"The Snow Was Turning Red": When War Came to the Himalaya
Photo by Chirag Saini on Unsplash An excerpt from " 'My Boys are Dying': The Impacts of High-Altitude Combat on Unprepared Soldiers in the Opening Weeks of the Kargil War" Tactics Mountain warfare, especially in peaks as jagged and harsh as the high Himalaya, requires highly unconventional tactics carried out by small units trained for both the terrain and the tactics required. Troops must be acclimated and well-armed, with supplies staged all up the ridgelines that will be used as assault paths; detailed and accurate maps of both enemy positions and terrain are vital. In the early days of the 1999 Kargil War the Indian soldiers sent up the mountains had none of these things. In the narrow valleys and knife-edged ridges of a high-altitude battlefield, modern mechanized warfare is less than useless—it is imposs...