Military Adventurism
Rehman's Thunder flew on, accelerating at twenty-eight hundred metres, ceaselessly spilling chaff to try to jam the fire-control radar; but the ground radar kept pointing firmly at him, and the chaff and electronic jamming seemed to little effect. He thought that unless he had some geographic barrier to block the radar waves, and here, riven with gullies, it was no hard thing to drop height and dive into a ravine. But Rehman was no fool; he knew the gullies below were beset with dangers, and to lower his height rashly was no good plan.
The pilot glanced back from time to time; two will-o'-the-wisp flashes at the edge of the sky were now visible, and within a few seconds these missiles would be upon him. By then he could go on spilling chaff and electronic jamming, then grit his teeth and dodge with a hard turn; but he knew that these ground-controlled surface-to-air missiles, even shaken off for a moment, would very likely go to proximity-fuse mode, and their warheads were generally large, nothing like the SA-7 class. Luckily the two high-frequency radio scan signals on his electronic-warfare threat display suddenly vanished; perhaps he could try Sami's method. Rehman had no time to hesitate; he dropped height fast, ready to fly tight against the hills, and staked all on this one throw. Sami had said that every pilot's growth comes with a few deadly gambles, sometimes a left turn, sometimes a right; sometimes life, sometimes death; now he had to choose a low-altitude evasion. In ten seconds only, the pursuing missiles would miss him; he could only hope this place was not, like the pass just now, packed with every kind of fire.
The Thunder suddenly dropped its height, to the delight of the anti-aircraft gun commander waiting on the ground. A few seconds before, he had deliberately switched off his radar search to lull the enemy; this Polish-made self-propelled gun could track effectively even with its passive electro-optical system alone, and its reaction time was uncommonly short.1
The enemy had plunged straight down and was flying slowly toward the position; the commander did not rush to fire. He waited patiently for this aircraft to turn west, and at last fall wholly into the guns' best firing range. The gunner, careful on his television sighting system, eased the crosshair box over the enemy aircraft with his joystick, then slowly trod the pedal so the turret swung round to keep up with the enemy's motion, laser-ranging several times in between, each time with success; within seconds all was ready to fire, and the enemy aircraft had no inkling of it.
The two self-propelled guns, a hundred and fifty metres apart, opened fire almost together. The fire was short and precise; swift ballistic computation was one main feature that made this 35-millimetre weapon a champion in the international arms market. Rehman's fighter was struck at once, in the vertical tail and one wing, by a hail of shells, and the aircraft spun out of control in a flat, fast rotation. The flying officer hurriedly hauled the seat-ejection handle and shot from the cockpit; before his parachute had even opened, he watched his aircraft and the two huge missiles that had chased it strike the mountainside almost together.
Sami found his wingman's radio signal suddenly gone; he was slow to reappear from the hills. Sami knew Rehman's chances were poor. This attack had been his order; though he had not asked his wingman to press so deep, he felt he bore some blame himself. But no one could have known that in a few short weeks the Indian army would cram so much air-defence fire into so small a gully; it showed this was very likely one of the Indian army's attack points for its coming offensive.
"Viper, my wingman may be lost, I didn't see him bail out. Can you confirm?"
"I am sorry, Group Captain. He has indeed vanished from our watch as well."
"How are things with Abbas?"
"He just fought the MiG-29s; after our Su-27s arrived in time, the Trident MiG-29s pulled out of the battle. Abbas is on his way home."
"Viper, how did the fighting go today?"
"Seven enemy aircraft downed in all, and we lost two; besides your wingman, an F-16C was shot down by the Rhino Squadron while pulling out to the south. And the army's ground fire brought down two more enemy aircraft near the dam."
"By the sound of it, we still came out ahead."
"That's right. Nine to two, and our dam is still there."2
"Viper, I think there may be a huge Indian army east of the pass; you could stay on a while and record the radar sites in this area, I think we need to send a drone to reconnoitre," the group captain said. He often reached over the heads of the AWACS and the ground command to point and direct, though the AWACS generally did not heed him.
"Black Spider leader, we just detected an SA-6 site, and two more that came on briefly, using E-band radar systems, perhaps a combined search-and-track system, like a division-level short-range air-defence weapon."
"A Tunguska system?"
"Perhaps so; we saw no missile launch. But even if it is only guns, once a low-flying aircraft moves into range, it is hard to escape these advanced systems."
In the Defence Ministry conference room in New Delhi, all the senior army generals were gathered together, discussing the new offensive plan. This military conference, convened by Defence Minister Singh, had suddenly produced Lieutenant General Sipanga's plan for a full-scale offensive, wholly overturning the Army Staff's original plan for a northern thrust, which took most of them by surprise. The officers, not yet in the know, listened dumbstruck to Lieutenant General Sipanga explain his plan, their minds all but at a standstill; they had served for years, but had never conceived so vast an offensive scheme, one that all but cut Pakistan in two.
This plan had no part that could be reconciled with the one the Army Staff had drawn up, because the Army Staff's original plan had been copied wholesale by Sipanga to serve as the feint; he held that in this way the enemy could be thoroughly lulled, and would in the first days of the ground war think the enemy still the same as ever, and so mass their heavy forces in the northern hills.
Were Sipanga's scheme carried out, it would very likely bring on the largest tank battle since the Second World War. Some had already sensed that this internal discussion had no fairness in it at all; Singh would surely force through this plan, which was bound to drag India into total war and into the eye of the storm of world opinion, and the conference's end would very likely be Prasad's resignation. In principle Singh had no right to interfere in the Army Staff's professional work; but he had won over no small number now, and some of the young generals of Western and Southwestern Command all seemed to stand at his side. Today's conference was less a discussion of plans than a taking of political sides, and by the look of it Prasad's day was done.
"I do not know who is pushing a scheme like this, but this... scheme plainly exceeds India's mobilisation capacity," Prasad said; he too had been appalled by this line of attack that would cut Pakistan through at the waist. He had served forty years, tending this army with painstaking care, witnessing its growth from weakness to strength, and he knew well that all this before him had been built up out of gold.
General Prasad had always held doubts about Clausewitz's theory; military adventurism, and the notion of total war, were in his eyes blind gambling, out of all keeping with the state of the world today.3 In his view every conflict had to leave room for politics to manoeuvre; and that kind of military tradition had already lost Germany two wars. So today he had to seize this last chance to argue his case on its merits.
1. The Polish 35-millimetre gun: The self-propelled gun that kills Rehman is the PZA Loara, Poland's twin-35-millimetre Oerlikon KDA system on a T-72 / PT-91 tank chassis, with its own 3D search radar, an electro-optical backup track, programmable AHEAD ammunition, and full autonomy, able to shoot on the move. In reality only Poland ever fielded it (a single production vehicle); India does not operate the type, so its appearance here with an "elite attack unit" is the author's licence. The E-band systems the AWACS also reads are, as Sami guesses, of the 2K22 Tunguska class, the Russian gun-and-missile air-defence vehicle India does operate. ↩
2. Nine to two: The tally for the largest air battle of the campaign. The Pakistani side lost Pandit's and Rehman's aircraft and counts nine Indian machines down (seven in the air, two to army fire near the dam); but the true point is the last clause: the dam still stands, so tactically Pakistan won and strategically it changes nothing, since India was never trying to win the air battle. ↩
3. Clausewitz and "military adventurism": Prasad's objection, and the chapter's title. He reads the drive to total war (the German tradition that "lost two wars," 1914 and 1939) as blind gambling that leaves politics no room to manoeuvre, against Sipanga's Clausewitzian appetite for a decisive battle of annihilation. The source spells the name 克莱塞维兹, a variant of the standard 克劳塞维茨; the referent is Clausewitz. ↩