Comparative Analysis of the Use of the Naval Forces of India and Pakistan During the 1971 War

Abstract

The destructive processes that are observed in the modern world, the crisis of the world order determine a new round of power confrontation both in the line of global and regional actors of world politics. There is an increase in armed confrontation, the desire to solve old, including territorial, problems by force. The study of the historical experience of the armed confrontation between India and Pakistan actualizes the problem of this paper. The purpose of the article is to analyze and summarize the experience of the use of naval forces during military operations at sea in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971, to identify the main factors that influenced the planning of naval operations, the course and results of combat operations at sea. The author used a narrative approach and a historical-comparative method to identify the evolution of ideas about the use of naval forces in the Indo-Pakistani conflict of 1971. The article highlights and examines the main factors and their impact on the training and use of naval forces during military operations at sea in the Indo-Pakistani conflict of 1971. Special attention is paid to the assessment of the impact of the political nature of the war, its goals and scale, the views of the military-political and military leadership of India and Pakistan on the training and use of naval forces; the tasks that were solved by the fleets of the parties; the role and place of individual types of forces in solving certain tasks in the theater of operations. To determine factors that directly affect the use of the naval forces of India and Pakistan in the 1971 conflict, the author analyzes the conditions in the Maritime theaters of war, the factors that have characterized the theater, and the impact of conditions in the theater on the planning and implementation of operations. The main sources are archival and analytical materials of the Ministry of Defense of India and the Ministry of Defense of Pakistan, memoirs of war participants.