Guns for Lakshadweep

Remember the guns of Navarone that threatened all the Allied shipping that passed though a narrow strait, in the Alistaire Maclean novel and film?

- R. PRASANNAN

It needed a team of the toughest British, Greek and American commandos to sneak in and destroy the guns and secure the seas. Maybe fiction, but it showed us the kind of threat that a force in control of a choke point can project in sea warfare.

A choke point is to sea warfare (there are choke points on terra firma martia, too) what a high ground is to land warfare. Military Machiavellis say, you need eight-to-twenty times the force to dislodge an enemy sitting on high ground with a machine-gun dog, a pair of binoculars and a good dog.

More, I would day. Look at Siachen. With all their snowtrained Northern Light Infantrymen and Frontiersmen, the Pakistan generals haven't dislodged about a brigade of our boys sitting like frozen colossuses on the Saltoro heights for the last 40 years.