I’ve been saying this for years
nominally prior to the recent SF conversion India had ~1 airborne infantry brigade strength (airborne btns) strength in the para regiment. Even the 50th (Independent) brigade that is the IA’s primary airborne rapid mobilisation unit was only partly constituted of airborne infantry (still taking strength from then SF battalions).
compare this to the 82nd of the US army that is at least a division strong and would be the comparable unit to the 50th of the IA.
with the conversion of airborne btns into ‘SF’ india neither has an even nominal airborne infantry nor SF.
The 50th para brigade was one of Indias best tactical brigades, according to Gen Katoch. To get rid of it was a complete and utter blunder. This is why I say the quality of officers has come down
The post 1971/IPKF/Op Cactus Indian military actually had some teeth, for the time they were pretty much on par with contemporary forces (leaning more to Soviet standards but also using the bleeding edge Western tech in places) and also had high tempo capabilities
come the 90s and this fell off HARD and they’ve just remained still.
Kargil took the wind out of their sails and exposed a lot of their shortcomings and the mentality has never recovered
obviously not a coincidence that COIN started to occupy more and more of their bandwidth from the late 1980s and that has systematically hollowed them out.
You put the decline in the 90s I put in the 2000s. Back in the early 90s, we made COIN school and RR to deal with coin. General BC joshi, the last of the great generals, himself didn’t want special forces and regular infantry to do COIN ops (or play a limited role in it). Hence, he wanted to create the Rashtriya Rifles which was solely dedicated to COIN. He even put Assam Rifles in charge of the insurgency. Matter of face in 91 and 92 the Assam Rifles is who had led the insurgency, one Assam rifles battalion having a record of 200 eliminations in two years. However, his successors seemed to have not gotten the memo and the army was getting more and more involved and by 1996, it was the r army which was solely involved in dishing out casualties. Hence, troops equipped themselves to do COIN ops (heavier gear was shunned upon).
Only thing the Kargil conflict exposed IMO was the lack of preparation that COIN can do for limited conventional conflicts.Overall though, it showed that the Indian army can adjust tactically after failing in the beginning (after failed assaults on Tololing, tiger hill, and 5140 in may-early June, Indian forces began using multidirectional assaults, coupled with the required artillery fire and displayed fine levels of tactical skills, and starting took points one after the other). I could post about several such operations. Bottom line is Kargil showed a highlight of things. A better example than Kargil would be Op prakaram where many men died from doing basic conventional warfare duties like land mines as they had been exposed to COIN for so long.
