OPINION | The Unfinished Debate: Is India Ready for Theatre Commands or Still Searching for a Joint-Warfare Identity?

by Huma Siddiqui

India’s military stands on the edge of a structural transition, yet the core of the debate remains unchanged: Will theatre commands strengthen the Indian Army’s ability to fight and win wars, or will they dilute land-warfighting authority under layers of committee-driven joint structures? The question matters because in any real conflict India faces, whether along the northern borders or on the western front, the burden of combat, logistics, terrain domination, and attrition will fall overwhelmingly on the Army.

For over a decade, Integrated Theatre Commands have been discussed as an inevitable reform. But the momentum of the debate often obscures a fundamental truth: India’s wars are fought, sustained, and won on land. The Army is the service that holds ground, takes casualties, maintains boots in hostile terrain for years at a stretch, and bears the responsibility for defending India’s most active and dangerous frontiers. Any structural reform of warfighting must therefore strengthen, not complicate, the Army’s ability to operate at tempo and mass.

The operational environment leaves little room for theoretical hesitation. The northern borders face a PLA that has transformed its forces through integrated theatre commands, placing land, air, missile, and support elements under unified leadership. The western front features a Pakistan military whose land–air ISR integration, though limited, is still sharper than India’s legacy silo model. Yet India continues to operate 17 separate commands, each running logistics, ISR, and operational planning on distinct lines. The Army has been the first to warn that this fragmentation introduces friction that can cost time and initiative during crises.

The Ladakh standoff made this painfully clear. When India surged nearly 90,000 tonnes of supplies into the high Himalayas in 2020, it was a testament to the Army’s resilience, improvisation, and sheer endurance. Troops, engineers, logisticians, and support units executed one of the largest high-altitude mobilizations in the world. But the entire operation had to navigate through separate service chains, ad hoc coordination, and parallel logistics networks. Commanders with intimate knowledge of the crisis note that a unified theatre logistics command, anchored by the Army’s operational requirements, would have compressed timelines, reduced duplication, and freed critical resources.

This is the essence of the Army’s position: integration must serve the warfighter, not the organizational chart. Airpower and maritime power are essential, but land warfare remains the decisive component of India’s military strategy. The Army cannot fight effectively when ISR, air support, air defense, and battle-space management are routed through distant command structures that do not operate at the tempo of ground battle. The Army’s view is simple, theatre commands must empower the ground commander, not dilute his control.

The Indian Air Force’s concern about distributing limited fighter squadrons across multiple theatres is legitimate, but it cannot overshadow the operational reality that airpower exists to support joint objectives, the bulk of which are land battles. The Indian Navy’s preference for a powerful Maritime Theatre Command is valid in the Indian Ocean context, but this cannot come at the cost of sidelining the Army’s centrality to joint operations on the nation’s most contested borders.

In practice, the Army has already moved ahead of the debate. The integration of Akashteer into the IACCS grid, the development of joint air-defense nodes, and increasing tri-service exercises all demonstrate that the Army has embraced jointness where it enhances operational outcomes. Operation SINDOOR, with its fused sensors and cross-linked operations rooms, showed that India’s military can respond as a single force when the situation demands it. But it also reinforced a deeper truth: during crises, the Army carries the weight of escalation, territorial integrity, and sustained operations. Theatre structures must reinforce this reality, not blur it.

Theatre commands cannot be designed as equal slices of authority. They must reflect India’s geography, adversaries, and the nature of conflict. Northern and Western theatres, the epicenter of potential high-intensity land warfare, must be Army-led. Command authority in these theatres must rest with generals who understand terrain, attrition dynamics, mobilization depth, and the complex logistics backbone required to fight prolonged, high-altitude, battle-intensive campaigns.

Another area where the Army’s perspective is indispensable is logistics, the spine of warfare. Land warfare consumes the bulk of ammunition, fuel, winter clothing, engineering material, and medical evacuation infrastructure. No other service operates under such severe constraints of terrain, weather, and altitude for such long durations. Without placing the Army at the center of theatre logistics planning, India risks creating elegant structures that falter under real-world pressure.

The stakes are clear. India’s adversaries are evolving toward faster, more integrated, and more technologically fused battle networks. Decisions will need to be made within minutes. ISR has to flow seamlessly from satellites to forward posts. Air defense must be layered and unified. Electronic warfare and cyber warfare must be immediately aligned with kinetic options. These imperatives place the Army, the service responsible for holding the line, at the heart of theatre command design.

The question India must answer is not whether theatre commands are desirable. It is whether theatre commands will be built around the operational center of gravity, the Indian Army, or around an abstract idea of “jointness” that looks neat on paper but collapses under the weight of actual combat.

India cannot afford to adopt theatre commands that dilute the Army’s authority in the very theatres where its soldiers will do the fighting and dying. If implemented correctly, theatre commands can be the catalyst for a sharper, faster, and more resilient warfighting machine. But that requires recognizing a simple, unavoidable fact: India’s wars are decided on land. The Army must lead the commands that matter most.

The unfinished debate is not indecision; it is a struggle to ensure that structural reform does not undermine battlefield effectiveness. And when India finally transitions to theatre commands, the measure of success will be straightforward: whether the Army emerges stronger, more agile, and better prepared to defend every inch of India’s territory when the moment of reckoning arrives.

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About Author

Huma Siddiqui is a senior journalist with more than three decades of experience covering Defense, Space, and the Ministry of External Affairs. She began her career with The Financial Express in 1993 and moved to FinancialExpress.com in 2018. Her reporting often integrates defence and foreign policy with economic diplomacy, with a particular focus on Afro-Asia and Latin America.