A shift in strategic thinking over the past two decades has now led to India being poised between the strategic doctrines of offensive and defensive realism.
Demands from society and family are higher on soldiers and, thus contribute towards greater stress. Therefore, desired capacities have to be built in our recruitment system, training philosophy, training methodology, training infrastructure in training academies, regimental training centres, divisional training schools and other military colleges/ schools of instruction as also in our military thinking to produce motivated, efficient and stress-adapted officers and soldiers capable of meeting future warfare challenges efficiently
The current predicament the Military finds itself in can be used constructively by the Services and the government for undertaking the necessary correctives with a sense of urgency and obligation.
People in India have traditionally looked up to the Armed Forces. Corruption in the Armed Forces therefore militates against the spirit of service to the nation. It has to be cleansed wholesale, with effective mechanisms for protecting whistleblowers and taking swift action against the guilty put in place. Caesar’s wife must be beyond reproach.
In practice, it has been found that a peacetime army tends to atrophy and lose its war fighting orientation. It develops a lopsided emphasis on peacetime routine, spit and polish. In fact, a wartime army may well be the very anti-thesis of a peacetime army. Years of non-use of the military instrument sometimes results in the rusting of its value system and ethos.
Supersession is too important an aspect of organizational existence to be dismissed lightly. It is a situation to be managed jointly by the organization and affected individual with the clear understanding that organizational interests are overriding. The Human Resources Management (HRM) approach aims to ensure that staffing manning of an organization effectively meets the quantitative and qualitative aspects at all times to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. An important element of HRM is Human Resource Planning (HRP).
The most crucial aspect is inspection of the ration offered by a contractor under the contract and acceptance of the same by the contract operating officer with due care and with reference to quantity as well as quality.
The interim opportunity provided by the Army’s curtailment of insurgent activity needs to be utilised to meet the aspirations of the local population in insurgency affected areas.
The Services have been doctrinally fecund over the past decade, with each Service bidding to pursue relatively distinct campaigns, which would amount to lack of synergy and the whole failing to rise higher than the sum of its parts.
