We have graduated from stones and clubs to computer-guided heat-seeking missiles, our military strategies are more sophisticated and the nations and armies involved are larger and more complicated—but our reasons for fighting have not changed much since the Bronze Age. Nor have the values and ethos of the military changed much – we can still admire the men like Kanishka, Leonides, Babar and Yoshimitsu – military men remarkable not only for their grasp of strategy but for their qualities of leadership.
The fighting man’s self-image as a man of honour and principle goes back to the prehistoric past. It was one of the things at issue in the Mahabharat. The officer in the Indian Armed Forces has much to draw on, not least of which is the model of the “gentleman officer” handed down by the British.
But in every military organization there are two principles that tend in different directions and are not always easy to reconcile: on the one hand, the military value system exalts bravery, skill, the ability to take quick decisions, innovative and/or unconventional behaviour is valued, provided it results in victory; but on the other hand, the military is also closely defined by formalities, standardizations, bureaucracies, procedures and protocols.
Habit and heroics don’t often mesh very well. The plus side of a highly bureaucratized set up is that it pays off in high-stress situations; one can maintain a functioning organization even when personnel are suddenly replaced.
The down side is a tendency to become ossified, to lose one’s flexibility and ability to think for oneself and make independent decisions and to become adept at manipulating the system for one’s own benefit.
The military also faces a major problem when the society it is drawn from is rapidly evolving from long-established feudal ways into a democracy with a free market economy. The military tries to insulate its ways and values from forces at work beyond the cantonment, but this is possible only to some extent. Today both jawans and officers enter the armed forces with very different expectations. A middle level officer is often able to “hide” his weaknesses from his superiors but he never succeeds for long in hiding them from his subordinates. In earlier days, the jawans might have been overawed by an officer’s aristocratic pretensions — but not any more.
Another way to look at the problem is in terms of content and form. When leadership “content” declines, there is a tendency to place increasing emphasis on “form”.
The content of leadership is, first and foremost, competence — closely followed by fairness, honesty and upright behaviour. “Content” is seen in times of crisis but it is also the sum total of the man’s day-to-day attitudes and way of doing things. The sort of things that goes down on the credit side of an officer’s leadership “account” can be of the most minor nature—simple gestures, you might say.
A story illustrates this, it was told to me by a retired Master Warrant Officer, Darshan Singh, who joined the Royal Indian Air Force during World War II. During the war he was posted in Burma. One day he happened to mention to his commanding Officer that his family back in Punjab was finding it difficult to get their share of rations.
A couple of weeks later a letter from home arrived, one that was full of astonishment. An Air Force Officer had turned up at Darshan Singh’s house with a veritable cartload of foodstuffs. Not only did this raise the CO in the eyes of Darshan Singh, but every man in the unit took pride in this deed. Across thousands of miles, at the instance of a single commanding officer, the machinery of the Air Force had moved to help the family of one man, and that too the junior-most.
This officer gave his “ORs” (Other Ranks) the confidence that their problems would be heard and something would be done to set things right. Punishment could also be very severe in those days, but there was a general feeling that it was meted out without fear or favour. The officer’s orders brooked no delay, let alone disobedience. As a result, discipline was high and so was the morale of the rank and file.
Of course, that was wartime, when content usually tends to predominate over form.
Today the OR sees entirely too much form and feels unhappy with it. His officer seems not merely distant, but virtually cocooned from what is going on at his level.
In the Air Force, young officers come in with fancy engineering degrees. Trouble arises when their subordinates — rank-wise inferior but experience-wise superior —discover that the officer is unable to guide them when it comes to diagnosing and rectifying the thousand and one things that can go wrong in an aircraft. Respect goes out of the window.
If this same officer also seems to be more adept in keeping his superior officer happy, it takes no time at all for the men to comment on it — in the bitterest tones. It will be said that the officer has little time to spend on the shopfloor because sycophancy is such a time-consuming activity.
Form predominates — the paper qualifications, the rank structure and system of ACRs, the formalities of tables filled in and accounts submitted. But airplanes don’t fly on “form”; they fly on “content”— in this case the content of knowledge, skill, dedication and perfectionism embodied in a team of expert men led by expert officers.
This is true for all branches of Armed Forces.
When one pays attention to how things are done in practice in the various branches of our Defence Services today, one cannot escape the feeling that the balance has tilted toward form excessively. It may not be easy, but we are certainly lost if we cannot get back a higher proportion of content at all levels but particularly at the level of leadership.
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