CDS, top tri-services military commanders meet to discuss Maritime Theatre Command

Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan on Tuesday began deliberations with top Military Commanders from the three services about nuances of Maritime Theatre Command

New DelhiNew Delhi: Working towards the creation of three new Theatre Commands, Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan on Tuesday began deliberations with top Military Commanders from the three services about nuances of Maritime Theatre Command and the related issues in the maritime domain.

The meeting of the Chief of Defence Staff with the Commands deployed in the peninsular and Island territories of the country comes a few weeks after he had held a similar meeting with Military Commanders responsible for securing the borders with China.

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“CDS is meeting the senior Military Commanders from the three services including the Andaman and Nicobar Command, Southern Air and Naval Commands, and Navy’s Western and Eastern Commands to discuss the future structures and responsibilities of the Maritime Theatre Command being created to tackle the threats from that domain,” top government sources said.

The Maritime Theatre Command is envisaged to be responsible for tackling threats and security challenges from all sides encompassing the entire Indian Ocean and Pacific region where the activities of the Chinese military have increased in the last many years.

The meetings involving top military commanders are taking place when the CDS is in the advanced stages of strengthening integration and jointness among the defence forces for setting up three new Theatre Commands which will look after threats from the Northern front, the Western front and the maritime domain.

The top leadership of the country created the office of the Chief of Defence Staff over three years ago to enhance jointness and integration among the defence forces for tackling the threat from adversaries in future in a more robust way including the capabilities in both Cyber and Space domains.

The Department of Military Affairs has been mulling over multiple issues including the one that whether the heads of these new formations should be three-star generals or four-star ones.

Most of the suggestions in this regard have been in favour of appointing four-star officers to head these formations as the Theatre Commanders would have many Commander-in-Chief rank officers under them and it would be better that a four-star officer leads them to avoid issues over seniority amongst them and have proper command and control structures in place.

It is also being felt that if the Theatre Commanders are at the three-star rank, the interference of their respective services headquarters may continue in their functioning.

The Chief of Defence Staff along with the Service Chiefs is also ironing out issues of integration and looking at having common rules for discipline, intelligence gathering and operations.

Studies have also been ordered under senior military officers to integrate intelligence gathering, common operations directorate, training, maintenance and logistics.

The DMA is also looking at significant savings with the creation of new formations as a number of existing formations at the Services Headquarters level will get optimised with the raising of new centralised Tri-Services Commands.

The CDS has been working towards achieving consensus amongst the three Service Chiefs regarding important policy aspects related to the Theatre Commands.

The Chiefs are also moving ahead as per the government directives towards a joint and integrated future recently the Air Force Chief visited the Army Air Defence College in Gopalpur, Odisha and the Naval airfield near Visakhapatnam. The Navy Chief also met the senior JCOs of the Three Services as part of the efforts to promote a Tri-Service culture among the forces.The Navy has also started a service-neutral campaign to invite youth to join the forces from Hind Mahasagar to the Himalayas and Kutch to Kohima in this direction.

As part of promoting the Tri-Service culture in the forces, the services are having cross postings of personnel from one force to the other as recently Army officers from Air Defence units are getting posted to the Air Force Surface to Air Missile (SAM) Squadrons.

The joint acquisition of weapon systems has already started in the Armed Forces with the case of procurement of Predator drones from the US to be followed up by the Medium Altitude Long Endurance drones being next on the agenda.

The Services will also have joint maintenance of their equipment like the Helicopters, Small Arms, Aircraft etc to make significant savings both monetarily as well as in time.