New Delhi, Sept. 21: At least three army officers are being questioned for lapses that militants exploited to kill 18 soldiers at the military camp in Uri on Sunday.

Defence minister Manohar Parrikar said at a seminar this evening that "something may have gone wrong there (in Uri). It is a sensitive matter. I believe in zero error".

"As a nation, we should ensure this is not repeated again and again. I will take steps to ensure it doesn't go wrong again," television news agency ANI quoted him as saying.

The wrongness of the attack in Uri that is exemplified in the skewed "kill ratio" - 18 soldiers killed to four militants killed - is apparent to everyone in any standing military.

The defence minister also said that the government was working on how to punish those responsible for the attack.

But the questioning of officers - and their probable removal from command that would be done quietly - is not going down well with the army. Officers say this will bring morale down. On the LoC, "morale" is a big factor. The army asks its troops to be aggressive on the LoC. Not so in counter-insurgency.

The army has pointed out that most of the soldiers died inside tents that were set ablaze by incendiary bombs.

"It is not by choice that soldiers sleep in tents. Even officers stay in tents often. It is not by choice. It is by compulsion. Either there aren't enough funds or there aren't enough supplies of the right quantity and quality of material," said one officer who has served in Uri and is now a brigadier.

The tents in which the soldiers - eight of those killed were tradesmen - were sleeping or had just woken up at 5.30 on Sunday morning were non fire-retardant. Fourteen of the 18 soldiers who were killed were inside the tents or were just leaving them.

Two parallel investigations are being conducted on the attack in Uri. One by the army itself and another by the National Investigation Agency. The army wanted the probe to remain within its limits. But the government has decided otherwise.

This is because in a repeat of the pattern observed before the attack at the Pathankot Air Force Base in January, here too there were intelligence alerts - actually two of them. The second alert was specific to the Uri sector, the area of responsibility of the army's 12 Brigade.

There were two breaches of boundaries - the first on the Line of Control and second, the perimeter fence of the Brigade complex. The administrative echelon of the 6 Bihar battalion had just moved in to the tents at the rear of the complex.

There is a general alert as part of the standard operating procedures of the army that troops are vulnerable to attacks in Jammu and Kashmir during the changeover of battalions. In Uri, the 10 Dogras were in the process of handing over responsibility to the 6 Bihar. The commanding officer of the 10 Dogras was supervising the handing over.

Typically, the administrative echelon of a battalion about to take over moves into the area of responsibility first. But it is based in the rear. Combatant troops are on "penny packet" deployments on the frontline - the LoC - and are rotated periodically from their posts to the rear base. Before being deployed the battalion that is being inducted goes through a training stint at the 15 (Chinar) Corps Battle School at Khrew in Pulwama.