Hundred miles from the international border with Pakistan, the Indian Army on Friday carried out its largest war exercises in recent times.
JAGRAON (Punjab): Hundred miles from the international border with Pakistan, the Indian Army on Friday carried out its largest war exercises in recent times involving tanks, mechanised troops, fighter aircraft and helicopter gun ships to validate its new concepts of rapid, integrated high intensity thrusts.
Sanghe Shakti, as the war manoeuvres were codenamed, tested for the second year in running army's operational preparedness to fight in nuclear, biological and chemical weapons environments.
More than a week of exercises witnessed the country's frontline T-90 and T-72 main battle tanks, mechanised columns and special forces crisscrossing areas on either sides of the River Sutlej to what a senior Brigadier SH Kulkarni said was to validate the army's new operational war doctrine.
As stipulated by a bilateral agreement, New Delhi had informed Islamabad of the holding of the exercise. But the Pakistani media saw the war games as aimed at a blitzkrieg against it.
Pakistan media saw in Indian Army's newly conceptualized operational doctrine Cold Start as Pakistan-specific but senior commanders at the war games being conducted by the army's Kharga Strike Corps as a measure to test rapid mobility and use of all arms as an integrated force multiplier.
The exercises envisaged eight to 10 rapidly deployable integrated battle groups drawn from the army and the air force make swift and hard inroads for lethal destruction of an adversary, with the theme being 'to destroy and not to hold or capture territory’.
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