have to stand up to both the fronts,” the Army chief said.

Now, if that be the case, then “we have to look at five generations of warfare”.

To boost preparedness, technology has to percolate down to the soldier level, and that is “why I have said, ‘eagle on the arm’, our 12 lakh population of the Indian Army, everybody should have one drone each, ‘eagle on the arm’,” he said.

So, from muddy trenches to the Internet of Things, that is the kind of arena we are looking at, Gen Dwivedi said, emphasising the multiple domains of the evolving nature of warfare.

PTI

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