Theatre Commands and the Unfinished Reform of India's Higher Defence Organisation

When the government created the post of Chief of Defence Staff in December 2019, following the recommendations of the Kargil Review Committee and the Naresh Chandra task force, it was billed as the most consequential change to India's higher defence organisation since Independence. The mandate was clear enough on paper: bring about jointness in operations, logistics, transport, training, support services, communications and maintenance across the Army, Navy and Air Force, and eventually stand up integrated theatre commands that would fight future wars under unified operational control rather than as three separate services coordinating awkwardly at the margins. Six years on, the CDS post has been filled twice, a Department of Military Affairs has been established within the Ministry of Defence, and several tri-service structures have been created. But the centrepiece of the reform, integrated theatre commands, remains a work in progress whose contours keep shifting.

Why Jointness Is Hard, Not Just Resisted

It has become fashionable in strategic commentary to attribute the delay entirely to service parochialism, and there is something to that charge. Each service has understandably guarded its budgetary autonomy, its promotion pathways and its distinct operational culture, built over decades of independent institutional development. The Air Force in particular has voiced concern that a theatre commander from a different service background might misallocate a scarce and expensive asset like fighter squadrons across competing theatre demands, diluting the concentrated air power that modern warfare rewards. But it would be a mistake to reduce this entirely to turf protection. India's geography is unusual: two active fronts with China and Pakistan, an extended coastline, island territories far from the mainland, and internal security commitments that do not map neatly onto any theatre boundary. The American and Chinese theatre command models, often cited as templates, were built for different geographies and different civil-military relationships. Designing an Indian model requires solving a genuinely difficult problem, not merely overcoming institutional inertia, though both forces are undoubtedly at work.

The Command Structure Debate

The internal debate has reportedly settled on a broad architecture of an air defence command, a maritime theatre command, and one or more land-centric theatre commands facing Pakistan and China separately, though the exact number and boundaries have been revised more than once. Each iteration raises fresh questions. A single command spanning the western and northern fronts would ask one theatre commander to hold responsibility for both Pakistan and China simultaneously, an enormous span given how differently those two adversaries fight and how differently India's force posture must respond to each. Splitting them risks recreating the very stovepipes the reform was meant to dissolve, this time organised by geography rather than by service. The maritime command raises its own puzzle, since the Navy's areas of interest extend from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca Strait, a canvas that does not sit comfortably inside a fixed continental theatre boundary. None of these are reasons to abandon the exercise, but they explain why credible timelines have repeatedly slipped.

The Cost of Delay

None of this complexity should obscure a real cost. India's current arrangement, with seventeen single-service commands reporting up separate chains, produces duplication in logistics, training establishments and even procurement specifications that a leaner joint structure could eliminate, freeing resources for modernisation at a time when capital budgets remain tight relative to ambition. More importantly, operational experience from Kargil onward has shown that ad hoc coordination between services under crisis conditions is a poor substitute for institutionalised joint planning built up over years of peacetime exercises and shared doctrine. The 2020 Galwan clash and the subsequent multi-year stand-off in eastern Ladakh demonstrated that China's own theatre command reforms, completed in 2016, gave the PLA a integrated Western Theatre Command capable of coordinating army, air force, rocket force and strategic support force assets under one operational commander facing India. India's continued reliance on separate service headquarters coordinating through liaison arrangements is not a fatal weakness, as the Ladakh stand-off showed India could still respond credibly, but it is a structural disadvantage that compounds with time.

What a Workable Model Would Require

A workable Indian model will likely need to move more incrementally than the original 2020 announcement suggested, building joint logistics and joint training commands first, testing command relationships through exercises before committing force structures permanently, and accepting that some functions, such as strategic air defence over the entire country, may need a functional rather than geographic command structure. The Andaman and Nicobar Command, India's only existing tri-service command, offers a small but instructive laboratory precisely because its narrow mandate has let it work through genuine jointness questions on a manageable scale before those lessons are exported to larger, higher-stakes theatres. Political oversight matters too: the Cabinet Committee on Security will need to adjudicate disputes between services that officers alone cannot resolve, and Parliament's standing committee on defence has a legitimate role in reviewing progress rather than leaving the reform entirely to internal military negotiation.

Getting the Sequence Right

The temptation in Indian policy debate is to treat any delay as failure and any announcement as achievement, but higher defence reorganisation is one area where sequence matters more than speed. Israel and Britain took the better part of a decade to bed down far more modest joint structures than what India is attempting across a much larger and more diverse force. What would be genuinely worrying is not a further slip in the announced date but a decision to force through an organisational chart without resolving the doctrinal and resourcing questions underneath it, since a theatre command created only in name would combine the costs of reorganisation with none of the benefits of actual jointness, and India's adversaries would notice the difference long before any parliamentary committee did.