"Taking POK" - a discussion of some technical aspects - V
In the
previous post, I worked through my understanding of the Pakistani strategic perspective and how that might influence their response to an Indian attempt at "Taking POK".
Now I want to walk through some of the loose ends. These are things to which I feel there are no obvious answers or no answers at all.
Let's start with the issue of nuclear weapons.
Can Pakistan use its tactical nuclear weapons in a "counterforce" role in this conflict? - Well... yes but if used in "Azad Kashmir" - the clouds of radioactive dust will end up falling on Pakistan's national capital region. In Gilgit Baltistan, if such weapons are used, then it is likely the fallout will contaminate the Indus River which supplies water to most of Pakistan. A certain group of Indians believe this makes it unlikely that Pakistan will use nuclear weapons in this case. I do not agree with this assessment as it assumes a "rational actor" model. I am more inclined to take an expansive view of the Kidwai "red lines" (sometimes called Musharraf's Red Lines) - as I feel any immediate loss of face in Kashmir is likely to have personal repercussions for Pakistan's military leadership - that makes a discussion on "rationality" difficult.
Can India use its nuclear weapons to coerce Pakistan into backing off on its land grab? - Sure - but then that visibly crosses a red line. If India does that, Pakistani Generals will simply as - "So what is to stop them from doing this and marching into Karachi or Islamabad tomorrow? ". You can see where that thinking leads.
I think it is safe to say - that as soon as the conflict erupts Pakistan will clearly signal its desire to use nuclear weapons for its defense. How the Modi government will manage that - I cannot foresee. I feel a race a to dominate the ensuing escalation will follow. I cannot guarantee that in the fog of war - mistakes will
not be made and a breakdown of nuclear deterrence will
not occur.
Even if neither of those things happen - i.e. no mistakes and no breakdown - there is a problem. Truth be told, no one wants to really fight a nuclear war but just look like they will do it if needed. The real strategic use of nuclear weapons is mainly to create a circumstance by which your opponent is bankrupted by arsenal servicing costs. If in the rush for escalation dominance - the "no mating" clause is broken, then it unclear if either Indian or Pakistani economies will survive the costs of maintaining a sizable nuclear arsenal at a high level of readiness.
There is the troubling matter of the fog of war.
Communications in the mountains are quite challenging. Mountains absorb radio waves and unless satellites are available to bounce signals over them, it is difficult to retain connectivity. I am obviously touching upon the "third dimension" aspect of modern warfare which is quite crucial to success in any military expedition, but I do not want to get into the specifics of how that will play out. It suffices to say that whoever is able to maintain the logistics of information (high velocity data transport, and reliable encryption) will have an advantage in the battles that follow. There is no clarity on this issues really and the entire field is rife with disruptive technologies. It is impossible to really estimate the impact this will have on the fog of war on either side.
And will the fog of war created in one theater of operations couple to others? Will the fog spread from conventional theaters to nuclear theaters? - I don't know if there an answer to that*.
Now we can briefly talk about the thing that we should ONLY have talked about - the economic cost of "Taking POK".
I pointed out that the gains for India for "Taking POK" are more in the non-monetizable realm - but the costs of mobilizing such a military expedition are in the monetizable realm. As with any war - one can pay for it by creating debt as long as there is some hope of economic growth which will pay the war debt. If such growth can't be arranged, the expedition will result in more damage to the aggressor than to the target. An economy with a declining growth rate offers little chance of paying off war debts. And paradoxically in history - every failing economy has a political group that attempts to promote war as an avenue to economic revitalization**. When the war inevitably leads to an internal economic collapse, the resulting famine and disease kill far more people than the enemy fire ever did. No matter how many times nations play this game - they always lose and somehow generations of people forget to learn this key lesson. There is no way to predict economic growth obtained by stealing the land next door - especially when the land grows no food, has no minerals and generally brings with it hostile populations who resist assimilation.
In short - Yes India can think about "Taking POK" and probably do it too - but the Indian economy may not grow as a result of this campaign and without growth - the war debt will not be serviceable. This bad debt will cause a depression. If you think the present recession is bad, perhaps you should not consider ideas that will invite a depression.
That is all I have to say for now. If I think of anything more I will write about it.
* Usually when a physicist tells you "I don't know if there is an answer to that question" - you should really consider stopping that line of thinking - but that's just my suggestion. I provide physical models of complex dynamics for a living, and I usually see great misfortunes when people forge ahead with poorly posed physics at the root of their engineering schemes.
** I actually use the desire to go to war in a national security mechanism as good gauge of how bad the true growth in the economy is. Today in developed economies it is very easy to hide debt and create hedonomic numbers that look awesome while the real economy crumbles. When elements of a national security mechanism start talking about war - that suggests to me that their nation is in a very different economic place than the numbers are showing on their central bank's website.
"Taking POK" - a discussion of some technical aspects - IV
In the
last post, I brought up the basic challenge associated with running a logistical line in this context. Needless to say - there are way more issues than I touched upon but those are big ones I see.
I left out the details of the formations and locations and kept to a high level picture. In this post I will talk through how I feel Pakistanis will think about this conflict. As before I will restrict myself to a high level picture and leave out details of formations and locations.
Again -
I do not think this action by India is productive, but the idea of "Taking POK" has become very popular among some people in India and I just want to point out how this may not go as they naively think it will.
The Pakistani Army is quite used to the threat posed by the Indian Army in Kashmir. They are well aware of their own logistical weaknesses and that is one of the key reasons why they chose to support the Khalistan and Kashmiri insurgencies - to keep the ground wet under India's feet. If India's feet were on dry ground, it's army might break out into a run straight at Pakistani Kashmir!
While much is made of Pakistanis and their kinship with Kashmiris and the shared religion etc..., the reality of Pakistan's interest in Kashmir is quite pragmatic and driven by geography. The Kashmir area affords them a lot of depth for their national capital region and critical national security facilities like the Mangla Dam, the Mashood Test Firing Range, the Kahuta Nuclear Facility and so on. The Pakistan Army would take a very negative view of an Indian intrusion into "Azad Kashmir" and react very strongly to that.
The Pakistani Army most likely thinks that Gilgit Baltistan defends itself due to geography. The Karakoram Highway is a very big expression of the closeness of Pakistan-China ties, but fundamentally moving anything down the KKH is quite costly and it is more cost effective just to provide the Chinese berthing facilities and base in Gwadur. The one part about an Indian move on Gilgit Baltistan that will really upset the Pakistanis is the possibility of India grabbing control over so much hydroelectric potential, but as I said elsewhere this discussion is not as big a part of Pakistani national security discussions as it should IMHO be.
So Yes, Pakistanis will be angry with India's actions and they will feel violated by the Indian Army but they have felt that way forever now and quite frankly they know how to cope with those feelings a lot better than India knows how to cope with whatever it's feelings are on Kashmir. For decades now Pakistan has told the world that India is a belligerent terrorist state that will stop at nothing to destroy Pakistan. Over the last three decades that view has been difficult to sell internationally as India had successfully portrayed Pakistan as the epicenter of global Jihadi terrorism.
So looking at things pragmatically (not to make light of any true concern that Pakistanis may have for their Kashmiri neighbors) - from the Pakistani Army perspective - Azad Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan are merely mountainous sponges where Indian Army resources will be sucked in and bled out. As a result of this, quite literally these places will draw fire away from sensitive national security zones further to the south. This picture (though terrifying in humanitarian terms) is actually quite logical.
When Indian Kashmir ran like a real democracy, it was very difficult for Pakistani strategists to provoke Indians into a self-destructive conflict there. They had to use Jihadis to stir up the pot and in doing so provoke India into stupid and outrageous behavior. The tactic works well when India is feeling particularly foolish. After the missteps in the late 80s, India lost ground to Pakistani provocations but through pain toil and tears, things were returning to normalcy prior to 2014. Now sadly, India is pursuing an aggressive nationalist image, we are wedded to a timeline where the amount of effort Pakistan has to put in to get India to behave stupidly is reducing precipitously. Once the Indian Army crosses the LoC in pursuit of a "Taking POK" mission - the level of Pakistani effort at sustaining their strategic vision of Kashmir will be minimal. The mountains will be doing all the work and the Pakistan Army General Staff will be largely sitting on its rear drinking whiskey.
An effective Pakistani strategy in the context of India "Taking POK" would be to put up a solid effort of resisting the rapid Indian advances in the Muzaffarabad area and Gilgit Baltistan but to really concentrate its reserve formations south of Muzaffarabad closer to its own crucial national security zone. The sacrifice of a few defensive formations (Chakothi, Rawalakot, Bagh, Muzaffarabad, Minimarg to name a few) alone would be sufficient to give the impression that Pakistan did everything possible to stop an Indian advance.
In the highly constrained movement corridors of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan - the most successful approach for mounting a defense would be similar to the Finnish Motti tactic used in the Winter War against the Soviet Union. It is unclear if the Pakistan Army would be able to action on such a tactical approach or it would revert into the Niazi approach of trying to hold major population centers. I feel they could use their considerable local knowledge and supportive population to mount this type of attack against Indian Army columns. If they use this tactic in Gilgit Baltistan, a relatively small number of Pakistani units should be able to inflict disproportionate damage on India's forces in this way. This is exactly what happened in Kashmir during the 1990s (in case you didn't know that).
As the Indian offensive would naturally create massive refugee crises and staggering collateral damage and the Pakistanis would have to provide relief to them, they would project these efforts on the international stage and successfully be able to push its narrative on India as a bellicose regional power.
This mostly concludes what I have to say on this part of the "Taking POK" story. A few loose ends remain and I will address those in the
next post.
"Taking POK" - a discussion of some technical aspects - III
As I said at the end of the
last post, I will restrict this part of the discussion to a high level and avoid getting drawn into discussions on OrBats or exact positions of various POL dumps in the region.
And again to reiterate I do not think this kind of operation is a good idea as India-Pakistan relations go or as global stability goes.
A sustainable operation is one where the operator is able to bring enough POL to last the duration of the operation and a significant time beyond. This is the hardest part of the entire "Taking POK" idea - Pakistani Kashmir has no native oil reserves or refineries. Every drop of POL used in this conflict will have to be brought from reserves or refineries a thousand miles away. This is not an unusual aspect as modern warfare goes - the sinews of war have to be strong otherwise the war-fighting muscles will not flex properly.
Generally speaking - the amount of fuel use scales with number of troops committed, the number of armored vehicles (AFV, Tanks, APC etc...) and the number of artillery pieces committed. For each of those things, apart from whatever POL is required for the actual maneuver - repair/resupply operations (machines need spares and munitions to remain viable, and the human beings need food) also need POL.
When planning such an operation, one has to consider how to
correctly forecast the POL usage scenarios down to each unit in the expeditionary force. Prediction relies on having good models of what will happen under combat conditions. As India has indulged in numerous feuds with Pakistan in these mountains, there are good models for this kind of thing in India. I am reasonably confident that the Indian Army with its extensive experience in operating the logistics in the Saltoro War and in the Kargil War is capable of building a workable forecast for POL use at least for the period of the operation.
As long as there are good prediction models, it should be possible to stockpile the right amounts of men and materiel on India's side of Kashmir. There are stable rail links in the Valley right from Banihal to Baramulla. The railway line from Katra to Banihal is still under construction but there are multiple roads that can be used go around this bottleneck and is a working railway line from Katra to Jammu.
It is plausible the PAF could disrupt the Indian supply lines. It has the necessary capabilities, but what it lacks is real numbers needed to dominate the airspace for extended periods of time. Similarly Pakistani backed Kashmiri insurgents could disrupt the lines of communication inside Indian Kashmir but these would at best be temporary disruptions and the Indian Army could bypass these disruptions with its vast reserves inside Kashmir. This kind of thing was also at play during Soviet operations in Afghanistan. The Soviet Army devised an ingenious solution to the mobility issue. It created special units that would quickly seize heights overlooking the main supply routes just before a maneuver or movement. The result was a rapid suppression of opposing activity and pin point strikes against any mujaheddin who were in parked there. These tactics were used to some extent by the US also after 2001. It is possible to counteract such interference.
The picture of the logistics as one goes deep into Pakistani Kashmir becomes cloudy. The Indian Army model for the logistics is likely to have more assumptions built into it as it has little direct knowledge of the transportation inside Pakistani Kashmir and the Pakistani holding formations will mount significant resistance to the advance of Indian forces.
The picture of logistics presented above will also be very cloudy for the "morning after" i.e. if the Indian operation in POK does succeed, they will then be holding a large chunk of Pakistani Kashmir and India will be on the hook for providing government services and relief to the local population and any prisoners of war they have. I feel the forecasts for POL use after the maneuver period of the operation will be quite useless and fresh models will be needed.
This all looks quite good - until one realizes that merely having a forecast and actually getting POL to the forward edge of operations are two entirely separate things. As one gets to the forward edge, one runs into a last mile issue. For example consider what happens to a column on one of these mountain roads. Say the lead vehicle has to be supplied with fuel. One has to mount a bucket brigade of jerrycans from the tanker to the lead vehicle. That takes time. The time required rises substantially if the column is also taking fire.
So all in - I feel there are some open questions whether the supply chain of the Indian Army will be up to the immense task of a rapid maneuver in these constricted mountain spaces of Pakistani Kashmir. The Indian Army has had some experience in Kargil and Saltoro conflicts but in both those cases the operational supply lines passed through Indian Kashmir and not Pakistani Kashmir, the tempo of operations was low, and mechanized forces were not involved - so it is not clear how much by way of learning can be transferred from there.
I feel the problem of the "morning after" is quite serious and has to be dealt with in a separate framework or India will end up in the same place as the US in Iraq 2004 - rapidly seizing control of the land but facing an uphill or impossible task of governing the space.
In the
next post, I will speak to the issue of likely Pakistani responses and how those might be different from what most might naively expect in this context.
"Taking POK" - a discussion of some technical aspects - II
As seen in the earlier
post, "Taking POK" is possible in a limited sense (
even though I don't think it is a good idea) and there are reasons why India might choose to take such an approach but there is a lot of technical aspects that could strongly affect the ability to actually do this.
The tactical picture of fighting in the mountains favors whoever holds the heights but the strategic picture of fighting in the mountains favors whoever can keep their supply lines clear. Higher is better in most warfare, but in paradoxically in mountain warfare - higher is harder to resupply.
If the Pakistan Army holds heights above key roads in the region, it can direct plunging fire to disrupt movement on those roads*. Similarly if the Indian Army takes Skardu Airport, the Pakistani Army will seize nearby heights and direct fire at the airport runway preventing India from turning it into a logistical hub**. This sort of counter-intuitive tactical picture will continue to present in the event of any Indian action in the region.
That said - all those Pakistani Army positions will have to be resupplied in some way, otherwise they will run out of food and weapons and eventually be taken out by Indian forces. So here we see a very crucial aspect of mountain warfare - that the fighting is only sustainable as long as key positions (OP/LPs) can be re-supplied***. All resupply operations revolve around the availability of enough POL so it all basically boils down to logistics. And if the cost of Pakistani jerrycan of petrol in the theater of conflict is higher(lower) than the cost of an Indian jerrycan of petrol then India wins (loses).
While it is easy in a discussion about "Taking POK" to get drawn into parallels with
Manstein's plan for the Maginot Line (yes there are some similarities there but many differences). It is important to note that window for operations is very short in the "POK" theater. For example - the best case time for
1) Skardu to Skardu Mor (R. Gilgit meets R Indus) along S-1 is 5 Hrs.
2) Kaksar to Jn of Astore Valley Road and KKH is 5 Hrs.
3) Khrool to Skardu (Along the Shingo River Road) is 4 Hrs.
4) Uri to Muzzarfarabad (along the S-3) is 2 Hrs.
5) Titwal to Muzzafarabad (assuming you cross R Jhelum somehow) is 2 Hrs.
6) Poonch to Rawalakot is about 2 Hrs
7) Baghsar to Mangla Dam is about 3 Hrs.
Assuming a constant inflation factor to account for all possible vagaries - we are looking at a window of
ONE DAY here. This is a reasonable amount of time in the context of modern military logistics but it does form a critical boundary of sorts on what can be reasonably expected out of a modern military expedition.
Then there are Pakistani redlines to consider. Critical Pakistani resources like the Mangla Dam lie in southern parts of Pakistani Kashmir. Any Indian invasion force that comes too close to those will end up raising the possibility of a nuclear escalation.
So we can see a natural contour for operations emerging from such thinking.
The proposed operation will have to work within a limited time window (including allowances for Pakistani counter-actions and natural obstacles). It will have to steer clear anything too far south as that will invite a nuclear escalation. So basically it has to remain north of Rawalakot and west of Skardu.
As far the first objective of ending the "Azad Kashmiri" will to fight goes, the Muzaffarabad area is the relevant center of gravity. It is a large population center and "investing" (i.e. with stand off weapons) in it will paralyze the region as refugees fleeing the Indian Army advance will clog all roads leading west.There are two ways to get to Muzaffarabad from the Indian side, one from the Tangdhar side and one from the Uri side, both offer some challenges by way building a bridge or two across fast moving waters but nothing that seems impossible on the face of it. It is likely that in the event that India makes a move towards Muzaffarabad, it will effectively pin the Pakistani Army Reserve North (ARN/ 1st Strike Corps) to a position between Muzaffarabad and the Mangla reservoir. The ARN will want to refrain from getting in the middle and instead remain in reserve should Indian eyes wander towards Mangla or the Kahuta area.
As regards the second objective of permanently snapping the KKH, again we see two options. First goes from Khrool area in India, up the Shingo River Road to Skardu and then along the S-1 to Skardu Morr (north of Jaglot) where the R Indus and R Gilgit meet. The second goes from Kaksar to junction of the Astore Valley Road and the KKH at the point where the R Indus and R Thelichi meet near the base of Nanga Parbat. At a simple analysis - the latter seems preferable to the former (as the former has a longer window of action and meets more Pakistani Army formations). Either ways breaking the KKH at Skardu Morr or at the sangam of the Thelichi and the Indus will force the Chinese and Pakistanis to build out a highly unstable bypass through the Gilgit River valley north from Gahkuch to Chitral.
In the
next blog post, I will focus on the battle of the logistics accompanying this sort of thing and how the price of petrol at the forward edge of battle plays into the notion of sustainable operations in this context. I will leave the discussion of the order of battle and other similar details as an exercise to the reader or to other commentators who may be in a position to offer insight****. I will also leave details of positions of known dispersal areas for POL dumps to other OSINT experts.
*They already demonstrated the ability to do this in Kargil in 1999 in case some of you have forgotten. They nearly shut the 1-Alpha down.
** They keep trying to do this with Jihadi proxies in Indian Kashmir. It is a major pain to keep the zone around the airports sanitized.
*** Something the Pakistani Army didn't do well in the Kargil War or on the Saltoro Ridge.
**** I no longer trust the OrBat data and Corps Commanders lists I have. I haven't bothered to update them so I am reluctant to base a discussion off them.
"Taking POK" - a discussion of some technical aspects - I
An old
friend asked me to comment on some of the technical issues involved in "Taking POK" and I agreed to do it.
I want to be clear about this from the outset. I am merely analyzing the technical aspects as best known to me. I am not in any way/shape/form advocating that "taking POK" is a good thing, only recognizing that it has become a popular discussion and it is time to highlight the technical aspects.
Let us begin by briefly reviewing key facts about the region.
Pakistani Kashmir consists of two parts - "Azad Kashmir" and "Gilgit-Baltistan". Both areas are very mountainous and many parts are covered with snow during the bulk of the year. As the snow melts, water from the melting snow causes unpredictable shifts in the patterns of the flow in rivers and streams. As the entire area is at a high altitude, there is little vegetation and soil erosion from mountains results in unpredictable silt dams being formed. The same kind of thing also happens in winter where snow collects in unexpected ways along rivers and streams creating snow dams. All this complicates the picture of flooding and communication in the region.
There are very few roads between key population centers in "Azad Kashmir" or "Gilgit Baltistan" and for the most part these communication links are easily snapped by bad weather or avalanches or landslides. It is common to experience "heave" in many of these roads - the routine seasonal temperature changes (winter to summer and back) produce shifts in the soil and which in turn weaken or break the tarmac above it.
Most of the roads here are one lane only - it is difficult for two vehicles to pass each other. In many places along these roads, there are bridges that cross various rivers and streams. A number of these bridges can only support small loads and thus are likely to break if one drives a lot of vehicles over them in a short amount of time.
If you start driving on one of these roads, you find yourself stuck for hours behind traffic. A single motor vehicle accident or landslide or bridge collapse can shut down the road for hours or even days. It is a very shaky picture as road transportation goes. The Pakistani Army relies on air mobility to supplement critical road transport but it still has to transport the bulk of its supply by truck and that is quite expensive. A liter of petrol costs way more in Pakistani Kashmir than it does in Karachi!
Neither "Azad Kashmir" nor "Gilgit Baltistan" are really known for possessing great mineral wealth. There is a small robust tourism industry in these parts and small amounts of mining. There are too few people there to really exploit this economic potential and a large fraction of the population is made up of expats from Pakistani Punjab, Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunwa.
The economy of Pakistani Kashmir is largely held in place by shipments of oil to Pakistani military installations which create the necessary infrastructural pull to make it economically feasible to supply local populations. There is a great ongoing discussion in Pakistan that this region can be used to create massive hydroelectric power resources for the rest of Pakistan* but that has yet to make the huge impact it should (sadly).
Normally invading a mountainous region like this is senseless (Look at Europe - no one ever invades Switzerland for the same reason!) but over the last thirty years, there has been a slow and steady improvement in the regional infrastructure (in part because of the Saltoro War and the Kargil War) and this has enhanced the ability to do certain things. So is an Indian invasion of POK possible? Yes, but... there is more to think about... lots more.
It is reasonable to ask why would India attack POK? I can see only two likely reasons for India doing this.
1)
To punish the people of "Azad Kashmir": Most of the people in Pakistani Kashmir live in the southern part (from Muzaffarabad down). A number of these people are refugees from the Indian side. Having been most affected by the ongoing tragedy of Kashmir, these populations have a deep hostility towards India and form a perennial source of manpower of groups like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. Those groups have killed a lot of Indians. Any move to punish the people of "Azad Kashmir", to
impose 10,000 KIA/hr death rates on them and
end their will to fight India - is likely to be
extremely popular among Modi worshipers.
2)
To snap the Karakorum Highway: If there is anything Modi haters and Modi worshipers both dislike - it is the manner in which China exploits Pakistan's fight with India. The Karakorum Highway (KKH) links Pakistan to China and is a vital part of the China reach for the Arabian sea. Most senior members of the Indian national security establishment openly take a negative view of the KKH and the debt obligations imposed on Pakistan by the China Pakistan Economic Cooperation agreement (CPEC). They seem to think that Pakistan will never repay this debt and India will have to indirectly pay it - so they would much prefer it if this KKH and CPEC were brought to an abrupt end.
In the
next blog post - I will discuss the technical challenges associated with proceeding towards the aforementioned objectives with military options.
* No surprise that I am a huge supporter of that idea. I have always supported the idea of a prosperous and confident Pakistan and this is a much better use of Pakistani Kashmir than the previous use popular in the last thirty years - i.e. a laboratory for crazy Jihadi ideas!
