Indian SOCOM Defeated By Politicians
31st January 2016
The most formidable foe Indian commandos face are Indian politicians. Since 2013 Indian special operations forces and the various branches of the military have sought to form a united Special Forces Command based on the success of the American SOCOM (Special Operations Command). Created in the 1980s SOCOM went on to be the model for similar organizations in many other nations. One of the most recent was Israel in 2007. That is important because Israel has become a major defense supplier and military ally of India since the 1990s and the two countries exchange a lot military-related information and experiences. Indian officers and special operations troops are quite familiar with the success of the Israeli SOCOM. But by late 2015 these Indian efforts were blocked by a lack of government willingness to back the proposal and the fact that half the Indian armed forces (and nearly as many of the special operations troops) are not in the military but an equally large collection of paramilitary forces controlled by other bureaucracies. This was done on purpose in the late 1940s to prevent the possibility that the military would become powerful enough to take over the government. That has worked. Neighboring Pakistan went in another direction, building a relatively more powerful military and has suffered periodic military takeovers. But India has several other cultural differences from Pakistan that have helped prevent coups. Meanwhile many non-defense branches of the Indian government have grown fond of having their own armed forces and mainly because of that have been unwilling to give up or share control of their special operations forces. In reaction to that the military has been reluctant to provide assistance to these paramilitary forces, even when there was a strong case for it (as in efforts to deal with Islamic terrorism, leftist rebels and armed separatist groups).
A pity. In the world that is to come, India will one of our few potential allies against an expansionist Red China, and we need her to be as strong as possible.