If the military art could be reduced to arithmetic,” observed Soviet General Andrian Danilevich, “we would not need any wars. You could simply look at the correlation of forces, make some calculations, and tell your opponent, ‘we outnumber you 2:1, victory is ours, please surrender.’ But, in reality, you could outnumber your opponent 3:1 and still suffer a crushing defeat.” War involved “a sea of specific subjective factors, or even random events, which reduce these objective factors to nil.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin either never read, or chose not to heed, the wise General’s caution. His gamble on Ukraine, premised on the overwhelming superiority of the Russian forces, has ended in a punishing stalemate—at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, and the lives of thousands of troops.
There is an important lesson in these events for New Delhi, and they’re not to do with the price of oil or geopolitics. Ever since independence, India’s superior conventional force has proved a reliable tool to coerce Pakistan into tamping-down covert warfare in Kashmir. There’s this to consider, though: Rolling the tanks means rolling the dice, and there’s no telling where they’ll land.
The secret India-Pakistan back channel
Ever since the summer of 2018, when a polo-playing aristocrat from the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) met a senior Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) counterpart at a London hotel, India and Pakistan have been engaged in quiet back-channel dialogue to...
Read Full Story: https://theprint.in/opinion/security-code/india-vs-pakistan-military-lesson-from-ukraine-generals-must-let-leaders-know-defence-reality/871699/
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