Core Concerns in Indian Defence and the Imperatives for Reforms

India`s current defence imperatives transcend the ideological `defence vs. butter` debate. Even while there may be no profound existential concerns, the geopolitical 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. Given the current capability gaps and infrastructure inadequacies, India requires a far more focussed pursuit of the objective of comprehensive national power with an optimal blend of fully deterrent stateoftheart and readily deployable capabilities potentially on more than one front. Likely outofarea contingencies and our legitimate aspirations as an emerging regional and world power further fuel this need. While there has been a significant stepping up of the public discourse in the recent years on the myriad concerns in defence, there is precious little in the public realm on the hard core issues confronting defence decision makers in critical areas such as the long range geostrategic environment, higher defence management and civil military relations, defence industrialisation, acquisition, research and development, logistics, manpower, planning, financial management and oversight. Possibly for the first time ever, this book seeks to put together the perceptions, views and recommendations of a host of past practitioners at the highest level from the civil and military bureaucracy who have had some unmatched insights into the complex world of Indian Defence and its decisionmaking structures and processes. For obvious reasons, the cause of reliable, efficient, and affordable defence brooks no further delay in terms of a potent capability basket encompassing the land, sea, air, space and cyberspace domains. This would call for some long overdue reforms covering organisations, policies and processes to enhance professionalism, synergies arising from jointness, drastically curtail decision making time frames, and, above all, enforce accountability for the attainment of stated goals. Hopefully, this book would contribute in some measure to this worthy task.