“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt”, said Sun Tzu almost 3000 years ago. Surprise and deception have always been a vital element in all operations. Does the predator tell its prey that it is coming for it before it hunts it down? Did we tell the enemy that we were coming for him before Uri and Balakot? If one does not prepare for the enemy’s next move, he will be surprised and maybe killed. That is the ugly truth of war. Therefore, I feel that the ongoing noise about the “treachery” shown by China is naivete at its best. I am sure that our military planners are well ahead of the enemy in their OODA Loop notwithstanding the dust being raised in the media.
Secondly there is a lot of indignation about how soldiers fought with sticks and stones “like cavemen”. The purists are outraged and will have none of it. After all wars are supposed to be clean, glamorous and glorious, all at the same time in their view. High tech weapons including fanciful equipment will win the day! My humble submission is that wars and their battles and engagements within have always been and will always be messy affairs. Who knows it better than the old blood and guts infantry man whose role is to close in with the enemy and destroy him in close quarter combat. All of us remember the lessons given to us in unarmed combat in our younger days. Vulnerable parts of the human body. Parts of the human body that can be used as weapons when no weapons are around, whatever the reason. The battle of Stalingrad, arguably one of the most vicious and long drawn battles of WW 2 was fought in the sewers and drains of Stalingrad in the final stages. Soldiers from both sides used pieces of debris, iron rods, crow bars, stones, bare hands, feet and teeth and whatever else they could lay their hands on, against each other. The most high tech army in the modern day world, the US army has engaged the Taliban in hand to hand combat on more than one occasion. This is what fighting is all about. The soldier must always be the hunter, thinking ten steps ahead of his prey, only then he will succeed on the ground. Meaningless rhetoric and tall talk does no good to anyone. The soldier and his squad leader knows it better than anyone else that there is only one motto ‘prepare and rehearse, prepare and rehearse, prepare and rehearse’.
Categories