Journal of Defence Studies

India’s Special Forces: An Appraisal

At a time when the battlefield has been progressively transforming from the conventional to unconventional, the role of Special Forces will become critical in shaping its outcome. Conflicts in the past decade have established the primacy of such forces. Their role has evolved and today special operations are meant to be decisive and achieve strategic objectives. The Indian security establishment has also been taking notice of these changes and by and large making right moves.

Fit for Command: Leadership Attributes for PSO–COIN Operations

Peace support operations (PSO)–counter-insurgency (COIN) operations are different and often significantly more complex than conventional operations. Such a complexity places greater demand on military leaders both at the tactical and operational levels. The diversity of tasks and threats, primacy of politics and the decentralized nature of PSO–COIN operations have serious implications for both junior and senior leaders.

Policing Insurgencies: Cops as Counterinsurgents, edited by C. Christine Fair and Sumit Ganguly

Counter-insurgency, referred to as COIN with the usual military fondness for abbreviations, is commonly understood as a military-centric effort that seeks to overwhelm the insurgents with superior numbers, firepower, technology, and funds. In countries like India, central paramilitary forces are enjoined to do so. The central premise in traditional COIN discourse is that insurgency is a military problem requiring a military solution.

Drone Warfare, by John Kaag and Sarah Kreps

Drones are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can carry a payload for the purpose of reconnaissance and surveillance; and those that are armed with missiles and bombs carry a payload for combat use. So, in drone warfare a human being, that is, a pilot flying an aircraft, is unnecessary and his life is not put in danger over the enemy territory. In military technology, drones represent precision weaponry and the rise of robotics. Drones were not armed at all till the 1990s.

Can War be Eliminated?, by Christopher Coker

Imagine a book that talks of war, of all wars that have been fought in all of human history. One could be forgiven for assuming that such a volume would run into hundreds of volumes and hundreds of thousands of pages. On the contrary, Christopher Coker’s Can War be Eliminated? is probably the slimmest volume on the shelf on the subject of war. That is because in this book, Coker is not interested in engaging into a conversation about specific wars. He instead speaks of war as a phenomenon in itself, a phenomenon whose military nature is only an aspect and not the core.

China’s Biological Warfare Programme: An Integrative Study with Special Reference to Biological Weapons Capabilities

This study attempts to profile China’s biological warfare programme (BWP), with special reference to biological weapons (BW) capabilities that exist in facilities affiliated with the defence establishment and the military. For that purpose, a wide variety of facilities affiliated with the defence establishment and with the military are reviewed and profiled. The outcome of that analysis points at 12 facilities affiliated with the defence establishment, plus 30 facilities affiliated with the PLA, that are involved in research, development, production, testing or storage of BW.

Standing Committee on Defence (16th Lok Sabha): Striking Old Notes on Debut

Three months after the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) was swept to power at the centre in the general elections held in April–May 2014 to the 16th Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Indian Parliament), the Standing Committee on Defence was constituted under the chairmanship of Major General B.C. Khanduri (Retd.), former Chief Minister of the northern state of Uttarakhand and a prominent member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is the main constituent of the NDA.

India’s Doctrine Puzzle: Limiting War in South Asia, by Ali Ahmed

India has often been accused of not having a strategic culture and, more recently, of not clearly enunciating its strategic and doctrinal thought. More often than not, this has led to interpolation of brief statements, actions and speeches in public domain that create more doubts than answer questions regarding the country’s strategic formulations. Ali Ahmed attempts to dig deeper into India’s doctrinal underpinnings in light of nuclearization in the operational domain, a field that remains limited to patchy assessments in the past.

The Rise of the Bengal Tigers: The Growing Strategic Importance of the Bay of Bengal

The Bay of Bengal region is now growing in economic and strategic importance. The good economic prospects of many Bay of Bengal states are making the region a cockpit for Asian growth and a key economic connector between East and South Asia. This article looks at strategic developments in the Bay of Bengal and their implications for our understanding of the Indo-Pacific. It argues that the Bay of Bengal needs to be understood as a region with its own particular strategic dynamics and issues.

Revisiting the 1971 ‘USS Enterprise Incident’: Rhetoric, Reality and Pointers for the Contemporary Era

The USS Enterprise naval task group entry into the Indian Ocean during the closing stages of 1971 Indo-Pak Conflict led to further deterioration in the relations between India and the United States (US), and this estrangement lasted until the end of the Cold War. The US couched this show of force under the rubric of ensuring safety of American personnel caught up in a war zone. In India, however, this was seen as a coercive attempt to prop up a genocidal military regime.