Army aviation is as good a subject as any to understand the dynamics of interservice turf battles. The army's justification for aerial platforms originated with the need to improve the accuracy of their long-range artillery fire. Hence the need to put artillery officers on elevated platforms. Initially, their officers flying Indian Air Force helicopters achieved this operational need. Soon the desire to own the helicopters gained ground and in the mid-eighties, the army won the battle with the IAF and the Air Observation Post helicopters were transferred to them.
Having got its own air arm, the army continued encroaching into IAF mission areas of communication, casualty evacuation, tactical reconnaissance, attack and so on, even as modern technology had rendered the old concept of artillery observation obsolete. The Kargil review committee report brought out that the army was carrying out tactical reconnaissance from helicopters with hand-held cameras. The KRC is silent on why the army chose this archaic method instead of asking the IAF, whose legitimate responsibility this was. So while state-of-the-art reconnaissance capability was idling at IAF bases, it was shepherds who alerted the army. This rivalry resulted in a war costing us some five hundred lives.
Today the army wants to expand its aviation to encompass attack helicopters, mobility, communications, heavy lift, reconnaissance and surveillance. Indeed an article in a respected aerospace journal authored by a senior retired general makes a case for the army taking over the close air support role from the IAF. Taken to its conclusion, such logic would imply that the army should take over responsibility of the battlefield air space, all the heavy troop airlift requirements and the many other tasks for which it depends on the IAF. This mindset rewinds the debate back to the history of airpower. The debate into whether air power should constitute a separate arm was conclusively settled because of the recognition that air power was unique and needed an independent status through a formal organizational change. It is strange that while world militaries have today graduated from the concept of integrated warfare to a higher plane of interdependent warfare, our militaries want to march back into history.
