Vice Chief Lieutenant General Manoj Pande has become the first engineer to be appointed as Chief of the Army Staff as the incumbent Army Chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane is due to retire by the end of this month.
“Lt Gen Manoj Pande becomes first engineer to be appointed as Army Chief,” as reported by news agency ANI.
A graduate of the National Defense Academy, Pande was charged into the Corps of Engineers in December 1982. Lt General Pande commanded a designer regiment during Operation Parakram in the Pallanwala area along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir. Operation Parakram, the huge scope preparation of troops and weapons toward the western line, followed the December 2001 fear assault on Parliament that carried India and Pakistan extremely close to war.
In his 39-year military vocation, Lt General Pande has directed an engineer unit in the western theater, an infantry brigade along LoC, a mountain division in the Ladakh area and a corps in the northeast. He was the president of the Andaman and Nicobar Command before he assumed responsibility for the Eastern Command.This reshuffle in the Army will also affect India’s strategy against China. The lieutenant general is the commander of the Army’s Eastern Command, which guards the border from Sikkim to Arunachal Pradesh. In such a situation, with the appointment of Lieutenant General Manoj Pandey as the new Vice Chief of the Army Staff, the army will get another China specialist officer.
There is still no clarity on when the government will name the next Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), with the post lying vacant after Gen. Bipin Rawat was killed along with his wife and 12 other military personnel during a helicopter crash on December 8. It is learnt the government is looking at both current and even retired four-star and three-star officers to fill the post of CDS.
