COAS Gen Bajwa intends to cut army strength of 5,38,000 substantially over next 5 years

[IblinI]

the result of restructuring and modernization is downsizing, not the other way around.
The PLA before and after reform is a totally different armed force, it is much more than cutting size.

 

[Signalian]

Downsizing occurs if current war has ended and there is no foreseen war in recent future.

 

[bananarepublic]

Downsizing occurs if current war has ended and there is no foreseen war in recent future.

So everything has been agreed on beforehand?
We

 

[Signalian]

Oh come on, don’t give me this india nazi nation going to attack Pakistan stuff. Pakistanis love to either overstate their Importance in the world or are just war-mongering all the time, there’s really never a realistic way of thinking involved, always a ton of conspiracy theories of “everyone is against us”. We’re simply not that important. The world has its own issues to deal with.

All that aside, we’re not just going to cut like 90% of our forces and call it a day, we’re trying to get to a better balance of manpower versus technology that will make the forces stronger, this is already happening and will and should continue to happen. I’ll repeat it again, every single nation in the world including China and india are moving to downsizing in order to support modernization, because it’s literally the way forward, having millions of troops you cannot use is useless, and having a million averagely equipped troops is going to be far less effective than having half a million well equipped troops. We have more than enough manpower and not enough modern technology. All of us keep saying, rather crying, for better weaponry, new rifles, new MRAPs, new UCAVs, new artillery, new tanks, the list goes on, but nobody wants to give a solution to the question of “where’s the money going to come from?”
I would much rather every soldier going into combat have the necessary modern equipment and support than one more soldier to go with him. Two poorly armed soldiers will not take down a tank, one soldier armed with a modern ATGM will do it just fine.

I think the allocated weapons (tanks, APC, Arty, any launchers) are up to their full capacity in every regiment .There is no under strength unit.

 

[JX-1]

How will we compete with indian human wave tactics?

Cluster Munitions like GB-6. But for this at the very least local air superiority is needed - and with longer range AAMs/SAMs, the definition of "local" superiority is expanding. Also this will only work in the Thar desert. In Punjab the civilian popluation is too dense to risk it in most areas. You could arm regular/irregular troops with ATGMs in these areas and make it a death trap for any Indian formation.

 

[Signalian]

An army size of 600k is enough only if there is a second line of defence for a country like Pakistan. The WOT taught us valuable indoctrination lessons for the soldiers and the local security forces. But we ended up making anti-terrorist forces every 2 days without thinking of long term sustenance.

1) The best bet would be to Merge The Frontier Corps And rangers into a National Guard. A good but simple command linked with the army.

2) Make a National Anti Terrorist group from the police and civil recruitment with setups across the Nation from top to bottom.

3) Create an SSG equivalent from and for the National Guard but they should be trained in all domains Sea, Land, Air.

4) Create a Joint Special forces command from SSG, SSGN, SSW and the National guard SSG equivalent.

5) The Pakistan Coast Guard should Come under the Navy.

6) Marines should be removed from base protection and should be a true Air, Land, Sea and mountain force with personnel to be deployed for a period in hot zones across the country be it from Balochistan to Siachen.

7) Increase the Frontier Constabulary (not to be confused with the Frontier corp) making them a national 2nd Policing force in case of emergency and national disasters. Also to work in tandem with National Guard and 1122.

You and others who want SSG numbers to increase should know that these numbers are controlled by fitness standards, not necessarily budget. There’s hardly a case that an officer or soldier passes SSG acceptance test but cannot be enrolled since seats are limited. The failure rate and injury rate is very high.

SSG is not for every officer or soldier.

So everything has been agreed on beforehand?
We

I don’t know, I don’t sit in GHQ.

By downsizing, I think he mean reallocation of resources/personal.

Pakistan has many paramilitary forces- Frontier corp, Punjab Rangers, Sindh Rangers, etc...

It would make sense for Pak to reduce army size to around 480k which is 70k less than today. All paramilitary forces can be combined into a National Guard/Gendarmerie similar to Turkey/Most western nations. If one looks at Urkaine their territorial defence brigades have been very effective.

While decreasing the size of the regular army, Pak should proactively increase the number of SSG. 5k SSG is not enough in todays warfare were SSG are the tip of the spear and would be most likely involved behind enemy lines and also night operations which can significantly demoralize the enemy. Thus I strongly believe SSG size needs to be increased to 20-30k Minimum. We have the population and resources.

Lastly we should sett up a National Rapid Action Battalion group similar to Bangladesh for internal riots/protests. We cannot always use our army for these situations as they are not trained for this. The RAB personel initially can be sources from the Frontier corp special forces and SSG, while slowly increasing their numbers to around 10-20k.

In all whatever personal the PA would lose would simply be reallocated to new structures-

1. Unified National Guard
2. Increased funding/personal for SSG
3. Formation of a Rapid Action Battalion for internal riots.

If you are increasing force from one side and decreasing numbers from another side, what are you actually achieving ?

 

[Signalian]

This is exactly the issue, people don’t understand the modern war and think downsizing somehow means we’re going to get rid of all our manpower. That’s not how this works. If the entire worlds military experts have agreed that downsizing in the favor of modernization is the way forward, then how are you going to justify your stance against it?

Do you know how much of the Pakistani army is simply sitting idle, doing absolutely nothing? Hundreds of thousands of soldiers. All of them poorly equipped (comparatively) to handle a major conflict. If instead we downsized, and equipped the smaller army with much better equipment, we would be much better off. You keep saying the forces need to modernize, but where will we get the money for that if it just keeps growing in size?

What do you mean india is on a warpath? I mean absolutely no offense but this is such a baseless statement Pakistanis keep repeating over and over to justify needless defense spending. There has been no such indication apart from the emotional outburst Pakistanis often show.

An all out war between india and Pakistan is less likely now than it has been in decades due to the geopolitical situation of the world and how war has evolved.

An india Pakistan war, if it occurs now (but is highly unlikely to occur in the world of political, economical and guerrilla warfare), is not going to be a massive conflict this time, it will be small, concentrated skirmishes in the air, on the the land, and in the sea, that will be confined to these areas and not all over the borders. Both countries have shown this is the case time and again. We saw it on 27th Feb, we saw it in Indias fight with China. We saw it in the last two standoffs we had with india, we saw it in 1999 in Kargil.

Pakistan at the moment is woefully unprepared for such a war because india is outdoing us in technology, they have more money and can equip their troops and forces with better and more modern equipment, so in the case of a small scale war, where both sides have equal numbers, india will have the edge due to technology, because they’ll have downsized and will have spent that money in better tech, meanwhile us with our lumbering 500 thousand troops that are under equipped will lose because we can’t use them effectively.

Downsizing is the way forward, a smaller force equipped with modern rifles, optics, radios, IFVs, UCAVs, tanks, covered by modern fighters, helicopters and artillery.


I still disagree, Even with all threats Pakistan is facing, we have hundreds of thousands of troops sitting idly. Taking up money that is better spent on equipping the troops that are actually deployed with better equipment. I’m not saying we should downsize massively, but certainly enough to where we have a better balance of reserves to quality of equipment, right now we’re fairly biased towards manpower instead of quality of equipment and this needs to change as the type of threats we face change. Even for insurgencies, do we have all our forces deployed? Or just a very minor part of them? Now what if we got rid of a portion of the manpower that’s not deployed to better equip the small amount of troops that are deployed to fight insurgency? We’d get better results instantly. That’s what we need to do. Everyone keeps saying our boys need UCAVs or Modern IFVs or new rifles, but the truth is due to our economy, equipping such a massive army with modern equipment is simply impossible, it can only be done by decreasing the amount of troops we have.

Look at Army’s ORBAT. Which formations are sitting idle, ready to be disbanded ?

If true, then the reason may be (?) :


Bajwa said [he probably had a little slip of tongue in one sentence, but you'll get the point]:


"finally one quick and important lesson, as a military man, that emerges from Russia-Ukraine conflict which must be highlighted over here and that is that it is the preeminence or dominance of fire power over mobility [I think he wanted to say mobility over fire power ? ] as was the case during first war this has given a heart to smaller country that they can still defend their territory with smaller but agile forces against an aggression by a bigger country by carrying out selective modernization in equipment and adopting novel ideas and this is the course we intend following for our future developmental studies"



i.e. Redirect some spending on quality from quantity (?)



Full txt of his speech here:

Somehow, mobility and fire power, go hand in hand with each other for best results.

A mobile force lacking firepower and an immobile force with high firepower
are both susceptible to failure.

Combined arms asks for both in tandem to compliment each other.

 

[Signalian]

I’ve discussed before how the Ukrainian-Russian conflict is a poor example to apply to other countries because of how surprising it was. Russia, despite having much larger numbers and much better technology Is on the losing end, so it’s definitely an outlier. And the Ukrainian forces would have never held out this long if the west hadn’t supplied them with the most modern weaponry they had. Just Ukrainian numbers alone would not have accomplished anything without this weaponry.

Ukraine is on defensive. If Ukraine has to go on offensive to take on a larger force like Russia, what does Ukraine need then ? ATGM and SAMs and ambushes won’t do.

 

[iLION12345_1]

I think the allocated weapons (tanks, APC, Arty, any launchers) are up to their full capacity in every regiment .There is no under strength unit.

It’s not the numbers, it’s the type. Our APCs are ancient, we've been trying to find a replacement to no avail. We don’t have modern ATGMs, 1/3rd of our tank fleet is obsolete, yes we will slowly see replacement programs, but it will take decades to replace every single M113 and Bakhtar Shikan, and we might not even have enough money to do that.

Ukraine is on defensive. If Ukraine has to go on offensive to take on a larger force like Russia, what does Ukraine need then ? ATGM and SAMs and ambushes won’t do.

And neither will hordes of men, but a balance of both will win, a balance that I do not see in the PA.

Look at Army’s ORBAT. Which formations are sitting idle, ready to be disbanded ?


Somehow, mobility and fire power, go hand in hand with each other for best results.

A mobile force lacking firepower and an immobile force with high firepower
are both susceptible to failure.

Combined arms asks for both in tandem to compliment each other.

The ORBAT needs to change to consider changes in geopolitics and doctrine. A better equipped force can handle a larger area with a smaller number of men and be more effective at it, particularly our offensive cores need better technology. Better IFVs instead of old APCs that are vulnerable to everything but small arms. We still have several Hundred first generation tanks that are nearly death traps in any sort of environment. Better ATGMs, better gunships. Again, we are trying to procure all of them, but how slow is the procurement process? And how long will it take to equip all the regiments with modern equipment? We also haven’t found a suitable rifle replacement because it’s extremely difficult to buy over a million rifles.

 

[313ghazi]

I'd love to know the opinion of the ex/current-forces guys about this.

In my opinion there is some merit to it, but I'm not sure right now is the time, and I think we need to increase spending, before we decrease it.

Until we can control the TTP/BLA insurgencies and destroy them entirely, we shouldn't be cutting down numbers. It's an insurgency, we're going to take a hit on casulties, we need the numbers. Even if we roll out our best equipped and best trained troops with all the air support and UCAV's etc they need, it'll still take some time for the fighting force to gel and get a lay of the land. They'd take casulties too. This is why I think we need to invest in our COIN capability whilst retaining our numbers.

On the other front, the Indians are as likely to go to war with us as ever. We don't want to risk being caught short. My dad has a large sweet jar filled with every screw, nut, bolt he has ever removed from something. He doesn't throw them away. For years we didn't get it. However on the odd occassion when you need something, we all go and dip into dads jar to see if we can find it, before we make a trip to the shops.

I think we do have a lot of paramilitary forces such as Levies, FC, Rangers etc all of whom are probably not that great as a fighting force. I know for a long time work has been underway to improve their capabilities, but I don't think we should remove capacity, until we've already replaced it with capability.

Long term;

- Lets reduce the armed forces by 25% but have a high tech force.
- Lets expand rescue 111 so that armed forces are not required to help with disaster recovery.
- Lets have compulsary military training for all men

 

[blueazure]

Look at what a large and gigantic army of Russia is achieving in Ukraine...

Gen bajwa is spot on

 

[Great Janjua]

You and others who want SSG numbers to

I never said that reread what I wrote.

 

[waz]

Look at what a large and gigantic army of Russia is achieving in Ukraine...

Gen bajwa is spot on

They’re conscripts bro hence their failures….

Case in point;

 

[Yasser76]

This is good news and long overdue. Pakistan Army is quite big and can do with cutting off a lot of tail. Remember we have a force that is still predominantly light infantry based. Light infantry has it's uses in mountain combat and urban warfare but armoured infantry and mechanised infantry will be the main battle winners against India. Light infantry will also be vital for defensive positions too, but that is it.

For these we need modern IFVs and more drones. This will all cost.

Additionally I think there are many things the army does that we can outsource like military farms, catering etc

Currently X Corps ('Pindi) with 4 Inf Divisions and XII Corps (Quetta) with 3 inf Divisions, can easily lose a Division each,

Then we can use the savings to make 1 Corps (Multan) with it's single armoured Div and 2 Inf Divs into a fully mechanised corps and II Corps (Mangla) with it's single armoured Div and single inf Div into a fully mechansied corps. If we even have enough tanks maybe add a armoured Div to XXXI Corps at Bahalpur, thereby giving Pak Army 3 fully armoured/mech corps that can manouvre.

 

[PanzerKiel]

Currently X Corps ('Pindi) with 4 Inf Divisions and XII Corps (Quetta) with 3 inf Divisions, can easily lose a Division each,

Then we can use the savings to make 1 Corps (Multan) with it's single armoured Div and 2 Inf Divs into a fully mechanised corps and II Corps (Mangla) with it's single armoured Div and single inf Div into a fully mechansied corps. If we even have enough tanks maybe add a armoured Div to XXXI Corps at Bahalpur, thereby giving Pak Army 3 fully armoured/mech corps that can manouvre.

X Corps is responsible for looking after almost 800 kms of difficult mountainous terrain, which is disputed as well.

XII Corps is solely responsible for Balochistan, alone...that is 2500 kms of international border and coastline only.....couple this with the fact that area wise, Balochistan is 44 % is the WHOLE Pakistan.

And both these Corps are looking after highly volatile areas of Pakistan.