Opinion | Kargil To The Next War: How India Reinvented Its Military After 1999

Kargil's greatest victory was never the territory. It was forcing India to build the military that guards it now, and the one it will need for whatever comes next

In the summer of 1999, Indian troops were sent to take back peaks the enemy already held. In mountain warfare, that is the hardest fight there is.

Whoever holds the heights holds every advantage. They see you coming from kilometres out. They fire down while you climb up, exposed on open rock, carrying weight through air so thin it saps the strength from your legs. At those altitudes, the cold does its own damage. Metal seizes. Weapons jam. A wound that would be survivable lower down can kill a man before he reaches an aid post. Pakistani troops had spent the winter fortifying positions above Kargil, Dras and Batalik, and by every rule of mountain combat, dislodging them should have cost far more than it did, if it could be done at all.

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It was done. Operation Vijay asked everything of the men in uniform, and they gave it, the infantry storming the slopes, the gunners, and the supporting arms carried the fight up with them. One position at a time, the heights came back into Indian hands. The valour shown across those weeks stands among the proudest chapters the Indian Armed Forces have ever written.

The men who fought Kargil asked for nothing and delivered everything. They out-climbed,........

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