Experts have repeatedly affirmed that the military debacle of 1962 is directly attributable to the failure of the Higher Defence Management. If the Indian leadership of 1947 had the resolve to establish the Higher Defence Organisation (HDO) through a Cabinet resolution within weeks of gaining independence, what went wrong in the first fifteen years? The Kargil episode was another sad reminder of the state of affairs, as brought out by the Kargil Review Committee and the Group of Ministers' (GoM's) report on Reforming the National Security System. This book dwells in detail on various reforms undertaken since Kargil and surveys the shortcomings that continue to plague defence decision-making in India. Almost a decade after the submission of the GoM's report, the book is an aide memoire of the fact that the time has arrived to take a fresh look at higher defence and analyse where we stand now. Exploring the past and discovering the genesis of Indian Defence Management since the Vedic Age, the book covers a large ground in analysing the role of HDO during the inter-state conflicts since independence, issues in defence planning, post-Kargil reforms, functioning of the Chiefs of Staffs Committee, the CDS impasse and the functioning of the National Security Mechanism. Besides being a rich source of information to students of history, politics and military science, the book will be of immense value to policy-makers, defence personnel and even the general public whose stability and prosperity are indirectly impinged upon a strong military driven by a robust HDO.

Keeping in mind the necessity as well as the urgency of reform, this volume brings together practitioners as well as researchers on defence issues, on the key issue of defence reforms. The aim is not just to interrogate the status of reforms in current times but to also place the issue before a wider readership.

This book engages a comprehensive approach to understand both traditional and non-traditional security issues in addressing dimensions of India’s national security. The issues highlighted in the book through fourteen distinct, yet inter-related, chapters offer insightful reading to India’s national security. This edited book explores the criticalities of various security issues in India, internal and external, and digs deep into the government responses to each of these issues. Stepping away from merely focusing on the state-centric understanding of national security, this book also includes human security perspectives. In this process, this book also offers set of policy recommendations which could be used for effectively dealing with the national security challenges. The themes covered in this edited book range from offering a conceptual framework of national security to issues such as energy security, maritime security, nuclear security, internal security, neighborhood policy, dumping, terrorism, economic security, cyber security, role of media, defense preparedness, and use of GIS in security domain. This book highlights some of the important security issues around the larger perspective of India’s national security. This book will be highly useful for the students and scholars of security and strategic studies and international relations and also to the policymakers in the region.

India's defence imperatives transcend the ideological "defence vs. butter" debate. Even while there may be no profound existential concerns, the geo-political reality of a deeply troubled neighbourhood, long legacy of border disputes with neighbours in the north and west and a widening spectrum of potential warfare from conventional and strategic to the asymmetric can be ignored at our own peril.

India has the world’s fourth largest military and one of the biggest defence budgets. It asserts its political and military profile in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region. The nation has been in the midst of an ambitious plan to modernize its largely Soviet-era arms since the late 1990s and has spent billions of dollars on latest high-tech military technology. This handbook: canvasses over 60 years of Indian defence policy and the major debates that have shaped it; discusses several key themes such as the origins of the modern armed forces in India; military doctrine and policy; internal and external challenges; and nuclearization and its consequences; includes contributions by well-known scholars, experts in the field and policymakers; and provides an annotated bibliography for further research. Presented in an accessible format, this lucidly written handbook will be an indispensable resource for scholars and researchers of security and defence studies, international relations and political science, as well as for government think tanks and policymakers.

This study examines the observations of U.S. military personnel who attended India's Defence Services Staff College (DSSC) at Wellington. Although the DSSC is a tri-service professional military education institution, this study focuses primarily on the Indian Army, the largest and most influentialmilitary service in India. Collectively, U.S. personnel at the DSSC had sustained interactionsover an extended period of time with three distinct groups of Indian Army officers: seniorofficers (brigadier through lieutenant general), senior midlevel (lieutenant colonel and colonel),and junior midlevel (captain and major). The study focuses on the attitudes and values of theIndian Army officer corps over a 38-year period, from 1979 to 2017, to determine if there waschange over time, and if so, to understand the drivers of that change.

Chris Smith explores the evolution of Indian defence policy since 1947. He looks carefully at the domestic dynamics of Indian defence policy. This includes an in-depth analysis of the period 1947-62, which is often ignored by Indian defence analysts, and the performance of the defence industrial base. He concludes that India's defence policy is designed more as one aspect of the quest for great power status than as an attempt to aquire security at an affordable price.