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New Delhi: Having recently assumed office as India’s third Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), recommissioned General N.S. Raja Subramani is expected to push ahead with the country’s long-delayed Integrated Theatre Commands (ITCs) proposal by presenting its final blueprint to Union defence minister Rajnath Singh later this month.

The ITC proposal, finalised by his predecessor, General Anil Chauhan, shortly before demitting office on May 30, now falls to Gen Subramani to guide through the government’s approval processes and, ultimately, oversee its implementation during his undefined tenure.

The most sweeping reorganisation of India’s higher military command structure since Independence

Recent media reports indicate that, once endorsed by the defence minister, the proposal will be forwarded to the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) for prime minister Narendra Modi’s approval, potentially setting in motion the most sweeping reorganisation of India’s higher military command structure since Independence.

According to Monday’s (July 13) Hindustan Times, quoting “people familiar with the matter”, Gen Subramani will present a detailed roadmap for creating three Integrated Theatre Commands (ITCs) – Northern, responsible for operations along the Chinese border; Western, focused on Pakistan; and Maritime, overseeing operations across the Indian Ocean Region – alongside a Vice CDS.

The report further states that four-star ITC commanders would exercise operational control over military operations and, in wartime, receive their operational directions directly from the defence minister rather than through the chiefs of staff of the Indian Army, Indian Navy (IN), and Indian Air Force (IAF).

The broad contours of the ITC reforms are by now well known, having been debated at seminars, on television channels, on social media, and in newspaper columns for several years. In essence, India’s existing 17 single-service commands – seven each for the Army and IAF and three for the IN – would coalesce into three ITCs, managed and overseen by a four-star Vice CDS.

Under the proposed arrangement, operational control of combat forces would shift from the three service chiefs to the ITC commanders. The former would thereafter function merely as force providers – responsible for raising, recruiting, training, equipping and sustaining their respective services – while the latter would become the designated force employers in military operations.

As the character of modern warfare rapidly evolves, few defence planners or security analysts dispute that India requires far greater jointness between its armed services. Recent wars and armed confrontations – from Ukraine to the Israel-Iran hostilities and the wider US military intervention in West Asia – have underscored the need for the seamless integration of land, air, maritime, cyber and space capabilities rather than the compartmentalised, service-centric operations that have characterised India’s defence structure for decades.

Hence, theoretically, ITCs for India promise unified planning, faster decision-making and the more efficient employment of increasingly scarce military resources, but whether the reality proves as uniform as the organisational diagrams drawn up by the CDS’s secretariat remains another matter entirely.

Where does the CDS stand?

Yet the Hindustan Times report raises another fundamental question. It states that the proposed four-star ITC commanders would receive their........

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