With all due respect to posters over here - the Indian Army always had the skills, but the political will was absent earlier. As a fellow poster (
@pankaj nema) had posted a few pages back about the chiding and transferring of aggressive officers at LC for taking decisions to the dismantling of TSD by Gen V K Singh, the political will was transparently absent.
A few points from an article based on Nitin Gokhale's book (chapter on SS) (many would have read it, but it's necessary to read it again in the current context - read debate which is going on here about political will).
- But were not cross-border raids carried out earlier too, I (*Nitin Gokhale, as can be presumed*) asked Gen Dalbir. “Yes, they were,” he agreed “but most actions taken in our younger days were, what we call, BAT (Border Action Team) raids on specific post(s) as retribution for something that the Pakistan Army troops would have carried out on our position(s),” he said. “What we were now planning for was much larger with greater ramifications,” he explained.
- In a way, it was like revisiting their basic tenets for the Special Forces men. And they loved it. Although no one could have anticipated that they would be called in to strike across the LoC, the very thought of crossing a line that was seen as taboo motivated the troops further. Indeed for over two decades no one at the highest political level had ever expressed willingness to sanction, or had demanded such an action inside PoK for the fear of escalation.
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As Col H remembers, “Most of our reorientation took place in the mind; we were crossing a threshold that had been embedded in the mind: thus far and no further. Now we were being asked to do a job that had not been undertaken in decades.” Adds Col K: “Our boys always had the skills, but they had applied the skills to a different set of circumstances, not the task we were about to undertake. However, due to our practice and reorientation, they were at the peak of their skills.” They were, like many Indian Army Officers before them posted along the LoC, aware of one-off, shallow raids launched by different infantry units into PoK. But all of them were individual punitive actions and not large-scale planned operations like the one that was being contemplated now.
Source - https://thediplomat.com/2017/09/the...16-surgical-strikes/?utm_content=buffer48626&
@COLDHEARTED AVIATOR bhai.
Add these to the points above -
- The Army in Kashmir is a realist. The surgical strike goals were not really about finishing terrorism in Kashmir or drying up infiltration. It was about the range of our response to terrorism emanating from Pakistan. The signal that we wanted to send was that we would not limit our actions only on our side of the border but also hit Pakistan in their territory. This message was sent successfully and we scored a definite moral victory.
- Can India do another surgical strike tomorrow, if there is another Uri-like terror strike? Or should be wary of Pakistani retaliation? Were you wary of retaliation after the strikes?
Of course, we were wary of retaliation. But the moment Pakistan refused to acknowledge the strike, we knew we had won the moral battle. Pakistan did step up infiltration and we had incidents of mutilation of soldiers but those were tactical actions to regain some lost ground. I wish these incidents had not happened but the Line of Control is a brutal place and these are the realities. Incidentally, our response to the mutilation was very strong and completely directed at the Pakistani Army.
- Many trans-LoC operations have been conducted when you were in service, and as you are aware, some of them have gone even deeper inside PoK than the surgical strikes. Why are the surgical strikes then so significant or unique?
The biggest difference from earlier strikes was the fact that the government had decided to nationally acknowledge the operation. When there is an element of deniability, failures could go unreported. We did not have that luxury. Also the scale at which it happened, multiple strikes across the Jammu and Kashmir regions, had not been attempted before. I think these two factors make last year’s surgical strikes somewhat unique
Source -
http://indianexpress.com/article/in...s-glass-ceiling-has-been-broken-4851981/lite/
