Where's the theatre-command plan headed?

The roots of theatreisation trace back to the 1999 Kargil War. The Kargil Review Committee flagged gaps in army-air force coordination and recommended a chief of defence staff (CDS) with greater joint integration. The model India now aspires to implement came later, after a 2016 committee led by Lieutenant General D B Shekatkar (retired) recommended three integrated theatre commands organised around the Pakistan border, China border, and the maritime domain.

The turning point came with the creation of the CDS post in 2019, and General Bipin Rawat, the first incumbent, made theatreisation his signature project.

However, his tenure reinforced a fissure, as calling the air force a “support arm” stoked fears of subordinating air power. His successor, General Anil Chauhan (retired), followed a slower, consensus-based approach. What is being reformed is a structure that has barely changed in decades: India today runs 17 single-service commands (seven each of the army and air force, three navy) plus two tri-service commands — the Andaman and Nicobar Command and the Strategic Forces Command — with boundaries that follow legacy administrative lines, not actual threats.

A conflict with China or Pakistan could draw in several commands, with no officer holding unified authority over the fight.

The proposed remedy places three aspects on the table. First, it lends structural consolidation and unified authority. Seventeen commands integrate into three theatre commands, organised around India’s actual strategic fronts rather than legacy geography: Western (Jaipur), covering the Pakistan border from Siachen to Gujarat; Northern (Lucknow), facing China along the line of actual control (LAC); and Maritime (Thiruvananthapuram), covering both seaboards. Each is led by a four-star officer with full command over the army, navy, and air force assets assigned to it. This would replace the current arrangement of independent service chiefs coordinating through committees like the chiefs of staff committee.

Second, it accords leadership responsibility for each theatre. Reports suggest the Western Theatre goes to the air force, given air power’s centrality on the Pakistan front; the Northern to the army, given its role in high-altitude terrain; and the maritime to the navy. An earlier proposal to rotate theatre command every 18 months has been dropped in favour of longer, staggered tenures, supported by a deputy from a different service. The debate over rotation however still lingers, with the post of CDS itself expected to rotate among the three services — a corrective action after the army held it for the first two incumbents.

Third, it proposes a restructured command apex, built around a different functional principle. Above the three theatre commanders sit the CDS, a vice-CDS who holds operational authority, and the three service chiefs — splitting one job into two theatre commanders run operations, what forces do in a crisis. Service chiefs build the force — recruiting, training, and equipping, no longer running operations. The rollout is cautious. Reports suggest the first theatre commanders may be three-star, not four-star officers, starting with administrative work — protocols, chains of command — before full operational control takes over. This means even those initiating the reform are moving carefully, not in a rush. Inspired by examples from abroad, this split is theatreisation’s sharpest idea.

So much for design. The harder question is whether it’s the right one — and which side’s argument carries more weight. The arguments in favour are strong. Seventeen overlapping commands — upon consolidation — would free resources for modernisation. A theatre commander can answer hybrid threats faster than three chiefs, and order air support directly, ending an impasse that hurt India in 1962 and Kargil. The reform has a clear objective, rooted in the Kargil War. The Andaman and Nicobar Command’s quarter-century run is proof that joint commands can work.

The objections are just as pointed. The air force fears that fixed theatres would strip away the mobility which makes air power valuable. They believe that this geographic model may suit expeditionary powers, not a status-quo power like India. Further, India has finalised theatre boundaries and commanders before building the shared doctrine that would make joint command work. The rocket force and space assets don’t belong to one theatre, since their targets are national, not regional. Moreover, there is no doctrinal clarity on where a theatre commander’s authority ends and the nuclear command authority begins. 

The argument

Until May 2025, all points on each side were arguments about a future war. Operation Sindoor, triggered by the Pahalgam terror attack, gave both sides something real — India’s largest beyond-visual-range air engagement, fought under the old structure. Proponents cite its best element — linking army and air force sensors — as what theatreisation aims to make routine. Opponents cite the same conflict to draw the opposite conclusion — that India won it without a theatre commander, relying instead on existing centralised control. On the nuclear question, both sides consciously avoided crossing the line, so we don’t know if giving theatre commanders more strike power would risk unintended escalation to the nuclear threshold. A second source of inspiration is comparative — what other countries have done to integrate their forces, and how much of it applies to India.

India’s debate is shaped by the American and Chinese systems, though neither fits cleanly. The American model splits the geographic from the functional command. India has adopted its useful principle  — separating force generation  from force employment  — but the model was built for a global expeditionary scale that India does not need. China’s system is a closer fit for a continental power like India, with its land borders and maritime front. However, its defining feature — joint command by a military officer and a political commissar — rules out adoption. But India can borrow from the Chinese logic of functional agencies — cyber, space, rocket forces — layered on top of its geographic theatres.

As a consequence of these debates, India is attempting a hybrid of two systems: An American-style separation of force generation from employment and a Chinese-style geographic theatre system, wrapped in civilian oversight in the Indian bureaucratic tradition. No country has ever combined these distinct elements before — hence the experimental risk, constant pushback and persistent delay in India’s theatreisation drive.

Four aspects stand out: The risk in the hybrid design. The American split matters most since it is the one principle imported wholesale  — commanders fight, chiefs build the force. The China-like geographic theatres bring a land-power logic to territorial security. Civilian oversight in the Indian tradition ensures that jointness must be built through negotiation, not decree. What if one design-logic does not fit well with the other two, to make theatreisation a workable framework?

Second, no template fits cleanly, which explains India’s domestic alternatives to design. A few experts proposed four theatre commands, splitting the maritime domain, since India’s two seaboards face different threats. That India nevertheless settled on one maritime command suggests the navy’s preference for unified control across both seaboards outweighed their initial case, due to resource limits.

Third, parliament passed legislation giving tri-service commanders the authority to discipline personnel regardless of the parent service. The Ministry of Defence has cleared cross-postings and identified base locations. The army’s Akashteer system is being integrated with the air force’s command-and-control system. These are clear signs that jointness can move from paper to practice.

Fourth, the CDS has released joint doctrines covering cyberspace, amphibious, special-forces, airborne, multi-domain, and space operations — indicative of genuine, if only incremental, progress. Yet the air force stays more cautious about full theatre commands than the navy, which embraces the reform more readily given its role in the maritime command. Beyond the design concerns, theatreisation itself faces hurdles rooted in India’s higher defence organisation — structural issues that would persist even if every service agreed tomorrow on the merits of the reform.

Four aspects matter: First, there is the ambiguous position of the CDS. The CDS chairs the chiefs of staff committee, sitting awkwardly alongside the authority theatre commanders are meant to hold. The American system keeps its equivalent chairman as purely advisory,  whereas India’s CDS chairs a committee of service chiefs who still hold operational authority, and any transfer of authority to theatre commanders may prove slow and uneven once approved. Some experts even argue the bottleneck is the unsettled political ownership above the CDS, which can be traced to how the post was created by executive order rather than by an act of Parliament — evidence of India’s civilian-control tradition built on separation, not integration. That is a dilemma theatreisation now runs against, and it is why the reform has taken so long to gain approval.

Second, theatreisation raises the issue of coordination with ministries beyond defence. Theatre commanders would need to work with the Central Armed Police Forces operating in the same border regions. Along the Line of Control (LoC) and the LAC, army and BSF/ITBP/Assam Rifles units answer to separate chains of command that a theatre commander would need to work around, not through. Beyond that, the finance ministry sign-off on the annual financial outlay adds another layer, with each service part of the three theatres competing for its modernisation budget — a reform of this size cannot run on the authority of the defence ministry alone.

Third, there are unresolved questions of career progression, rank equivalence and tenure. Merging personnel from three services with different promotion policies raises questions about career prospects and equivalence. Moreover, the length of tenure for theatre commanders remains unsettled, since a normal term may not give a new commander enough time in the role. The Agnipath Scheme’s short-service model complicates this further, since a joint-force increasingly built around shorter, non-pensionable tenures sits uncomfortably with the longer horizons a genuinely integrated command needs.

Fourth, India’s armed forces remain governed by the army, navy, and air force acts, each with its rules on discipline and command authority. A 2023 law let tri-service commanders discipline personnel regardless of parent service, but did not harmonise the legal codes. Besides, integrating logistics built separately by each service over decades is a substantial task. A March 2024 proposal for Mumbai as India’s first tri-service defence station, with Sulur and Guwahati floated next, remains just that — a proposal. Taken together, these hurdles explain the slow, incremental pace of the reform so far. Approval will not be the hard part, implementation will be.

Structure alone will not make theatreisation work. Beneath the organisational charts lies a second, less visible layer of requirements that serving officers, retired commentators, and parliamentary committees alike have identified as the reform’s real bottleneck. Six gaps stand out — each is paired below with a recommendation.

Doctrine: The absence of a shared war-fighting doctrine — one internalised through joint training, not published — is the most frequently cited gap. A commander’s authority is only as good as the doctrine behind it; without it, authority stays nominal, precisely when speed matters most in short and swift wars. Left unresolved, decisions that should be settled in advance instead get renegotiated in real time, reproducing the lag that theatreisation is meant to eliminate. Recommendation: Test the doctrine through joint exercises rather than treat publication as the finish line, and settle in advance who is authorised to strike what — and on whose orders — before any theatre goes operational.

Trans-theatre capabilities: The Integrated Rocket Force, the Defence Cyber Agency, and space-based assets do not map onto any theatre. A missile strike, a cyber-attack on adversary infrastructure, or a satellite covering all three theatres is a national problem, not a theatre-specific one. Where such capabilities sit in the hierarchy — plausibly under the CDS — remains unresolved as the structure moves towards finalisation. Recommendation: Place these capabilities under the CDS, not any single theatre — a national asset needs a national owner, not one borrowed by whichever theatre needs it on that day. The harder line is the nuclear-conventional boundary, which belongs to political leadership, not the CDS — but conventional military authority could at least be bounded at the theatre level, so everyone knows where it stops.

Industrial base: India’s defence-industrial base needs to deliver command-and-control networks, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, secure communications, and precision munitions faster than procurement allows. The deeper problem: India treats defence technology as separate from its national industrial base, unlike China, Israel, and South Korea. Reorganising the commands will not fix this; a commander is only as effective as the industrial base behind them. Recommendation: Fuse civil and military technology development and build co-development models that turn India into a creator of technology, not a buyer. This means long-term contracts to give industry confidence to invest; a fairer public-private split; and cross-service data-sharing modelled on existing pacts with the United States (US).

Careers, equivalence and culture: Perhaps the hardest to legislate is the need for career and cultural integration between the personnel of the three services, and inter-service trust that has historically been in short supply.

Cross-postings have been cleared on paper; whether they result in a joint officer corps, rather than a formality, will only become clear over time — a question made harder by a force structure increasingly shaped by Agnipath’s shorter tenures. Recommendation: Joint professional military education, through the National Defence College and war colleges, paired with better, more equitable promotion prospects for joint postings. A fixed term for theatre commanders — long enough to see a doctrinal cycle through — and a rank-equivalence table could end the ambiguity. Agnipath needs its own answer: a longer-tenure track for joint roles, drawing on career-oriented assignments rather than short, non-pensionable ones. A standing parliamentary committee could give these less visible parts the same attention — as its defence preparedness and industry. 

Timeline: Kargil to now

Readiness cost of transformation: India’s combat readiness splits by front — the northern border needs structural readiness built over years, the western border needs operational readiness, sustaining capability the force already has. Building new command architectures across this geographic divide is itself a risk — the army must keep holding both the LAC and the LoC at their respective readiness levels, while the navy and air force keep up their own levels of deterrence. Recommendation: Sequence the rollout and stagger out activation so the Northern theatre, where structural readiness dominates, is not rushed through the same timeline as the Western theatre, which can mobilise faster. Keep single-service chains as a fall-back until each joint theatre reaches full capability, so the reform is tested by design, not by an adversary. A formal readiness metric, tracked jointly, would show the strain before a crisis occurs.

Defence strategic guidance: Above all is a more basic deficit. India lacks not only a national strategy document but a hierarchy of downstream strategic guidance — a National Security Strategy from the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), cascading into a National Defence Strategy (NDS) at the Ministry of Defence and a National Military Strategy at the CDS/Chiefs of Staff Committee level. Without this chain, a theatre command inherits no authoritative statement of purpose — on which front matters the most — year-on-year. Recommendation: Legislate the hierarchy of strategic guidance through a parliamentary mandate: task the PMO with the National Security Strategy, the Ministry of Defence with translating it into a NDS, and the CDS with a National Military Strategy (NMS) that tells each theatre command which front carries priority in a given year — the statement of purpose the gap above says is currently missing.

Underlying all six recommendations is the “cost question” hat remains unpriced: no one — not the ministry, not the services, not Parliament — has put a number on it. The same mandate should require a costed implementation plan — covering theatre headquarters, command-and-control networks, personnel relocation, and running old and new structures in parallel — so that the budgetary expenditure is ring-fenced before the reform proceeds, not after. The US’ Goldwater-Nichols reform, the closest precedent, took a decade and cost more than planned. Until India budgets its own, these six gaps risk closing only on paper.

Beyond these six, another four issues remain unresolved: Three are structural, raised earlier, and the fourth is the air force’s standing concern about mobility accruing out of inter-theatre allocation of its assets. Civil-military trust: Place the CDS’ role and theatre commanders’ authority on statutory footing through legislation, rather than executive orders a future government could quietly narrow, and give theatre commanders a limited, advisory seat in the National Security Council, building the habit of civil-military dialogue without touching India’s model of civilian primacy.

Inter-ministerial coordination: A standing protocol should fix how theatre commanders and the Central Armed Police Forces coordinate along the LoC/LAC/IB, rather than working around each other, and a multi-year, ring-fenced allocation per theatre from the finance ministry should replace the annual single-service budget competition that forces jointness to fight the same budget battle every year.

Legal and logistical integration. A single tri-service code should supersede the army, navy, and air force acts, tabled alongside the CDS’ statutory footing above. And a completion date, not an open-ended proposal, should be set for the Mumbai tri-service station, with Sulur and Guwahati sequenced behind it.

The air force’s inter-theatre mobility concern: A fixed theatre need not mean fixed basing — air assets can still be tasked, re-allotted and re-deployed across theatres by the CDS even while sitting under a permanent theatre commander’s authority. One recommendation sits above the rest. India lacks a framework for National Security Resilience (NSR) — the capacity, built on industrial, financial, and social strength, to sustain a prolonged conflict. NSR bears on theatreisation in two ways, both pointing towards moving faster, not just safely. The coordination gap among civilian, industrial, financial, and military decision-makers is the CDS’ real problem; a National Security Resilience Agency could help close it. Its idea of combat resilience  — restorability and surge capacity to sustain attrition in a quick war — is what would let India move faster through the staggered theatreisation, without every step needing to be safe.

None of this guarantees success — but it is a more honest starting point than treating approval of India’s theatreisation as the finish line.

India’s theatreisation drive is a long-overdue attempt to reform the command structure. It settles who commands India’s forces in a crisis, and locks in the capability and doctrinal choices the military needs. But settling command structure is not the same as being ready to fight. It still needs a shared doctrine; an industrial base to arm it; careers that reward jointness; a costed transition; and political leaders willing to own the decision.

Above all six, it needs a NSR framework to coordinate them — without which the gaps close, if at all, only on paper. The next decade will judge this reform not by the organisational chart it produced, but by whether India closed these gaps before it needed to.