What one needs to know: Reading from the American script on troop preparedness

An assessment of the morale of the Indian Army, one of the most disciplined and finest professional forces in the world, is an exercise that is never undertaken in public.

Considering that the military has been fighting a three-decade-long shadow war in Kashmir against an enemy who is often hiding in plain sight, and then under relentless shelling on the Line of Control (LoC), there is no reason why a candid assessment cannot be undertaken.

Last month, one such opportunity went abegging, but not before it had fulfilled its basic objective of putting an issue in perspective.

A study conducted by the United Service Institution of India (USI) – a tri-service national security and defence think tank based in New Delhi, – has arrived at some sensational, if far-reaching conclusions. It says that more than half of the over 13-lakh strong Indian Army personnel “seems to be under severe stress”. There have been over 1,100 cases of suicide among various ranks since 2010, the study points out.

Conducted by Col AK Mor, Senior Research Fellow at the USI during 2019-20, the study was published on the think tank’s website in January but was subsequently withdrawn.

Consider the salient features of the report:

** Prolonged exposure of Indian Army personnel to counterinsurgency (CI) and counterterrorism (CI) environment is one of the contributory factors for increased stress levels

** The Army, the study further noted, lost more personnel every year due to suicides, fratricides, and untoward incidents than in response to enemy or terrorist activities.

** Some of the major organisational causes of stress among army officers have been identified as inadequacies in the quality of leadership, overburdened commitments, inadequate resources, frequent dislocations, lack of fairness and transparency

** The main organisational stressors, as perceived by junior commissioned officers (JCOs) and other ranks (ORs), were delay and denial of leaves, excessive engagement, humiliation by seniors, lack of dignity, zero error syndrome, unreasonable restrictions on the use of mobile phones (for security reasons) and lack of recreational facilities.

While sources in the Army have debunked the study due to its small sample size of just 400 personnel, they do admit that stress is an issue.

Brig Rajiv Williams (Retd) said that the USI study in their findings on the subject of suicides in the army, may have brought out certain indicators based on combat deployment, especially in low-intensity conflict operations (LICO) and counterinsurgency operations (COIN Ops) and the frequency of such deployment.

While sources in the Army have debunked the study due to its small sample size of just 400 personnel, they do admit that stress is an issue.

``However, as a hardcore infantry soldier I disagree with that perception and the study findings. A soldier trained well for combat roles, with resolute leadership, has the capacity to withstand pressures of tasks given at regular frequencies and at different operational environments,” he said.

Williams added, however, "that as part of management of human resources and in the instant discussion management of command, a leader must understand the limits of a soldier and must appropriately allocate responsibilities, well under the threshold level.”

The USI study underlined that there has been a significant increase in stress levels among Indian Army personnel in the last two decades due to operational and non-operational stressors.

On January 14, 2020, much before the report became public, the USI had organised a presentation by Colonel Mor on the topic ‘Occupational Stress in Indian Army Due to Prolonged Exposure to Counter Insurgency/Counter-Terrorism Environment’.

Talking about the steps taken by the army as well as the Ministry of Defence (MoD), the study went on to note that various stress management measures implemented in the last 15 years “have not been able to achieve the desired results”.

It said that while operational stressors are well understood and accepted by army personnel, non-operational stress factors are perceived as avoidable and resented against.

The study added that “overall job satisfaction and pride in uniform still remains high amongst JCOs/ORs. However, at the same time, it seems to be a growing matter of concern amongst officers, requiring urgent interventions from the highest levels of government”.

It called for an institutionalised approach to stress prevention and management, which should be treated “as a leadership role at Unit and Formation level.”

Even though the report now stands withdrawn, there is no reason why an introspection should not be in order.

As a matter of fact, this is not the first time that such an exercise has been carried out. In 2015, the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, conducted a study entitled Occupational stress in the armed forces: An Indian army perspective, which sought to explore factors influencing on-the-job anxiety faced by soldiers and evaluate applicability of the scale used for measuring these stressors.

It recorded "ineffective leadership style, unsupportive colleagues, indifferent organisational attitude, inadequate training, inadequate awareness about profession, workload and job pressure, lack of control at work, role ambiguity and role conflict,” as principal reasons for the stress that the army worked under.

The IIM study – which too had a small respondent size of 415 – observed that reports on the rise of suicidal and fratricidal incidents in the Indian army in the past decade denote the relevance of such empirical research on the Indian Army.

It quoted the then Defence Minister, A K Antony, who told Lok Sabha on March 6, 2013, that a "a total of 368 defence personnel committed suicide from 2010 to 2012, out of which 310 soldiers belong to the Indian army alone; in 2010, 115 cases were reported as compared to 102 in 2011 and 93 in 2012.” This does suggest an ongoing trend, as confirmed by Col Mor’s report.

To be sure, the Indian government and the army have taken several steps to counter the problem of stress, such as recruiting psychiatrists in the military, discussions between the MoD and the expert panel of psychiatrists, initiating stress-busting therapies in recuperation centres set up in certain geographies prone to stress, practising meditation and introducing regular lectures on yoga techniques.

Interestingly, there is copious research on morale in the US military that is conducted from time to time in that country. Sample a few American titles: Resilience under military operational stress: can leaders influence hardiness? in 2006; Dimensions of psychological stress in peacekeeping operations in 1998; The protective value of hardiness on military post-traumatic stress symptoms in 2013;  and Big five personality factors, hardiness, and social judgment as predictors of leader performance in 2009, to name just a few very few.

Interestingly, there is copious research on morale in the US military that is conducted from time to time in that country.

Recently, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), dedicated its legislative goals and research on veteran suicide and mental health. "An average of 20 service members and veterans die by suicide every day, and IAVA’s own research has found that 59 percent of members know a veteran that took their own life,” the US Veterans Magazine report reported.

The two situations are totally dissimilar, however. While the US Army is often sent into unknown locations in foreign countries, ostensibly for peace-keeping purposes, where their troops are unfamiliar with the local culture and language, in the case of India, the military is defending its own land. Additionally, after waging a proxy war for close to three decades or more against Pakistan, they now also must reckon with China’s Peoples’ Liberation Army (PLA) along a border that is 3,488 km long.