(An edited version of this article was first carried in the Indian Naval Despatch --Summer 2021)
FLASHBACK TO 1969
WHAT OUR SYNCRETIC TRAINING TRADITIONS CAN LEARN FROM
EXPOSURE TO THE SOVIET UNION.
1. PERHAPS THE MOST DIFFICULT decade for
our Armed forces was the 60’s. 1962 Sino-Indian war exposed our chinks on the
land border, without testing the Airforce and the Navy. 1965 Indo-Pak war was a
stalemate; until 1971 placed us right on top. Not often is one blessed to see a
new Nation born in a short war of under two weeks. The army had to handle 93000
prisoners of war and oversee their repatriation to Pakistan. Having been posted
in Islamabad in 1985, I can personally vouch for the goodwill that our Army
earned while looking after the wellbeing of Pakistani prisoners in make-shift camps.
The Geneva convention was followed in letter and spirit.
2. But this is not about the war. This
story is about how the USSR trained us to be effective in combat. In fact, they
could not have believed that we would use their platforms as well and at times,
better than they could. Quite by default, they had created just the environment
to make our crew bond as never before. This captures the gist of what happened
on a remote island off the secret city of Vladivostok in 1969.
3. So secret was our training mission
that little was known about the very Missile boats that we were to acquire.
Need-to-know communication and the absence of reference material on both the
city and the platform merely helped to accentuate the mystery.
4. In our early 20’s, unlike the senior
officers with families, we didn’t really care much about our destination. Not
many of this generation may know that in the the1950s and 60s an average Indian had
to struggle for any comfort that is taken for granted today. Naxalism and
Maoism had begun to make an impact on our way of life, although peripheral at
that time. Getting a phone or a vehicle meant waiting for years.
5. We lived in non-airconditioned ships
infested with giant bandicoots. Cabins below upper decks were uninhabitable to sleep
at night. Most of us would carry our beds to the open decks just to sleep.
Poverty and total lack of infrastructure meant that an average Indian could
sleep on any hard surface despite air and noise pollution. We were content with our lives since we were better
off than many of our countrymen. Going to the Soviet Union we thought, was a
leap from the third world to the First World.
6. And so, in August 1969 when we were dumped on an island
8kms from the nearest land which was accessible only by tightly controlled boat
services, in a secret city called Vladivostok, it did not worry us. Our navy
had been training there for the Foxtrot class submarines and the Petya class
frigates. When we landed with over a hundred officers and men, the Island
hosted the largest Indian naval contingent in the USSR.
.
7. The Soviet Union and its Warsaw-pact allies were in direct
conflict with the USA and its NATO and other allies, in a bipolar contest.
India was seen as an ally of the West despite our “non-aligned” profile. Paradoxically,
until then, we were trained, manned, and taught to fight by the West. Our
training, doctrines, traditions, logistics, and thinking were aligned to the
West. Due to the Iron curtain and the non-availability of the opportunity to
understand Marxism and Leninism, we were ill-equipped to even understand Soviet philosophy. This included the social and economic underpinning that formed
the very basis of their ideology and existence. Most of our Officer Corps was
not exposed to university education, where conflicts of Eastern and Western
ideologies were a way of life. Given the abhorrence of the West to Socialism
and Communism, “liberals” often clashed with the rest.
8. Here was an apolitical Military with little knowledge of what
the word Socialism meant (the word “socialist” had not been inserted into our
constitution at that time) was suddenly thrown into the lap of Marxism/Leninism.
None in India or none in the USSR was able to foresee a conflict of interest
encompassing all activities of Military life. Let us examine a few examples and
what transpired.
9. The Soviet Union was a powerful country that had adopted a
Command Economy of highly centralized planning. To meet its ideological and
singular focus on beating the West, it invested heavily in education, science
and technology, child welfare, and the Military. Given the natural resources
spread over almost a continent and tight control over human resources and
central planning, it made rapid strides in missile and space technologies in
particular. But just then USSR was also in conflict with China on its eastern
border. It was ironic that two powerful Communist powers could not see eye to
eye. The Sino-soviet clash gave the
opportunistic USA, to establish contacts with the Chinese with the assistance
of their ally, Pakistan (the Kissinger -Zhou in lai meeting occurred in Aug
1970) By then the USSR had extended political, economic, and military support
to Egypt, Iraq, Syria, India, and Cuba among the non-Warsaw pact countries.
10. The point relevant to my story is that until the mid-1960s the
Soviets did not have to deal with the Military of a free, democratic, and highly diverse country like ours. Dealing with us was an episode by itself. For
us, this was completely uncharted territory.
11. Here were some unforeseen problems. The Indians stumped
them with their dietary preferences. We had vegetarians, non-vegetarians,
chickenatarians (no red meat) fishetarians (fish= vegetable) eggetarian and so
on. Neither were they equipped to prepare a multi-cuisine meal nor were they
able to procure vegetables of choice in a neglected part of the Soviet Union. A
single middle-aged lady could serve food to a large contingent of Indians and
keep the dining area clean. An unimaginable proposition in an overpopulated
India. In an underpopulated country that took pride in bestowing the highest
award to a Mother who could deliver 12 children to meet the demographic profile
of the Govt, the human resource was a strategic shortcoming.
12. The USSR had conscripts at the lower rung on compulsory
military training for 3 years as opposed to our voluntary force for 20
years. They relied on JCO s and Officers
to fight the ship. The whole- ship knowledge rested with them. The conscripts
were used for mundane tasks with training adequate to man a single system
during their limited service. They did not have a logistic cadre for cooking,
cleaning, stores, and financial management, etc.
13. Our manning pattern had to adapt to their system.
Excessive reliance on the officer corps meant that they adopted a variant of a
user-maintainer concept which relied on the technical competence of the officer to
repair and/or maintain sensors and weapons as also propulsion and power
generation systems. We had a separate
electrical and engineering branch to handle technical matters. The manning
pattern of ships had to undergo subtle and not-so-subtle changes. Some
compromise solutions were made to save costs by not sending personnel from the
non-combatant duties until return to India. But the philosophy of the user-maintainer concept could not be resolved by our navy for decades to
follow. The recently embraced Technicalisation of the Officer corps was based on
perceptions- not necessarily facts, and hence would need to be re-evaluated
sooner than later.
14. The Soviets soon realized that the Indian sailor had to be
periodically introduced to the greatness of communism as an ideology. All
Soviet military establishments were overseen by a political commissar whose
primary task was to uphold and propagate the virtues of their ideology. Subtle indoctrination through a Soviet model
was supplanted with the training curriculum for sailors. Lectures on the
socialistic, egalitarian pattern of society were introduced succinctly. That most
of it failed to succeed was because our officers and men lived in close-
proximity shared the same vagaries of weather and was equally inadequately
clothed to face 32 degrees below zero -while also experiencing the surreal
sight of the sea freezing. That the only language spoken was Russian, turned
out to be a blessing, in that subtle suggestions and innuendos to fight for
egalitarianism fell on deaf years. Strong religious beliefs and multi-cultural
diversities did not yield to the most sophisticated attempts to convert the
average Indian.
15. Our sailors also witnessed very harsh and inhuman
punishments awarded to the defaulting Russian sailors who were often chained
for the duration of punishment. The lesson “Free people are not equal and equal
people are not free” was brought home to our men during our stay.
16. There was a social cost that our senior officers had to
bear. Most of them had to share rooms with two or three others depending on the
size of the room. Bear in mind that a Commander was a senior officer of a small
navy like ours. There were common bathing and toilet facilities for all. The
sight of very senior officers in the queue for morning ablutions alongside the
junior-most was not a pleasant one. The gesture “Après Vous” was impractical
given the physiological pressures and the need to be on time for training. The
next embarrassment was washing clothes. The Soviets did not provide a washing
machine for nearly half our one-year tenure on the island. The Juniors avoided
washing their clothes in the afternoon thus preventing undue embarrassment to
the senior ones.
17. Toothpaste and toiletry were a rarity in town. They were
just not available and when a consignment arrived people queued up to buy mere
toiletries. Consequently, most Soviets suffered from issues related to oral hygiene.
Ergo, the naval detachment managed to convince the Naval headquarters to send
canteen goods to Vladivostok through the Indian naval canteen services. Colgate
toothpaste was a luxury that an average “Vostokian” could not afford. Banned
Jeans and Japanese watches along with chewing gum were many sought-after items
on the streets of many deprived cities, not just confined to the East of the Soviet Union. Desperate youth deprived of the freedom to access the quality of life
readily available to his Western counterpart was a common sight. They were
desperate enough to beg our personnel to trade what we wore. Here is the
underlying irony. While showpieces of modernity in the form of cities like
Moscow were open to visitors, the closed parts were tightly shut, much like
China today.
18. Lack of avenues for entertainment was the root cause of hard-working
Russian men taking to vodka drinking on an unimaginable scale. Over weekends
It was a common sight to see drunken citizens along the road-sides of almost
all cities. Alcoholism was a national health issue. Not much was done to address this addiction as
it was seen to be a pressure release mechanism for the lack of social amenities so
freely available in Western Europe.
19. Briefly put, the communist Soviet Union was far from being an
egalitarian society. The quality of life in Moscow or Leningrad was a chimera
in comparison to the interior and most neglected parts of the Union. Little
did we know that the Soviet empire with all its glory would collapse like a
pack of cards in two decades.
20. On the training front we couldn’t have asked for any
better facilities and expertise from them. They had a process-driven programme
that was meticulous, and it facilitated the identification of weak links in the
chain. Given their human resource limitations they had no option but to evolve
fool-proof processes.
21. The ecosystem prevailing on the island left us with
little options but to improvise activities to focus on our tasks. We soon
discovered means to form groups to interpret and convert Russian documentation
into English. We discussed technical details of the boat and the missile in
particular. There were discussions on how to deviate from the recommended
operational and tactical deployment of the Missile boats. The Indian jugad philosophy
started a whole new approach.
22. This could not have happened had we remained in India or
in a city in Russia which offered off-duty social opportunities. If the crew
bonded, it was the extreme climate, restricted living space, conflicts with the
hosts on ideological and administrative issues, graduating from rudimentary
knowledge of the Russian language to technical language to assimilate the nuanced
operational philosophy and a host of such activities. These were perforce
collaborative and complementary efforts within our teams for which burning of
mid-night oil was a necessity. Inventions followed.
23. In the process we discovered quite to our surprise that
technical subjects which appeared to be beyond the grasp of a non-technical seaman
could also be mastered with a bit of guidance and assistance. A revelation
which was not proliferated, for the training of Indian crews, as we watered
down the Russian training methodology to meet career requirements and inter-branch rivalries within the navy. The whole concept of keeping the entire crew
together during training was allowed to dissipate, ostensibly to meet
exigencies of service. This in turn has led to sub-optimal ship knowledge and
assigning disproportionate importance to technical education at the cost of
management of violence through the art of warfighting.
24. As a result of extreme pressure on limited manpower
resources, NHQ had to perforce juggle with crisis management as opposed to
viewing a systematic long-term perspective plan. Not surprisingly when I
finally reached the seat of the Naval training command, in 2004, the dilution
of training philosophy hit me like a ton of bricks. That we had structured the
whole training edifice on the Western philosophy of training young officers for
specific purposes at the early and middle levels of their careers was not
sufficiently reconciled with the Soviet approach. It was inevitable that a
hybrid approach would be necessary to audit and verify various methodologies to
suit our very special mix of platforms and weapons. This is an endless process,
the study of which ought to be invested in an independent Commission on a
periodic basis.
25. Quite simply put the Soviet training module was an input
so fortuitously timed to enable us to streamline and develop the one that suits
us. If we have top-line ships today and they are being manned by a competent
crew, the exposure to UK and USSR played a vital role in perpetuating a mixed
model. The question is, have we found the most suitable system to restructure
not only the ab-initio training academies but also the professional courses? Education
and training are two complementary aspects leading to optimum use of personnel.
They are not mutually exclusive.
26. We must deeply introspect on the assessment methodology
practiced in our educational institutions that promote rote system vis a vis
the assessment that promotes creativity, imagination, and innovation needed to
win wars.
27. Our basic profession is Management of Violence-and that
must not be lost sight of.
