Why do nations go to war? As Indians trace the origins and impacts of wars in Europe and West Asia, there has been a gradual evolution in our understanding of why wars are fought and what they leave behind. However, the same critical analysis is not extended as enthusiastically to India’s own wars and conflicts, leaving them shrouded in a sense of perpetual mystery.
Why do India’s adversaries initiate wars or conflicts against it?
In a recent interview, former Army Chief General Manoj Naravane was asked a reflective question: “Six years later, when you look back, do you think we could have done anything different?” He replied, “Perhaps we need to study China in more detail to understand what makes them tick. We were surprised because we don’t know their manner of working and thinking.”
He then recounted discussions on China’s motivations in Galwan, ranging from Covid-19 to the withdrawal of Article 370, but admitted that the search for a definitive explanation continues.
There are certain infirmities in India’s ability to reckon with past wars retrospectively as well as to anticipate future contingencies. For instance, China’s synchronised advance in 2020 was neither the first nor the only time that Indian decision-makers were caught by surprise in terms of the scale, timing and intent of adversary action. India was as surprised during Kargil in 1999, the India-China war of 1962, and the India-Pakistan wars of both 1948 and 1965.
There is something broader, more historical and perhaps more elusive at play here rather than merely the inscrutability of Chinese intent. After all, the Kargil Review Committee report (a laudable and unique act of reckoning in Indian history) was tellingly titled “From Surprise to Reckoning”—a descriptor that could apply to almost all of India’s analyses of war, with the possible exception of 1971.
There are three fundamental aspects of this problem that need to be better understood: war anticipation (before conflict), the determination of adversary motivations once a crisis/conflict has begun (during conflict), and India’s ability to interrogate the causes of previous wars or strategic surprises — in other words, deterrence failure — in order to draw lessons (after conflict). All three aspects are naturally interconnected and require broad analysis.
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More complicated than intelligence failure
A peculiar feature of the Indian security state is the frequency with which failures to anticipate enemy action are explained away as “intelligence gaps” or “intelligence failures”.
China’s offensive in 1962 was partially blamed on Intelligence Bureau chief BN Mullick and his alleged failure to anticipate Chinese military action. The lack of healthy coordination between the Army and the Intelligence agencies is cited as one of the reasons for the Kargil ingress, while the 2020 crisis is also at times seen as resulting from gaps in surveillance capabilities.
Although this line of analysis carries a kernel of truth in all three cases, it is too narrow, simplistic and puts a premium on the detection of troop movements or the acquisition of crude information about enemy preparations.
This is puzzling because, in all three crises and wars, there were enough indications of military movements, as well as warnings and intelligence inputs.
Dramatic and adverse surprise developments have raised overwhelming questions. Given the need to preserve political and military morale, as well as to avoid mutual finger-pointing, there has often been a temptation to locate and confine the problem at the level of “intelligence failure”. This is also illustrated in accounts that present the core lesson of Galwan as the need for better surveillance capabilities at the lower level—a problem that is easy to solve and unlikely to elicit deeper institutional inquiries.
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Conceptual failures and adversary motivation
The common thread in anticipation failure happens to be conception failure. This occurs when the state leadership adheres too strongly to fixed notions of an adversary’s strategic intent and behaviour pattern. When intelligence inputs pointing to a new development pile up, the state struggles to interpret it. This is because such inputs only point to anomalies and probable offensive intent, without explaining the larger politico-military intent.
In his study of the 1962 war, Professor Steven A Hoffmann explains the role of conception failure as a “failure to imagine or speculate about unorthodox courses of action which the opponent can adopt.”
Prior to 1962, Indian political leadership reached the fixed assessment that China was unlikely to enter into a significant conflict because of its own constraints. These constraints were assessed to be related to its intense competition against both the US and the Soviet Union as well as internal economic difficulties. The IB did deliver pointed reports in May 1962 (based on sources) that an attack aimed at removing forward-deployed Indian posts across Ladakh was imminent or likely. But such predictions did not explain strategic intent.
Lacking a theory of China’s motivation, even intelligence reports reverted to the thesis that China will not react strongly—based on the mere observation that it had not reacted too strongly in previous cases when the Indian Army established new outposts. Reflecting path dependency, even as intelligence reports from 1959 started noting accelerated military preparation on the Chinese side, both policy and intelligence assessment operated on the sole and fixed premise that China seeks to avoid war.
What is striking is that almost no one was able to visualise an offensive military operation in which the PLA fights through forward-deployed military concentrations (to correct a trend) and recedes back to its own territory.
Chinese actions were assessed merely through the rigid binary of ‘usual localised incidents’ or ‘all-out invasion’. This meant both intelligence and its analysis could only ‘confirm’ the former given that the latter was ruled out as a matter of political-strategic assessment.
The security system also overestimated the state of Indian military preparedness in the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA) sector (present-day Arunachal Pradesh)—thereby overestimating military deterrence.
Hence, the system could not visualise a wider conflict in the nature of preventive war (and prepare for one) even after the political leadership had declared its intent to ‘throw out’ Chinese forces from Thag la ridge publicly on 12 and 14 October 1962 and had deployed a brigade to achieve the same.
The same pattern took hold prior to the Kargil War. The military leadership—based on a predictive model called Operation TOPAC—was committed to the idea that Pakistan would continue its policy of infiltration and terror support in Kashmir and refrain from any significant frontal conflict similar to the 1965 war.
Indian conventional superiority, as well as nuclear deterrence, deemed any operation aimed at holding strategic ground or an alteration of the LoC ‘irrational’ and ‘out of the question’ (as noted by the Kargil Review Committee as well).
This, in turn, impacted winter air surveillance operations as resources were focused on surveilling ravines and riverbeds (infiltration-friendly) rather than ridges (encroachment-friendly).
Hence, when intelligence agencies provided inputs regarding Pakistan’s suspicious purchase of 500 winter boots, road-widening activities, construction of underground bunkers, as well as troop and artillery build-up in PoK, these only confirmed the thesis that they were preparing for more infiltration. But since intelligence inputs could not (or did not seek to) explain strategic intent and logic, they were found to be unpersuasive and dismissed. Facts, after all, become meaningful only within pre-existing frameworks of understanding.
What makes the ‘only infiltration’ or ‘deterrence is strong’ assessment somewhat paradoxical is also the admission (in retrospect and in statements to the KRC) by military officials that the Indian Army would have struggled to bring its superiority to bear in the region given its ongoing commitments to counter-insurgency all across India.
This, after all, is something that Pakistan’s military planners may have noted as well—making the ‘fixed’ and impossible somewhat more dynamic and possible. Besides, the ongoing political rapprochement (reaching its height in bus diplomacy) subdued both operational concerns as well as more aggressive intelligence-collecting operations.
What was lacking in each case was the ability to visualise the adversary’s willingness to take the contestation to a higher level—or toward an objective that lay between conventional war and localised coercive encroachments/infiltrations. Intelligence inputs and analysis, in absence of such frameworks/visualisation, are predisposed toward confirming past templates of behaviour rather than pointing toward a new shift in the dynamic.
Importantly, this particular problem is not necessarily limited to a service or government or intelligence agency but tends to pervade across organisations and including the strategic community as well to a degree. Such ‘failures’ are national failures to a degree and it requires an intervention beyond mutual recrimination.
Deterrence failure in 2020: Does it fit the pattern?
There is now enough information in the public domain that points toward the architecture of China’s motivations before the April-May 2020 crisis. We know that Chinese calculations had fundamentally shifted in the aftermath of Doklam. This was evidenced by new investments in military infrastructure near the Line of Actual Control (LAC), as well as shifts in Chinese public discourse and analysis. Chinese decision-makers simply concluded that the growing security dilemma along the LAC, in the backdrop of India’s new assertiveness and improved infrastructure, which facilitated its mobilisation capabilities, had made the existing status quo too volatile and undesirable.
What China sought, therefore, was a new normal based on domination of key vantage points and the denial of Indian access to strategically important areas.
The Indian Navy’s recent maritime security strategy document describes three factors that lead to deterrence failure. The first is an “Incorrect reading of the level to which a potential aggressor is dissatisfied with the status quo, thus rendering deterrence ineffective”.
Put simply, India underestimated the degree to which China was alarmed by India’s action in 2017 and therefore underread signs that Beijing had moved toward a fundamental shift in its threat perception toward Indian intention and nascent-yet-growing capabilities.
Hence (and perhaps ideally), when Chinese personnel and equipment started to move toward the LAC, India could have recognised the possibility that the PLA was advancing in order to hold ground i.e. a more permanent presence right at the LAC to ‘correct’ growing unfavourable trends. China was also reassured in this risky gambit by its perception of continuing and large gaps in India’s defence/deterrence capabilities despite great advancements, pointing toward possible Indian over-estimation of deterrence.
India did undertake bold steps toward deploying tanks in forward areas in the years prior—finger area in Sikkim as well as Depsang plains. This signalled offensive potential. But such deployments—while confident in their signalling—were not backed by depth in munitions, supply chains and surveillance infrastructure. This helps us visualise what the Chinese saw and deliberated upon from their vantage point in late 2019 or early 2020. The completion of the DSDBO road in Ladakh by April 2020 (runs parallel to the LAC) and its feeder roads toward Galwan valley and other key areas provided the perfect inflection point to set the ball rolling. The PLA assessed that Indian future temptations were only set to increase and a costly intervention in the present moment will still be less costly than one later i.e. a preventive war logic.
Despite such trends playing out in the open, the Indian security system may have in part succumbed to conceptual failure. Officials and analysts prior to May 2020 continued to frame the challenge at the LAC as primarily limited to localised incidents originating from tactical coercion. There was an inability to conceptualise an operation aimed at seizing domination over key routes and axes as a reaction to India’s own (entirely justified) efforts to enhance its own strength all the way up to the LAC after decades of neglect.
The prevailing political climate then, marked by Post-Wuhan trust-building, may have incentivised assuredness over concern (much like pre-Kargil).
Hence, despite all indications of gradual PLA movement toward key vantage points since April 2020, it was only when the PLA occupied the ridge lines of Finger 4 (mid May) with a parallel move to block the southern tip that incursion was seen as something more alarming than usual. By then, India’s options had already started to shrink. The 2020 conflict and stand-off, thus, cannot be chalked up to ‘intelligence failure’ or the lack of surveillance capabilities.
This motivation was also presciently anticipated by the influential security expert Colonel Zhou Bo who had noted in early 2018 that the Doklam crisis marked a ‘turning point’ that had put India on China’s ‘strategic radar’ and that the China-India border “would not be the same again”, with a LAC-wide war made more likely.
But this raises yet another question. The above explanation focuses on geography (vantage points), key infrastructure and worsening perceptions of India since Doklam; this has been available in many versions since June 2020. This was seemingly evident to scholars such as Yun Sun, Jabin Jacob and M Taylor Fravel. Notably, sources (see) from the Indian Army itself had alluded to the same as they repeatedly suggested that the crises had been triggered by China’s objection to the DSDBO and its feeder roads towards vantage points. Chinese diplomacy and behaviour ever since have only continuously confirmed its validity in numerous ways. This author himself sought to explain the road to Galwan in much greater detail here.
Are we, then, predisposed toward single-cause explanations rather than a layered, scenario-based, multi-causal understanding of conflict and deterrence failure?
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What is true and what is accepted?
Some historical accounts may be more well-grounded than others. But that does not necessarily mean they are widely accepted or impactful. In mainstream discourse, multi-causal explanations such as those outlined above have hardly found much resonance. Dramatic occurrences demand dramatic causes/explanations that emphasise anger, hurt and revenge.
The predominant view even in May-June-July was that the action was a diversionary crisis engineered by the CCP in order to divert its people’s attention from the growing pandemic or that it was a response to India’s decision in August the previous year to withdraw Article 370. In the years that followed, one often heard the explanation that it was caused by China’s need to undercut India’s growing foray toward building its maritime/naval power—the real concern for China. Yet another popular explanation in 2020-22 was that the action was a reaction to the growing India-US strategic partnership.
Notably, none of the above single-point explanations have been fully developed and have remained mere hunches or guesswork. They do not explain the timing, the scale, the risks and costs undertaken and Chinese behaviour ever since.
There is a second class of explanations aimed at the other end of the spectrum. These theories emphasised structural factors such as Chinese proclivities toward salami-slicing and coercion, Chinese expansionism in Asia or growing Chinese assertiveness.
A third category sees the crisis as simply pre-destined, a skirmish that had escalated in absence of a border agreement and as something that was waiting to happen. This indeed is a difficult thesis to accept given that Galwan valley itself was not disputed until China made new claims in the summer of 2020.
How India thinks about its past wars
What this muddle points to is India’s struggle in deciphering adversary motivations — both in peacetime and during war.
A country’s ability to apprehend future wars is built through the sustained practice of historical studies—both official and academic. In this regard, India’s record of historiography on past wars is telling and requires brief attention.
The overwhelming majority of India’s wars have been initiated by Pakistan. There is, in general, little intellectual curiosity about Pakistan’s motivations in India. The revisionist state to India’s west is often seen as opportunistic, irrational, and unworthy of serious analytical dissection. Given its fixed hostile intent, conflict initiation can simply be explained away either as tactical ingenuity or delusional overconfidence.
This simply means that there is little fodder for reflection and debate that are conventionally necessary for cultivating strategic foresight about war and peace.
It is therefore not a great surprise that the only war to spawn a significant body of politico-military historiography and some debate over causes and blame has been the India-China War of 1962. But even here, the record has been less than satisfactory. Political sensitivities across successive governments produced both censorship and squeamishness, while also leading to simplistic notions of brute Chinese expansionism and cunningness—if only to contrast it with the perceived naivete and idealism of PM Nehru’s foreign and security policy. For too long, the politics around the 1962 War was enveloped in the trope of ‘betrayal’. It had emotional resonance domestically. It is therefore ironic that BN Mullick titled his account of the war My Years with Nehru: The Chinese Betrayal, despite the fact that Chinese diplomats and military commanders had repeatedly warned of conflict before October 1962.
It is only in more recent years, and with some distance, that there has been a new historiography of the conflict that rightly presents a more dynamic and complex account of the causes of war—without necessarily shying away from criticism of the government.
The accounts by Srinath Raghavan, Mahesh Shankar, and AV Bhasin have brought us much closer to an understanding of China’s motivation than earlier. The present scholarship is essentially more realist, strategically sound and avoids simplistic explanations of what was indeed a very dramatic war—but drawn out by gradual developments of events (Tibet uprising), intractable and complex negotiations, inadvertent choices, hardening dilemmas and misperceptions. But this has taken a long time and in the meantime, a very weak grasp of the causes of 1962 has impacted India’s China policy ever since.
Are there similar reasons at play that prevent us from recognising the pathway to 2020?
An explanation that includes India’s own strategic choices is still somewhat taboo, given the essentially moralist approach India takes to conflict (still).
Second, in the Indian general view, the key importance of vantage points in Eastern Ladakh is missed and hence any explanation that emphasises tactical-operational gains (for either side) is seen as an underwhelming explanation. This is unfortunate, given the seeming importance the PLA itself allots to control over such vantage points and patrolling points. Instead, explanations based on China’s long term international and geopolitical strategic objectives are preferred.
Third, Indian officials (serving and retired) and even scholars are ill-disposed toward seeing India’s security-maximising moves as ‘threatening’ or ‘concerning’ to the other side. This is because India has never initiated conflict in its history and has been a relatively satisfied status quo power. This leads to underestimation of the adversary’s level of dissatisfaction toward India’s military build-up.
In the present context, the prevailing general agnosticism toward China’s motivation in 2020 is no longer justified and has had costs both in terms of responses as well as negotiations.
Continued agnosticism leads to greater self-deterrence and a psychological disadvantage—given that India is then forced to second-guess the ways in which its own actions could ‘provoke’ China again. Given that Chinese strategic intent behind 2020 is not objectively a mystery, the record suggests that Indian inquiry must focus as much on its own historical cognitive blind spots when it comes to gauging adversary motivation and intent. Deterrence and anticipation failure, in India’s case, has often occurred as a consequence of India’s own strategic idiosyncrasies rather than due to intelligence failures or enemy inscrutability.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)