Wargames on the western front

It’s going to be a noisy western front in April, what with the Indian and Pakistani militaries slated to conduct major exercises. While India’s month-long ‘Yodha Shakti’ kicks off in mid-April, around the same time — from April 10 to May 13 — Pakistan will conduct its ‘Azm-e-Nau-III’ (new resolve) exercise, described as its biggest wargames in two decades, to train for a conventional war with India. The manoeuvres will be held near the border in the country’s Punjab and Sindh provinces — close to Rajasthan’s Thar desert. Pakistan’s exercise will be massive. “It’s aimed at validating and refining newly evolved doctrines,’’ the head of Pakistan army’s military training directorate, Muzammil Hussain, said. Azm-e-Nau-III will mobilize 20,000 troops in the beginning, rising to 40,000 to 50,000 towards the end, he said. The Indian Army, learning lessons from the slow mobilization during Operation Parakram, will practice launching self-contained and highly-mobile ‘battle groups,’ with Russian-origin T-90S tanks and upgraded T-72 M1 tanks at their core, within 96 hours. The game will involve one of its three main ‘strike’ formations, the Mathura-based 1 Corps.
The IAF will operationalise a forward airbase at Phalodi in Rajasthan on Tuesday. Jaguars will be the first fighters to land at the new airbase on Tuesday to mark its inauguration by IAF chief Air Chief Marshal P V Naik. India, on its part, is operationalising the Phalodi airbase, strategically located since it falls in the middle of the ‘triangle’ constituted by Jaisalmer, Nal (Bikaner) and Jodhpur airbases, to plug operational and air defence gaps in the western front. “The 24x7 airbase, equipped to handle potent fighters like the Sukhoi-30MKIs and heavy-lift aircraft, will provide us with requisite flexibility,” said a senior officer. This comes even as the newish South-Western Army Command (SWAC) at Jaipur, established as the sixth operational command of the 1.13-million strong Army in 2005, is fully up and running now. With the Mathura-based 1 ‘Strike’ Corps and Bhatinda-based 10 ‘Pivot’ Corps under it, SWAC is responsible for offensive operations on the western front in conjunction with the Chandimandir-based Western Army Command (WAC), which controls the Ambala-based 2 ‘Strike’ Corps. Northern and Southern (which has the Bhopal-based 21 ‘Strike’ Corps) Army Commands, at Udhampur and Pune respectively, will of course play crucial roles in the event of a war but it will be SWAC and WAC which will assume the pivotal roles. The high-voltage ‘Yodha Shakti’ will revolve around the objective of mobilising fast under ‘the cold start’ doctrine and striking hard across the border to pulverise the enemy.