A Military History of India since 1972 is a definitive work of military history that gives the Indian military its rightful place as a key contributor to Indian democracy. Arjun Subramaniam offers an engaging narrative that combines superb storytelling with the academic rigor of deep research and analysis. It is a comprehensive account of India’s resolute, responsible, and restrained use of force as an instrument of statecraft and how the military has played an essential role in securing the country’s democratic tradition along with its rise as an economic and demographic power. This book is also about how the Indian nation-state and its armed forces have coped with the changing contours of modern conflict in the decades since 1972. These include the 2016 “surgical” or cross-border strikes by the Indian Army’s Special Forces across the line of control with Pakistan, the face-off with the Chinese at Doklam in 2017 and in Ladakh in 2020, the preemptive punitive strikes by the Indian Air Force against terror­ist camps in Pakistan in 2019, and the large-scale aerial engagement between the Indian Air Force and the Pakistan Air Force the following day. These conflicts also include the long-running insurgencies in the northeast, terrorism and proxy war in Jammu and Kashmir, separatist violence in Punjab, and the Indian Peacekeeping Force’s intervention in Sri Lanka. The author also includes a chapter on the development of India’s nuclear capabilities. Arjun Subramaniam enlivens the narrative with a practitioner’s insights amplified by interviews and conversations with almost a hundred serving and retired officers, including former chiefs from all three armed forces, for an in-depth exploration of land, air, and naval operations. The structure of the book offers readers a choice of either embarking on a comprehensive and chronological examination of war and conflict in contemporary India or a selective reading based on specific time lines or campaigns.

India’s armed forces play a key role in protecting the country and occupy a special place in the Indian people’s hearts, yet standard accounts of contemporary Indian history rarely have a military dimension. In India’s Wars, serving Air Vice Marshal Arjun Subramaniam seeks to rectify that oversight by giving India’s military exploits their rightful place in history. Subramaniam begins India’s Wars with a frank call to reinvigorate the study of military history as part of Indian history more generally. Part II surveys the development of the India’s army, navy, and air force from the early years of the modern era to 1971. In Parts III and IV, Subramaniam considers conflicts from 1947 to 1962 as well as conflicts with China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1965 and 1971. Part V concludes by assessing these conflicts through the lens of India’s ancient strategist, Kautilya, who is revered in India as much as Sun Tzu is in China. Not merely a wide-ranging historical narrative of India’s military performance in battle, India’s Wars also offers a strategic, operational, and human perspective on the wars fought by independent India’s armed forces. Subramaniam highlights possible ways to improve the synergy between the three services, and argues in favor of the declassification of historical material pertaining to national security. The author also examines the overall state of civil-military relations in India, leadership within the Indian armed forces, as well as training, capability building, and other vitally important issues of concern to citizens, the government, and the armed forces. This objective and critical analysis provides policy cues for the reinvigoration of the armed forces as a critical tool of statecraft and diplomacy. Readers will come away from India’s Wars with a greater understanding of the international environment of war and conflict in modern India. Laced with veterans’ intense experiences in combat operations, and deeply researched and passionately written, it unfolds with surprising ease and offers a fresh perspective on independent India’s history.

The armed forces have played a key role in protecting India's sovereignty and raising its stature as a stable democracy and responsible regional power. Though the nation's soldiers, sailors and airmen occupy a special place in people's hearts, standard narratives of contemporary Indian history rarely cover the military dimension. In his first book, India's Wars: A Military History, 1947-1971, Arjun Subramaniam attempted to set this right by taking readers on a journey until the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971.Full Spectrum: India's Wars, 1972-2020 takes the story forward. It is a sweeping account of war and conflict in contemporary India over the past five decades. Covering every major operation that the armed forces have participated in -- including insurgencies in the north-east, terrorism and proxy wars in Jammu and Kashmir, separatist violence in Punjab, the IPKF intervention in Sri Lanka, and the continued stress along the LoC and LAC -- it fuses the strategic, operational, tactical and human dimensions of war and conflict into a racy narrative that reflects their changing character in modern times.

American Military History provides the United States Army-in particular, its young officers, NCOs, and cadets-with a comprehensive but brief account of its past. The Center of Military History first published this work in 1956 as a textbook for senior ROTC courses. Since then it has gone through a number of updates and revisions, but the primary intent has remained the same. Support for military history education has always been a principal mission of the Center, and this new edition of an invaluable history furthers that purpose. The history of an active organization tends to expand rapidly as the organization grows larger and more complex. The period since the Vietnam War, at which point the most recent edition ended, has been a significant one for the Army, a busy period of expanding roles and missions and of fundamental organizational changes. In particular, the explosion of missions and deployments since 11 September 2001 has necessitated the creation of additional, open-ended chapters in the story of the U.S. Army in action. This first volume covers the Army's history from its birth in 1775 to the eve of World War I. By 1917, the United States was already a world power. The Army had sent large expeditionary forces beyond the American hemisphere, and at the beginning of the new century Secretary of War Elihu Root had proposed changes and reforms that within a generation would shape the Army of the future. But world war-global war-was still to come. The second volume of this new edition will take up that story and extend it into the twenty-first century and the early years of the war on terrorism and includes an analysis of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq up to January 2009.

Two and a half million Indians volunteered in the Second World War. Their stories had been lost and silenced, until now. Award-winning historian Yasmin Khan marshals interviews, newspaper reports and unseen archival material to tell the forgotten story of India’s role in the Second World War. We meet soldiers, sailors and non-combatants – prostitutes, nurses, cooks, peasants – whose lives were upended by a war far, far away. From a small Muslim boy arrested for singing anti-recruitment songs, to cooks preparing chapattis on army boats, to a family listening to illicit German radio broadcasts, and a love letter from the first Indian soldier to receive the Victoria Cross, Khan makes us feel and hear the lost voices of a people involved in a war that wasn’t of their choosing. Dramatizing a cataclysm that transformed the subcontinent and led to its independence, The Raj at War undeniably inserts South Asia back into World War II history and confirms that the Empire – and all its subjects – formed both the heart and limbs of Britain’s war efforts and eventual victory.

The war of 1971 that created Bangladesh was the most significant geopolitical event in the Indian subcontinent since partition in 1947. It tilted the balance of power between India and Pakistan steeply in favor of India. Srinath Raghavan contends that the crisis and its cast of characters can be understood only in a wider international context.

A Military History of Australia provides a detailed chronological narrative of Australia's wars across more than two hundred years, set in the contexts of defence and strategic policy, the development of society and the impact of war and military service on Australia and Australians. It discusses the development of the armed forces as institutions and examines the relationship between governments and military policy. This book is a revised and updated edition of one of the most acclaimed overviews of Australian military history available. It is the only comprehensive, single-volume treatment of the role and development of Australia's military and their involvement in war and peace across the span of Australia's modern history. It concludes with consideration of Australian involvement in its region and more widely since the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the waging of the global war on terror.