Defence Primer

Strategies of Warfighting
Arzan Tarapore
Arzan Tarapore is a PhD candidate in the War Studies Department at King’s College London, and
a non-resident visiting fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. He previously served in the
Australian Defence Department.
India has fought six wars since independence; generally, with the conservative goal of preserving or restoring
the strategic status quo. Its wars against Pakistan in 1947-48, 1965, and 1999, and against China in 1962,
were all defensive actions to repel invasions of its territory. Even its more ambitious campaigns – the 1971
vivisection of Pakistan and the 1987-90 intervention in Sri Lanka – were planned by New Delhi to address
mounting instability and restore regional order. In all cases, India sought to assert its primacy in South Asia
and dissuade extra-regional powers from intervention. As the dominant power of the region, India has long
been satisfied with the geopolitical status quo. And with an increasing focus on accelerating its economic
development, India is invested more than ever in maintaining regional stability. In any future conflicts, India
would likely persist with these conservative policy goals – it would seek to defend territorial boundaries or,
as an emerging “net security provider,”restore regional stability. But, especially given its aggressive program of
military modernization, how would India fight such a conflict? If its strategic goals remain constant, would its
warfighting methods also remain constant? What capabilities would be required for India to develop alternative
ways of using force?
For the purposes of this argument, I posit there are three main force employment methods: force-centric,
terrain-centric, and risk-centric. 1 These are the ways of using force in wartime; along with the policyends and
military means, they define India’s possible strategies of warfighting. Since I assume the ends will be largely
constant – in defence of the status quo – and the military means evolve only very slowly, the ways are the most
variable feature of India’s military strategy. In general, a force-centric campaign targets the enemy’s military
forces, seeking to degrade its capacity to fight. A terrain-centric campaign seeks instead to gain control of
politically-significant features of the landscape. Such key terrain may include natural geographic features,
towns, critical infrastructure, or even specific groups of people – whatever has political significance for that
particular contingency. A risk-centric campaign seeks to gradually escalate pressure on the enemy, inflicting
some harm and signaling the risk of more harm to follow. These ways of using force are ideal types only – in
the practice of warfighting, they coexist and overlap, although campaigns usually emphasise one more than the
others, whether by design or accident.
In the service of its status quo-defending strategic ends, India has usually adopted force-centric strategic ways
in wartime. That is, in most wars India has sought above all to degrade enemy military capabilities, rather than
to seize politically-significant terrain or to escalate pressure on the enemy. In this chapter I argue that each
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