India needs integrated theatre commands because its armed forces can no longer plan and fight wars service by service, former Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba (retd) has said. He described the Indian Air Force‘s reluctance to divide its assets as the main obstacle.“We cannot have 17 independent commands, none of them co-located,” Lanba told TOI’s Defence HQ podcast. “The need of the hour is joint planning and joint execution.” With AI shortening decision cycles, he said, separate services operating in separate environments is “not going to run”.Lanba headed the Navy from 2016 to 2019 and chaired the Chiefs of Staff Committee. Asked why the reform is needed when Operation Sindoor succeeded without it, he pointed to Pulwama. A year before the 2019 attack, he said, he had the operations directorates of the three services draw up a joint plan for a “contingency short of war”, which was passed down to all commands. “That helped us when Pulwama happened, and finally it led to the Balakot incident,” he said. A theatre command, with one joint commander over Army, Navy and Air Force components, would be “much more effective”.The IAF’s objections, Lanba said, “can all be worked out”. Strategic assets should stay with the Air Force, he argued, while tactical platforms such as attack helicopters should go to the Army. “I know the Air Force guys will pan me for saying all this.”The Navy, about one-fourteenth the size of the Army, need not fear being subsumed, he said, since the maritime theatre would remain its own. He would prefer two maritime theatres, one for each seaboard, but called the single one now proposed “fair enough”.The plan for Northern, Western and Maritime theatres, submitted in April, still awaits Cabinet Committee on Security clearance. IAF chief A P Singh said in August that the force is not against theaterisation but wants a gradual rollout.On submarines, Lanba said a 1999 plan for 24 conventional boats in 30 years has “suffered great delays”. That plan was later revised to 18 conventional and six nuclear-powered attack submarines. He faulted the 2015 decision to bring in a private shipyard for Project 75I, cleared in principle in 2007, when Mazagon Dock and Visakhapatnam already had submarine lines. The deal still awaits final approval. “All delays lead to costs,” he said. On conventional versus nuclear attack submarines, he said: “It can’t be either. It has to be both.”The Navy’s last sanctioned force level, from 1964, envisaged about 140 ships built around three aircraft carriers, he said. Three remains the ideal, so that one can be in refit while two operate in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. Gaps are costly, he said, because carrier flying, where every landing is “a controlled crash”, is hard to relearn once lost.Lanba also called the September 15 collision between INS Kolkata and Pakistan’s PNS Hunain in the Arabian Sea “most unprofessional”. He said the Pakistani commanding officer had breached agreed confidence-building measures. Pakistan has blamed the Indian destroyer.
