Troops' training and welfare, focus of Army commanders' meet

The Indian Army top brass will review and decide several important issues of training and welfare of troops in the four-day long Commanders' Conference beginning on Monday. 

The annual Army Commanders Conference, coming in the wake of several controversies centering around Army Chief Gen VK Singh over the past fortnight, is scheduled to finalise a road map for enhancing the "technical threshold" of all personnel in the force.

Explaining the concept, a senior general said given the technology-intensive nature of future wars, the Army has felt the need to improve the technical skills and understanding of its soldiers.

Favouring the adoption of a "bottom-up" model, the Army commanders will give the final stamp of approval to a plan that gives more technical training to every soldier and officer in handling and understanding operations involving battle-field surveillance radars, unmanned aerial vehicles, electronic warfare and ways to combat nuclear, biological and chemical attacks. 

The top brass is also like to push for speedier implementation of the F-INSAS (future infantry soldier as a system) programme designed to make every soldier tech-savvy and self-sufficient in short wars fought under highly informalised conditions.

To be chaired by Army Chief Gen VK Singh and attended by the vice chief of army staff and all the seven Army commanders, the conference will also clear the plan to establish theatre training nodes to put into action the technical enhancement training programme. These training nodes (at the command level) will bring under one umbrella all the facilities required to take the programme forward.

Select PSOs (principal staff officers) in the Army HQ will present their progress report to the Army commanders. The adjutant general, in-charge of the welfare of troops, will give an update on the ambitious married accommodation project. Under this programme, which started in 2007, over two lakh dwellings for armed forces personnel, the bulk of it for the Army, are to be built in four phases. A mid-course review is expected to bring in an urgency to the project.

The director general military operations will present an update on the security situation across the spectrum -- from the condition along the Line of Actual Control and the Line of Control to the security situation in the north-east, and his assessment of the coming months in the Kashmir valley to the security scenario in the neighbourhood. 

Defence Minister AK Antony will speak to the commanders at the beginning of the conference, followed by several sessions of briefings and presentations by each of the Army commanders.