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Future of India’s IBGs rests on rollout speed, tech. History rarely rewards armies that wait

With the launch of Integrated Battle Groups, India is implementing a brigade-centric model nearly two decades after the US Army and about a decade after the PLA.

The Indian Army’s rollout of Integrated Battle Groups (IBGs) on 1 July is its most ambitious structural and organisational reform since Independence. Yet it also raises an uncomfortable question: can an army preparing for future wars afford to spend another 10 years implementing a reform whose necessity was recognised in 2002 and which was finally conceptualised in 2018?

Nevertheless, the reform has now certainly moved beyond concept papers. The first phase involves converting the two divisions of XVII Mountain Strike Corps into five IBGs and one Fire Support Group (at the Corps level) over the next two years. The refined model would then be extended across the Army’s 42 Infantry, Mountain, Rapid, Armoured, and Artillery Divisions, and 12 Independent Armoured/Infantry Brigades.

However, the creation of IBGs must not become another prolonged restructuring exercise. It must become the technological nucleus of the Indian Army’s future battlefield. And it must happen in the next five years.

Also Read: Operation Sindoor 2 could unfold in 5 yrs. Pakistan is learning from Iran

The evolution of the IBG

The origins of the IBG lie in a fundamental operational problem. Traditional combined-arms divisions, which have been the default fighting formation of armies for two centuries, are manpower-intensive, headquarters-heavy, and relatively slow to mobilise. Their deployment is optimised for prolonged campaigns rather than the compressed timelines likely in future conflicts. The brigade battle groups created out of divisional resources for operations also lacked organisational cohesion.

The Indian Army learnt the lesson the hard way during Operation Parakaram in 2001-02 when it took three weeks to mobilise and lost the window of opportunity and advantage of first mover against Pakistan. Consequently, the Army started functioning with division-size battle groups since 2003-04, which were planned to be progressively launched into battle to execute the Cold Start operational strategy.

However, even these were too large and slow to mobilise. In 2018 General Bipin Rawat caught the bull by the horns and ordered a detailed study for evolving the IBG. In 2019 field exercises were conducted in 9 Corps in the plains and 17 Corps in mountains with experimental IBGs to test and refine the concept.

Another factor driving the creation of IBGs is that India and its adversaries, China and Pakistan, are armed with nuclear weapons, precluding full-scale decisive conventional wars. Conflict will be limited in time and space, and dominated by high-end precision and lethal military technology, and rapid manoeuvre. In this context, Operation Sindoor is a........

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