Fit for purpose: It’s imperative to transform India’s defence forces
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. National defence is crucial to the security of a sovereign state. While wars of conquest and territorial defence have been fought for ages, the modern notion of national defence is a Westphalian idea.
It posits that a nation-state has sovereign control not only of its domestic affairs, but also of security from external threats. A 1996 National Defence College of India document expands on this: “National security is an appropriate and aggressive blend of political resilience and maturity, human resources, economic structure and capacity, technological competence, industrial base, availability of natural resources and military might." Viewed from this wider lens, India’s aspiration to become an upper middle-income country by 2047 needs much work on national security. This column, the fifth in my series on a ‘quantity to quality’ transformation, addresses what’s required in national defence.
As with our armed forces, what is needed here differs from requirements in other areas. This is because in defence, we must also keep pace with developments in the capabilities of our adversaries. In that sense, it is not just something we must do to move forward, but also to avoid getting left behind.
Because of this ‘reflexivity’ requirement, quantity and quality cannot be fully separated. In some sense, quantity as a minimum requirement might be necessary just to maintain parity with an adversary. An extract from a document put out by the US Director of National Intelligence reads thus: “During the next two decades, military conflict most likely will be driven by the same factors that have historically prompted wars—ranging from resource protection, economic disparities, and ideological
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