“From Plato to Nato, the history of command in war consists of an endless quest for certainty…historical commanders have always faced the choice between two basic ways of coping with uncertainty…to construct an army of automatons following the orders of a single man, allowed to do only that which could be controlled; the other, to design organisations and operations in such a way as to enable the former to carry out the latter without the need for continuous control. …the second of these methods has, by and large, proved more successful than the first…”
— Martin van Creveld quoted by William Lind in Manoeuvre Warfare Handbook
“He plunged past with his bayonet towards the green hedge,
King, honour, human dignity, etcetera
Dropped like luxuries in a yelling alarm
To get out of that blue crackling air
His terror’s touchy dynamite.”
— The Bayonet Charge by Ted Hughes
SITUATING THE ISSUE
Among other changes brought in by the 27th Constitutional Amendment, one relates to the creation of the office of Chief of Defence Forces (CDF). The position, which is to represent command of all three services, will not exist as an independent office but will be held concurrently by whoever is Chief of the Army Staff, beginning with the current incumbent. The amendment also extends the tenure of the current army chief/CDF as also those who would succeed him.
The issue of the probity of the amendment and the manner in which it was pushed through continues to be debated. The delay in the notification gave rise to much speculation about the grey areas in the draft, which seemed tailored for specific circumstances and person but will impact the Higher Defence Organisation (HDO) and civil-military relations beyond this moment and its politics. Expectedly and rightly, the debate on the political aspects of the amendment should continue.
My purpose here, however, is different and is related to analysing the argument, given by some former generals, that there’s nothing novel about the changes that have been made in the HDO because the issue was long being debated within the organisation and the system. They have argued that, in light of evolving warfare, the imperative for ‘jointness’ — seamless operational coordination among the services — has now been formalised through these changes.
On the face of it, these arguments cannot be faulted. For instance, the need for coordination at all three levels — tactical (where battles are fought), operational (where planning is done to achieve the desired outcomes), and politico-strategic (the highest level that informs the purpose of war as also the direction and intent of the other two levels) — should be obvious. War is not a clash of mobs. It requires disciplined forces that must operate to create synergies. That requires coordination.
The 27th Constitutional Amendment promises streamlined command across the military services by creating the post of Chief of Defence Forces. But neither is this a novel concept, nor is the current interpretation without its issues. History shows that organisational redesign alone cannot overcome the realities of conflict. Ejaz Haider urges revisiting the details of an important and necessary doctrine…
However, agreeing with the obvious or stating it without reference — in this case, to factors that do not fall within the operational domain — is not the same thing as agreeing with the details of how it is to be achieved and why in a particular way and not in another.
Further, while jointness is much talked about, like strategy, a term that has almost become meaningless, it must be problematised. It is neither a magic wand nor even desirable in many battle scenarios. We shall return to that.
At this point, a caveat is in order. What follows is my view. There can be many views. Debates over doctrines and the best courses of action have to continue. Wars usually settle them!
One example is the post-WWI debate in France over static and mobile defences. Critics of the idea of the Maginot Line — a vast French system of concrete fortifications, obstacles and weapon installations built along its eastern borders (Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland) in the 1930s — argued that it symbolised passivity, would be costly and a drain on resources and would not be effective against German manoeuvre warfare. The proponents argued that it would provide a strong defence, a base for counterattack and force the Germans into Belgium, drawing their main thrust into a pre-planned battleground.
As it happened, the real test came with the German offensive. The Germans didn’t attack the main line. They rapidly advanced through the supposedly impassable Ardennes Forest, getting around the line’s northern end. The French, who had committed their best mobile forces to Belgium, had left the Ardennes and the road to Paris vulnerable. The point is that debates over this and that can only be settled when the real test of battle comes.
The second issue is that wars are not linear. Nor do they follow a particular template, at least not for the winning side, which wins precisely because it does something different, unexpected. As the celebrated German Panzer commander Gen Hermann Balck once said, “There can be no fixed schemes. Every scheme, every pattern is wrong. No two situations are identical. That is why the study of military history can be extremely dangerous.”
In other words, the official view remains untested.
Let me begin this discussion with some history related to HDO in this country, take a look at jointness and its attendant problems and square it off with how battles frustrate top-down planning and why it is important to keep things simple.
HAVE WE THOUGHT OF JOINTNESS ONLY NOW?
The short answer is no. We thought of it way back in the 1970s, after realising the organisational failures, both vertically and horizontally, in the 1965 and 1971 Wars. Gen Ehsanul Haq, former Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff and arguably a most experienced officer, wrote an excellent paper (2013) for the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency (Pildat) on higher defence organisation.
The paper briefly traces the history of why the government of the day established the Joint Staff Headquarters (JSHQ) in March 1976, how and why the centrality of that JSHQ was undermined and what needs to be done to return to what was started in the mid-’70s.
The paper is easily available for anyone interested in reading it, so I won’t go into the details of Gen Haq’s arguments. Two points are important, though. The first is a direct quote from the paper: “Given the political history of Pakistan, unless we build up credible security policy making mechanisms subordinated to Parliament and civilian control, ad hoc and parochial interests would continue to impact our policy formulation processes, undermining critical aspects of our national defence effort [Italics added].”
This, as should be obvious, establishes the principle of civilian control and the fact that, in war’s three levels, the highest is the domain of the civilian principals.
The second point is that jointness did not really require reinventing the wheel. JSHQ was meant precisely for that and, as Gen Haq suggested in 2013, the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee (CJCSC) could have been made Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff or, if we like CDF better for some reason, CJCSC could have been renamed CDF or CDS or whatever suits our fancy.
The only point where I disagreed with Gen Haq’s excellent analysis when I first read the paper 12 years ago was his suggestion that “while the Chairman may continue to be from the Army (due to the predominance of land strategy and asymmetry in the size of the services), the Vice Chairman [4-star] may be on rotation between the Navy and the Air Force.”
General Haq’s suggestion is/was in good faith. My disagreement then was based on two factors: JSHQ became dysfunctional precisely because of the army and the praetorian tendency of certain chiefs.
In fact, within 14 months of the reorganisation of high defence, Gen Ziaul Haq mounted his coup, essentially kicking the chessboard to play solitaire. To break that cycle and move away from the army’s primacy, the office was to rotate among the three services.
Second, jointness is not about service size. Just like an army CJCS or a CDF cannot make naval operational strategy and would need the navy’s input, a navy CJCS would need the army’s or air force’s inputs for land and air operations.
Now I have a third objection, given the type of war we have witnessed: non-contact, technical and high-intensity, no ground incursions. (This is not to say there can’t be ground incursions. Small-scale incursions can and would likely happen, but the thrust has generally changed.) If the idea of jointness has to have any meaning in the operational sense, the air force has emerged as the thin end of the wedge and, in any future round, the navy could likely get involved on its own and with dedicated air assets in support from the air force.
Within land forces, ground air defence (AD) and long-range artillery have emerged as the main fighting elements. This is unlikely to change and this is where ground AD will have to be fully integrated with PAF. Cyber is a new element but will be central to many operations.
Given these and other factors, we have to look anew at the traditional centrality of land forces as the backbone of military operations — ie the assertion that the army, given its sheer size, is not just primus inter pares [first among equals] but the dominant force. It is not, from an operational perspective, the politics of the issue notwithstanding.
Critics might point to the Russo-Ukraine War and say land forces are critical. That situation does not obtain between Pakistan and India. Neither has the sustainment capacity for long, meat-grinding wars and both are nuclear armed. The Russo-Ukraine scenario would mean — even if we discount the sustainment factor — that either one or the other will resort to nuclear weapons or else the weapons and the entire concept of deterrence through them has been bunkum.
LET’S TALK JOINTNESS AND COORDINATION
There’s a reason for this. The neatness of ‘jointness’ and coordination on the drawing board must get tested in the messy reality of the battlefield, as it often does.
The US military should know. Their Joint Publication 1, whose latest iteration came in 2023, promises to be “the capstone publication for all joint doctrine, presenting fundamental principles and overarching guidance for the employment of the Armed Forces of the United States.” Yet, we have seen the US military grapple with the contingencies of irregular wars and has often failed strategically, even when winning tactical battles.
A good example is the military presentation of plans. Maps, symbols, arrows, timelines. Units represented by icons. They assume perfect (or at least good) communication, shared situational awareness, adherence to timelines and probable enemy reactions.
But information is never perfect — radios don’t work well in nullah beds. The enemy can be wily and Boyd Cycle you, to quote Lind, which basically refers to US Air Force Col John Boyd’s ‘OODA’ loop — observe, orient, decide, act. Whoever can run the OODA loop faster is better placed. Exercises and simulations try to model friction but they cannot go beyond controlled variables. The reality, when the shooting begins, is about exhausted, scared humans with equipment malfunctioning and everything that can possibly go wrong going wrong.
A supposedly rapid advance on a map becomes a gruelling slog through mud, traffic jams on narrow bridges, or unexpected urban sprawl. If you think this is fiction or unlikely, just recall what happened to the Russian forces advancing on the north-south axis towards Kyiv from Belarus.
The conceptual Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) of the 1980s was thought to reduce and ultimately eliminate the fog of war. The First Gulf War further entrenched this idea. Since then, battlegrounds have made clear to both practitioners and theoreticians that the fog comes in many ways and no one can get rid of it. Cutting-edge technology can help defeat forces in conventional conflicts but the fog sets in when a military tries, as the US did, to grapple with populations.
Technology, however useful, can fail. GPS can be spoofed, software can crash, batteries can die. Ukrainian artillery with GPS-guided HIMARS [High Mobility Artillery Rocket System] rounds realised the Russians were jamming and spoofing their GPS signals. It was back to relying on non-GPS rounds and old-school artillery methods both for battery and counter-battery.
Take logistics. The perfectly synchronised attack can falter when one unit runs out of fuel, ammunition or food, because a supply convoy was ambushed, or the map was read wrong by a unit. Any military officer reading this would nod in agreement with a sad face.
One only has to read reports from the Russo-Ukraine front and even about the genocidal Zionist occupation force. Fear, fatigue, fog (in the case of Donbas, a real one!). Humans are not robots. They get exhausted. Exhaustion degrades decision-making among commanders and the fighting spirit among soldiers.
To top it all. The dastardly enemy has an independent will. He is the greatest source of disorder because, unsurprisingly, he actively seeks to disrupt coordination. He ambushes command posts, attacks supply lines and flanks, jams communications, feints and deceives. What he does can throw everything awry: planned timelines and sequences.
Does this mean planning and coordination are meaningless? No! If anything, they are even more important. As in most endeavours in life, the paradox is that planning is essential precisely because it will go wrong. In other words, coordination is crucial not because it is easy to achieve for the reasons cited above (and they aren’t exhaustive), but because its absence can be catastrophic.
Put another way, it provides a commonly-understood baseline and shared intent for all fighting echelons in that theatre of operations. When communication breaks down, which can often happen, leaders at the tactical level can make decisions based on the operational commander’s intent.
This is what Germans called Auftragstaktik [‘mission-tactics’ or as the US military translates it, ‘mission command’]. The term often misunderstood, like Clausewitz’s schwerpunkt (which is NOT centre of gravity), had its meaning in professionalism and an entire military culture (Prussian and German) as it evolved over a long period of time.
In his Instructions for Large Unit Commanders, Helmut Karl Bernhard von Moltke (the Elder) wrote in 1869: “In general, one does well to order no more than is absolutely necessary and to avoid planning beyond the situation one can foresee. These change very rapidly in war. Seldom will orders that anticipate far in advance and in detail succeed completely to execution. The higher the authority, the shorter and more general will the orders be. The next lower command adds what further precision appears necessary. The detail of execution is left to the verbal order, to the command. Each thereby retains freedom of action and decision within his authority.”
This passage was quoted in ‘How the Germans Defined Auftragstaktik’ by Donald E. Vandergriff, a former US Army major. Vandergriff writes, “The overall commander’s intent is for the member to strive for professionalism. In return, the individual will be given latitude in the accomplishment of their given missions.”
According to Lind, “During 19th-century war games, German junior officers routinely received problems that could only be solved by disobeying orders. Orders themselves specified the result to be achieved, but never the method (Auftragstaktik). Initiative was more important than obedience. Mistakes were tolerated as long as they came from too much initiative rather than too little.”
Today’s wars and their many battles are far more complex. No CDF can stand on high ground like Bonaparte, observe enemy movements and send directives to commanders in the field. Yes, we have satellites and other means to have eyes on the enemy, but command has to be delegated and field commanders have to think on their feet. Nothing has changed on that count and nothing is likely to.
A SYSTEM-LEVEL ANALYSIS
Critics would say: what are you talking about? Jointness is about the three services and making them fight like one unit, not in silos. A higher headquarters, in this case the CDF, will make the plans on the basis of threat assessment so the army, navy and air force can operate seamlessly, communicate with each other, be integrated.
Sounds good. The problem is, wars have different formats. A conventional war is not the same as an irregular war or low-intensity conflict. A conventional, non-contact war (May is an example) is not the same as a ground incursion. A ground incursion at a single point or even multiple points in one theatre is not the same as on a very broad front. The fight is different in the mountains from operations in the plains or the desert. Air operations are not the same as naval operations and vice versa, though air can support both ground troops and naval attack vessels. A short, sharp war is different from a long, attritive war in the trenches, which is what we are witnessing in Ukraine.
This brings into play the issues of training and doctrinal gaps. Different services (army, navy, air force) have different cultures, communication protocols, and priorities. This is a problem which has been analysed and written about a lot within the US military.
Despite the emphasis on jointness, the US military continues to grapple with challenges like integrating complex systems, overcoming bureaucratic silos among services — what’s referred to as stove-piping — adapting to new threats (cyber, grey zone operations) etc. The services also face funding problems where the requirement of modernisation often runs into the problem of readiness. This invariably leads to inter-services friction. True jointness, in addition to other impediments, requires overcoming deep-seated institutional biases.
Again, the point is not that jointness should be ditched. It’s a process. Joint planning forces different services to communicate, reveal their capabilities and limitations, and build (some) shared understanding before the battle. This relationship-building is as valuable as the plan itself. Equally, the plan cannot be taken as a rigid script. At best, it’s a foundation for adaptation whose goal, howsoever difficult, is to adapt together more effectively than the enemy.
Put another way, coordination in real-battle conditions is often a patchwork effort to manage chaos at the operational and tactical levels. The elegant flowchart can only provide design principles. To expect more of it is to assume that one side has perfect information and, therefore, can work out every little detail about the adversary’s moves. That is simply not possible.
Another downside of jointness and creating multiple headquarters that link up with a single office is bureaucratisation.
This problem has been dealt with by various writers in relation to the US military, albeit that’s just one example. Personally, I find Edward Luttwak’s The Pentagon and the Art of War: The Question of Military Reform to be an incisive account. Luttwak highlights how the Pentagon’s immense budget often funds technically impressive but strategically useless weapons systems and is driven by bureaucratic incentives rather than genuine military need.
Reason: large bureaucracies, in this case the Pentagon, prioritise internal processes, career advancement, and complex planning over effective outcomes, leading to waste and strategic blunders. Luttwak coined the “Luttwak Paradox”, which suggests that military efforts often become less effective as they become more complex and technically advanced.
Jointness demands inter-services interface. In reality it means (again the US military’s example) that an individual service’s bureaucracy is not replaced. Instead, a new layer on top of existing bureaucracies is added. As identified by various writers, this means that a commander must navigate not only their own service’s logistics, personnel and acquisition systems but also the protocols, politics and resource battles of the joint structure. What begins with creating agility and clarity ends up doing the opposite: slowing things down.
Complexity in systems is a subject long debated since American sociologist Charles Perrow’s analysis of the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown accident. What’s true of tightly coupled engineering systems and the cascading effect of failure in one spreading through the system is also true — in a different way — of complex human organisations.
A good example of how what begins as an elegant concept can end up badly in the heat of battle was the ‘Systemic Operational Design’ created and introduced into the Zionist Occupation Force by Brig Gen Shimon Naveh, who headed the defunct Israeli Operational Theory Research Institute. The language of the concept, given the complexity it introduced, was never understood by the fighting echelons and their commanders who went to battle Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006.
Success lies not in the most elaborate joint plan, but in creating the conditions where a simple directive, empowered subordinates, and shared awareness can produce coherent action in chaos. The system must be designed not for neatness on the drawing board, but for resilience under stress — and that almost always favours robust simplicity over fragile complexity, to use Lebanese-American writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s phrase.
The challenge is to institutionalise the principles of jointness — shared intent, trust and interoperability — while minimising, to the extent possible, the bureaucratic structures that are supposed to deliver it. The aim is, to use the title of US Gen Stanley McChrystal’s book, create a ‘team of teams’ culture that coordinates organically and is not a rigid, top-down machine that requires constant management. In essence, go back to Elder Moltke’s advice: keep it simple.
EPILOGUE
Let’s recap: if we can make three disparate services with their own roles, systems, training protocols etc to roll together, that’s great. But if such integration is not done intelligently, it can end up defeating the very purpose for which jointness was undertaken.
The other point, as discussed above, is that jointness was conceptualised and a system put in place in 1976. It was made to fail because allowing it to work would have undermined army chiefs and how they control(led) politics. Laying waste to that system, instead of strengthening it had nothing to do with military professionalism.
What 27th Amendment has done is to constitutionalise what was long debated and opposed by proponents of balanced civil-military relations. To cloak it in the shiny garbs of jointness and operational integration is to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes.
Jointness requires input from all services. Given the conduct of war, in most cases, the air force and navy will have a bigger role to play. If we are indeed looking for jointness from an operational, not political, angle then the office of CDF should be separate from the office of army chief, stand on its own and above the offices of service chiefs. And, yes, it should rotate among the three services.
Finally, no matter how sound the planning at the top, battles are fought on the ground. It’s ultimately the commander in the field — at any level — who needs to have the Odyssean metis or what Bonaparte, in a different context, called coup d’œil — the glance that takes in a comprehensive view.
The writer is a journalist interested in security and foreign policies. X: @ejazhaider
Published in Dawn, EOS, December 14th, 2025
