Chief justice on military for election security
AFTER the Supreme Court of Pakistan established May 14 date for election to be held in Punjab, the Ministry of Defence declared that the Pakistan Army is not in a position to provide enough manpower for guarding the elections within that time. The Chief Justice responded by saying “The Army is not the only wing of the military. There is also Navy and Air Force. Why can’t they provide manpower?”
It seems the CJ is looking at the “quantity” of resources that Pakistan’s defence forces can provide. But obviously, different military sectors have different functions, and the Pakistan Army’s designated role is to encompass every asset that can be used for enhanced security to the masses as they vote in election. The functions of the Pakistan Navy and Air Force are of no use in this situation. Fighter jets hovering above are not a good way to protect voters and polling stations. Navy and Air Force generally cannot be converted to serve an Army role. Understanding how makes us understand why militaries of the world are divided into these fundamental branches in the first place.
As everyone knows, the Army, Navy, and Air Force are meant to operate on land, sea and air, respectively. However, we should not assume that planet Earth being divided into different environments is the very reason human institution of the military is arranged the way it is. After all, warfare in a tropical jungle is also very different from warfare in arctic environments, but no military is split into separate branches for these (instead, armies have particular units or divisions specializing in such environments). A fundamental principle of life is that the structure of human systems are decided by factors internal to those systems. In the case of the military, that factor is the “non-interchange ability” of assets that results from differences in land, sea and air operations.
Consider this. In order to use the sea for fighting battles, warships mounted with big artillery guns and missile batteries are needed. But for a battle happening far inland, those ships cannot be brought onto land to participate and neither can their guns and other weapons systems be dismantled and effectively used on land. Likewise, all the equipment used for fighting on land cannot usually be deployed at sea. No matter how formidable a nation’s fleet of tanks is, no commander would ever line these tanks up on the deck of a destroyer or carrier and have them fire at targets on the water or shore. What this means is that the resources that a nation puts into its navy cannot be used for land operations and what it puts into its army cannot be used for sea operations.
That is why many nations have faced a dilemma of choosing between greater build-up of their army or their naval forces. The two compete for scarce national resources, instead of complementing each other. Germany before World War 1 is a prominent example. But that same nation suffered no such conundrum between getting its military ready for warfare in the high mountains of the Alps and for warfare in the immense and flat plains east of Germany. That’s because any equipment and any tactic the Germans might use for invading Switzerland could easily be converted for use in invading Russia as well, even if the standardized design is slightly different. The same artillery gun can be pulled up the mountainside by mules or loaded onto a train headed to Belarus.
Around that time, flight entered the realm of warfare and created the potential for a new service branch, the air force. Because military planes can be effectively used in all operations on land and sea both, there is a slightly different reason to separate them from the army and navy, which is inability of aerial forces to interact with and operate alongside forces on the ground and water. Tanks and infantry are very different, but they can travel together, be stationed together, and receive food and fuel from the same depots. But airplanes in the sky have to be by themselves. This is why the strength of a navy or army contributes little to control the skies and why flying warriors have their own wing of the military.
Granted, when our Chief Justice suggested getting the involvement of the Navy or Air Force for safeguarding election, he was not talking about weapons and vehicles but rather about personnel, the people in the military. And people are all the same, so, surely, they could be interchanged between any combat or security role, right? However, even that would be unwise, because, like material assets, training and experience are scarce.
In a film about the 1990s Balkans wars titled Behind Enemy Lines,an American plane is downed and when a Serbian soldier comes onto the scene, the pilot bursts out of the snow and fires at him wildly with his sidearm, missing several times. As retired Navy SEAL Jock-o-Willink explained when reviewing the film for GQ Magazine, this scene demonstrated the fact that, in an air force, extensive training is needed to become a pilot, leaving little time to become good at inter-personnel combat, a very peripheral role for a pilot.
In a navy, it’s a little different, because sailors are often trained to board and inspect intercepted vessels at sea while being armed. But that is very limited compared to what army soldiers have to be ready to undertake. It is latter who are meant for a job like safeguarding elections. So if the Pakistan Army says it is not thoroughly ready for that task, it simply means the nation is faced with a big challenge, and that challenge cannot be met by calling up anyone, because guarding the masses as they head out to vote in an election and guarding the security of the nation-state during the politically sensitive time of competing and heightened emotions is an undertaking that requires great care in managing.
—The writer is Director at Pakistan’s People Led Disaster Management.
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