S. Kalyanaraman

The Indian intervention in Sri Lanka throws up five major lessons for future regional stability operations. Firstly, it is imperative to define the mission unambiguously and establish a clear mandate. Secondly, there is need for a robust military contingency planning process as well as discussions at various levels within the system to refine plans and provide an adequate force to meet possible eventualities. Thirdly, clear command and control needs to be established at the outset and the appropriate field formation must be designated as the headquarters.

• Published: July 2012
• Journal of Defence Studies

Coined a few years ago, ‘asymmetric warfare’ is an umbrella term that includes insurgent and terrorist campaigns that Western militaries were forced to contend with in the course of external interventions. Asymmetric wars for Western countries are wars of choice, not wars of necessity.

• Published: March 2012
• Strategic Analysis

The story of the Asian Security Conference is the attempt by IDSA to capture the complex issues involved in Asia’s emergence as the new locus of international affairs in the 21st century and India’s emergence as a factor in the continent’s evolving economic, political and security dynamics.

• Published: February 13, 2012
• IDSA Comments

Does India have a strategic culture? The conventional answer is ‘no’, especially since George Tanham said so. Jayashree Vivekanandan contests this view, the roots of which she traces to the ‘Orientalist’ construction of Indian culture.

• Published: September 2011
• Strategic Analysis

Terrorism in the Indian hinterland is the result of a complex set of inter-related factors. The development of a jihad culture in Pakistan during the course of the Afghan conflict in the 1980s led to the subsequent Pakistani decision to employ jihad against India as a strategy. The mobilisation of the Hindu Right in India and ensuing communal violence led to the radicalisation of Muslim youth and the resort to terrorism by both Indian Islamists and Muslim criminal networks with help from Pakistan.

• Published: September 2010
• Strategic Analysis

• Published: May 2009
• Strategic Analysis

Escalation Control and the Nuclear Option in South Asia Edited by Michael Krepon, Rodney W. Jones, and Ziad Haider The Henry L.

Stimson Center, Washington DC, 2004, pp. 166

• Published: January 2006
• Strategic Analysis

Every war is waged to fashion a better and more acceptable peace. Peace, in the sense of a legitimate framework within which States can pursue their interests without recourse to arms. The fashioning of a better and legitimate peace is especially important in the wake of wars among Great Powers, which have an immense impact on the international system as a whole. In fact, some wars among Great Powers – like the Thirty Years’ War, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and the two World Wars – are expressly waged to determine a new framework for the conduct of international relations.

• Published: May 16, 2005
• IDSA Comments

September 11, according to the Commission that investigated that catastrophic event, was a result of a failure of imagination. Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, on the other hand, could be characterised as a case of fertile imagination exhibited by US intelligence and the George W. Bush Administration. Intelligence failure is the facile answer given to describe what went wrong in both cases. This article offers a more nuanced answer that takes into account the political context in which the threat posed by Osama bin Laden was analysed and acted upon.

• Published: January 2005
• Strategic Analysis

Guerrilla warfare is not a new phenomenon and history is witness to its repeated occurrence. In the modern era, it acquired prominence during the Napoleonic Wars which led to an examination of its role by leading nineteenth-century thinkers including Clausewitz, Jomini, Marx and Engels. Over the course of the subsequent century, the concept and practice of guerrilla warfare was integrated within social, economic and political programmes that aimed to overthrow established authority and transform society through an armed struggle.

• Published: April 2003
• Strategic Analysis