India S Military Strategy

This book explores what military strategy is and how it is interconnected with policy on one hand and military operations on the other. In the process, it traces the transformation of the notion of strategy from its original military moorings to a more policy-oriented and-influenced conception and elaborates upon a tripartite framework of policy, strategy and doctrine to think about, understand, and analyse the use of force. The book explores the politics of India-Pakistan conflict in order to root the study of Indian military strategy in the political sphere. It discusses three main issues that have ensured the persistence of conflict: incompatible national identities, Pakistan's congenital quest for parity with and compulsion to challenge India, and irreconcilable positions on the Kashmir issue. The book argues that India has invariably pursued limited political aims that did not threaten Pakistan's survival or form of government or regime in power albeit containing a counter offensive elements. It states that India employed the strategy of exhaustion during the Indian Army's campaigns in the 1947-48 conflict and 1965 war, which made way to strategy of annihilation during the 1971 war (East Pakistan), but after Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons capability the strategy is back to exhaustion. The book highlights the importance of designing an overall military strategy for waging limited war and pursuing carefully calibrated political and military objectives by creatively combining the individual doctrines of the three services by establishing a Chief of Defence Staff system.

India has long been motivated to modernize its military, and it now has the resources. But so far, the drive to rebuild has lacked a critical component—strategic military planning. India's approach of arming without strategic purpose remains viable, however, as it seeks great-power accommodation of its rise and does not want to appear threatening. What should we anticipate from this effort in the future, and what are the likely ramifications? Stephen Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta answer those crucial questions in a book so timely that it reached number two on the nonfiction bestseller list in India. "Two years after the publication of Arming without Aiming, our view is that India's strategic restraint and its consequent institutional arrangement remain in place. We do not want to predict that India's military-strategic restraint will last forever, but we do expect that the deeper problems in Indian defense policy will continue to slow down military modernization."—from the preface to the paperback edition

This book examines the origins, courses and consequences of conventional wars in post-colonial South Asia. Although South Asia has experienced large-scale conventional warfare on several occasions since the end of World War II, there is an almost total neglect of analysis of conventional warfare in the Indian subcontinent. Focusing on China, India and Pakistan, this volume, therefore, takes a unique approach. Regional rivalries between India and Pakistan are linked with global rivalries between the US and USSR (later Russia) and then China, and war is defined in a broader perspective. The book analyses the conduct of land, sea and air warfare, as well as the causes and consequences of conflicts. Tactical conduct of warfare (the nature of mobile armoured strikes and static linear infantry combat supported by heavy artillery) and generalship are studied along with military strategy, doctrine and grand strategy (national security policy), which is an amalgam of diplomacy, military strategy and economic policy. While following a realpolitik approach, this book blends the development of military strategies and doctrines with the religious and cultural ethos of the subcontinent’s inhabitants. Drawing on sources not easily accessible to Western scholars, the overall argument put forward by this work is that conventional warfare has been limited in South Asia from the very beginning for reasons both cultural and realpolitik. This book will be of much interest to students of South Asian politics, security studies, war and conflict studies, military studies and International Relations in general.

India's growing affluence has led experts to predict a major rearmament effort. The second-most populous nation in the world is beginning to wield the economic power expected of such a behemoth. Its border with Pakistan is a tinderbox, the subcontinent remains vulnerable to religious extremism, and a military rivalry between India and China could erupt in the future. India has long had the motivation for modernizing its military—it now has the resources as well. What should we expect to see in the future, and what will be the likely ramifications? In Arming without Aiming, Stephen Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta answer those crucial questions. India's armed forces want new weapons worth more than $100 billion. But most of these weapons must come from foreign suppliers due to the failures of India's indigenous research and development. Weapons suppliers from other nations are queuing up in New Delhi. A long relationship between India and Russian manufacturers goes back to the cold war. More recently, India and Israel have developed strong military trade ties. Now, a new military relationship with the United States has generated the greatest hope for military transformation in India. Against this backdrop of new affluence and newfound access to foreign military technology, Cohen and Dasgupta investigate India's military modernization to find haphazard military change that lacks political direction, suffers from balkanization of military organization and doctrine, remains limited by narrow prospective planning, and is driven by the pursuit of technology free from military-strategic objectives. The character of military change in India, especially the dysfunction in the political-military establishment with regard to procurement, is ultimately the result of a historical doctrine of strategic restraint in place since Nehru. In that context, its approach of arming without strategic purpose remains viable as India seeks great-power accommodation of its

Transformation should lie at the heart of our new approach to defense. The development of transformational capabilities, processes, and force structures should be given strategic focus to meet the principal challenges under our defense strategy. India is already ceased with the necessity of transformation albeit without any documented national security guidelines or operating instructions, which are legislated or have the validation of at least the 'Cabinet Committee on Security'(CCS). In other words the first step would be to create a draft security strategy based on many assumptions, like the foreign policy or the cumulative emerging threat scenario as appreciated by the Defence Intelligence Agency(DIA). This well researched book is a result of the project allotted by the USI under the Field Marshal K. M. Cariappa chair. The book is therefore more as an idea or a theoretical construct, basically to bring in more clarity to the various options available for this great transformation of the Indian military. The author has deliberated upon various landmarks of transformation milestones achieved so far by the three services and given recommendations to further build upon ongoing modernization plan and shift to a higher plane of transformational activities.

India's military history goes back to the Indus or Harappan people who flourished 5,000 years ago; the history of military fortifications in the country goes back even further. It remains, however, a subject largely neglected by the country's historians. This book traces the evolution of India's military tactics and strategy during the ancient period and till the eleventh century ad by examining available sources from a dispassionate, professional military perspective. The author analyses the military factors which led to the end of the Harappan civilization. The Rig Veda contains a great deal of information about battles fought by the Aryans. The author makes use of the description of the first recorded battle, the Dasrajan War fought around 1900 bc, as a basis for reconstructing the strategy and tactics employed by the combatants. The portion of Kautilya's Arthashastra dealing with matters military has been examined at some length because it exercised a profound influence on the tactics of Indian warfare for over a millennium. Such loyalty to the injunctions of the shastras bred extreme conservatism in military doctrine and often effectively prevented progress and innovation in the art of war. Learning from experience, the Guptas repudiated Kautilya's static concept and successfully defended the country against the Hunas. This work traces how a subsequent reversion to tradition and the antiquated Kautilyan system led to tragic consequences.

This book examines the determinants of India's National Security Strategy. The author brings out that National Military Strategy should envisage employment of all the nation's military and civil capabilities at the highest of levels and this should facilitate long-term planning, development and procurement to create the requisite capabilities to assure victory or success. He states that if not enunciated by the politico-military establishment in peace, and if not planned, organised, structured, developed, trained-for or forces created in peace, then inadequacies in the achievement of political aims during war will be a national loss. This paper is accordingly laid out in six chapters examining the changing strategic geography and geo-strategic context; strategic threats and challenges; strategic culture and civil-military relations; envisioning of prospective warfighting; guidance of National Security Strategy and finally, the formulation of National Military Strategy. The author concludes that If the oncoming era is of back-end warfare ─ combat by programming computers, launching missiles or operating drone swarms ensconced thousands of miles away, in safe environments, then so be it! Assuredly, warfare has a future, the all-important question is the typology of warfare, and what it would take to accept it as inevitable, and assiduously work to acquire the capabilities. The strategic conclusion is that technology has fundamentally transformed the character of war, and maybe its nature too, in a significant measure.