SPECIAL Special Force?

Don't get offended fellow Indians but our soldiers are far from being technologically advanced. What you saw in "Uri: Surgical Strikes" happens to be just make believe scenario. In fact the soldiers depicted in the film use technologies that have never been seen by the special forces of India ever. I say this with a certain degree of conviction because like our bureaucracy, our defence forces is also not free from red-tapism, the F-INSAS program being the best example for describing the above mentioned statement. The Future Ready Indian Soldier is nowhere near ready, period.

Now optimistically taking a stock of this situation, this has been a boon in disguise. How ? Well the leading powers have modernised their basic infantry soldiers to their special forces with ultra modern technology though this has come at a steep price. Their soldiers have forgotten soldiering. Their dependency on technology is to such a high extent that they are not able to successfully complete a mission without drones providing real time signal and visual intelligence, constant presence of air support where pilots are trigger happy and are ready to level an area the size of a football field even if they take out some friendly forces along with the enemy and the incessant use of precision guided munitions at the first sign of trouble even on civilian population. This inability of fending off an attack on troops without help from technology was very clearly evident in the instance of the ambush on US Green Berets (considered as one of the highly trained US special forces units) in Tongo-Tongo situated in Niger a few years back. This was very humiliating to the US on so many levels as their best of the best were killed by rag tag terrorists, equipment captured and also videos released which showed the entire episode that depicted the pure helplessness of their Tier-1 unit when they were caught off guard. Maybe the world powers will once again have to constitute a SPECIAL special force that is able to fight without high end weapons and technology...literally going back to the roots of what it really meant to be called as a special force.

Now I will say that if it were our troops they would have fiercely fended off the attack and would have returned albeit by also taking casualties (not because of poor training but because of poor equipments.. thanks to DRDO and OFB) because they will not wait for support as the "support" is non existent. Our troops including central armed police, paramilitary forces and military have been fighting the wars by depending on the sheer bravery and courage of troops and not on some geeky gadgets. This does not in any way mean that we should not modernise our troops but this is just a harsh reminder that troops should be first and foremost taught to fight than be tech savvy.

Because in a 21st century war with a near peer adversary the second casualty (the first being truth in any war...Aeschylus) will be technology.