Strategies of stalemate : explaining Indian military effectiveness, 1965-90

• Main Author: Tarapore, Arzan
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: King's College London (University of London) 2018

Why do states often fail to achieve improved political conditions through war, even if they meet their military objectives? India is a powerful state which has generally achieved its operational-level objectives against weaker adversaries - but it has also ended wars with a peace that was no better than the status quo ante it had sought to improve. In 1965, it repelled a Pakistani invasion of the disputed territory of Kashmir, but relinquished its operational gains and, contrary to its goals, ended the war menaced by the same threats. In 1971, it avoided that outcome with a decisive victory in which it soundly defeated Pakistani forces and oversaw the creation of the newly independent state of Bangladesh. In 1987-90, it returned to stalemate in its ill-fated intervention in Sri Lanka, where it fought a gruelling counterinsurgency that proved counter-productive to its policy. In all these cases, it achieved operational effects - so the military could and did claim "mission accomplished" - but its strategic outcomes were variable. Most existing scholarship on military effectiveness cannot explain this - it generally focuses only on states' battlefield effectiveness, and rarely accounts for variation in a country's effectiveness over time. To address this puzzle, this dissertation makes several theoretical and empirical contributions. First, I develop the concept of strategic effectiveness - the degree to which a state converts wartime operational effects into desired changes in political or military conditions. Second, I develop a causal framework which explains the sources of strategic effectiveness. My framework shows that a state's execution of critical warfighting processes depends on three particularly important strategic actions in war: its willingness to generate and escalate force; the degree of political influence on war planning; and the selection of force employment method. Third, my empirical contributions rest on in-depth historical analyses of India's wars in 1965, 1971, and 1987-90. This empirical research - based on primary archival research, first-hand accounts, and interviews - yields novel analytic findings for each case, and insights into patterns in India's strategic behaviour.