Major General AK Dhingra appointed as the first Special Operations Division Commander
The newly-created Armed Forces Special Operations Division, responsible for targeting enemy’s strategic installations and high-value terrorists besides crippling adversary’s war fighting capabilities, will have its first chief Major General AK Dhingra.
The tri-service unit will have elite drawn commandos drawn from the Special Forces of the Army, Marine Commandos (MARCOS) of the Navy and the Garuda commando force of the IAF. It will be on the lines of the US Special Operations Command, which was responsible for taking out Osama Bin Laden.
The proposal for setting up of the tri-service division was first mooted by the Naresh Chandra committee in 2012. The panel was asked to suggest ways to fine tune the higher defence management to fight modern and fast evolving war scenario in the backdrop of terrorism, cyber warfare and use of space to enhance military might.
Besides the Special Operations unit, the panel had also proposed formation of Defence Cyber Agency and Space Agency to be headed by the Navy and the IAF respectively. While Dhingra’s name was cleared by the Defence Ministry on Tuesday, Rear Admiral Mohit Gupta was appointed earlier this month as the first chief of Cyber Agency. All the three agencies will operate under the Integrated Defence Staff (IDS) and headed by Major General equivalent officers.
As first reported by The Pioneer on January 18 this year, the Armed Forces Special Operations Division (AFSOD) will formally start functioning from November 1 this year initially with a small team of commandos selected from the Special Forces of the Army, MARCOS and Garud force. The division will finally have 3,000 commandos.
Besides having commandos from the three Services with the Army playing an eminent role as it has the most experienced professionals for such missions, the unit will have its own dedicated helicopters, transport planes and specialised weaponry besides surveillance equipment for carrying out strategic missions.
Elaborating upon the nature of the Division, officials said here on Wednesday the specialised teams will be responsible for conducting missions within and outside the country. The missions include targeting strategic installations, high value targets in terms of terrorists and cripple the war fighting capabilities of the enemy. The missions no doubt will be high risk given the strategic importance.
Once the Division becomes functional in November, plans are already in place to bring together the commandos from the three Services to a central place or station for joint training to conduct special missions during peacetime and war, they said.
Explaining the objective of the Division, officials said the stress is on synergising special operations amongst the three forces. At present, the Special Forces of the Army, MARCOS and Garuds function separately. Once the Division comes into being, the special talents and assets of the three Services will be pooled.
Similarly, experts from the Army, Navy and IAF will work together in the Cyber Agency and the Space Agency. The main aim is to exploit the resources of all the three Services for the three specialized agencies in a joint manner to achieve the objective besides reducing expenditure on administration and training, they said.