With jointness in operations among the three Services still far from perfect, the Indian armed forces along with top commanders from the Integrated Defence Staff will debate and fine tune their joint war doctrine at a two-day meet beginning in New Delhi on Tuesday.
Defence Minister AK Antony would inaugurate the conference that will discuss the 'Joint War Doctrine' formulated in 2006 and look at resolving the irritants in the relationship among the Army, Navy and the Air Force, according to Ministry of Defence sources.
With 'jointness in operations' emerging as a crucial factor for effectively waging war in the future, the meet marks the third time the unified commanders from the IDS and the important Andaman and Nicobar Command would meet since 2006.
Each of the services have prepared and adopted their own doctrines and vision documents, and the 'Joint War Doctrine' was a baby of the post-Kargil battle churning among the country's defence planners for achieving greater integration and operational cohesiveness among the three arms of the Indian defence forces.
Faced with strong resentment among defence personnel over inadequate salary hikes proposed by sixth pay commission, the unified commanders would discuss its fall out, apart from the tri-services' demands from the Central government for a 'reasonable pay package.'
At the annual conference, the unified commanders from the IDS and the Andaman and Nicobar Tri-Services Command, would raise a pitch for a favourable response to the forces' salary demands through the defence minister , who is slated to inaugurate the two-day meet on June 10.
The Army, Navy and the Air Force have already prepared a case for a substantial revision in the salaries recommended for middle-rung officers from the tri-services and the Personnel Below Officer Rank (PBORs), and presented it to Antony after several brain-storming sessions with the minister and the ministry officials.
While the Justice Srikrishna-headed sixth pay commission had recommended salary hikes for newly-recruited Lieutenants of the Army and their equivalents in the Navy and Air Force, and provided new Military Service Pay to both officers and PBORs, there is a strong feeling that the hardship factor of the Armed Forces service had not been compensated adequately for all personnel.
The middle-rung officers and the PBORs were particularly cut up with the Sixth Pay Commission's recommendations for devaluing their status vis-a-vis officers from the civil services in the order of precedence for protocol.
The three services had come up with separate review reports of the sixth pay commission recommendations and these were presented to the defence ministry officials for preparing a joint demands list for the anomalies committee headed by Cabinet Secretary KM Chandrasekar, sources said.
The conference, sources said, would discuss issues concerning the implementation of phase II of the Ajai Vikram Singh Committee recommendations for cadre restructuring in the Armed Forces. Under Phase II, the Army, Navy and the Air Force would get over 3,000 additional Colonels, Brigadiers, Major Generals and Lieutenant Generals and their equivalent posts in the other two services.
While the Navy and the Air Force wanted a 'fair deal' in the number of higher posts, the Army had been contending that the number of posts should be proportionally distributed across the three services. The Phase I of the AV Singh Committee recommendations up to the rank of Lt Colonels were implemented in 2005.
Antony had personally taken keen interest to expedite the implementation of the Phase II of the AV Singh Committee recommendations.
