Arming without Aiming


Book Description

India has long been motivated to modernize its military, and it now has the resources. But so far, the drive to rebuild has lacked a critical component—strategic military planning. India's approach of arming without strategic purpose remains viable, however, as it seeks great-power accommodation of its rise and does not want to appear threatening. What should we anticipate from this effort in the future, and what are the likely ramifications? Stephen Cohen and Sunil Dasgupta answer those crucial questions in a book so timely that it reached number two on the nonfiction bestseller list in India. "Two years after the publication of Arming without Aiming, our view is that India's strategic restraint and its consequent institutional arrangement remain in place. We do not want to predict that India's military-strategic restraint will last forever, but we do expect that the deeper problems in Indian defense policy will continue to slow down military modernization."—from the preface to the paperback edition




Societies and Military Power


Book Description

A work with broad implications for theories of comparative strategic behavior and civil-military relations, Societies and Military Power uses the long history of the armies of India as a basis for analyzing whether the character of a given society affects the amount of military power that can be generated by the armies that emerge from that society. By examining the changing relationship between ruling elites in the Indian subcontinent and their armed forces, the book shows that divisions within society are mirrored within the military, even within the contemporary professional military. Stephen Peter Rosen explores the proposition that cultural explanations don't sufficiently account for changes in military power, whereas social structure does. He suggests also that the dynamics of civil-military relations in a non-Western setting are not explicable without social-structural insight. He concludes that the comparative study of strategic behavior and military organization has lacked a sound foundation, which the social-structural explanation offered in this book begins to provide.




Fighting to the End


Book Description

The Pakistan Army is poised for perpetual conflict with India which it cannot win militarily or politically. What explains Pakistan's persistent revisionism despite increasing costs and decreasing likelihood of success? This book argues that an understanding of the army's strategic culture explains its willingness to fight to the end




Not War, Not Peace?


Book Description

The Mumbai blasts of 1993, the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, Mumbai 26/11—cross-border terrorism has continued unabated. What can India do to motivate Pakistan to do more to prevent such attacks? In the nuclear times that we live in, where a military counter-attack could escalate to destruction beyond imagination, overt warfare is clearly not an option. But since outright peace-making seems similarly infeasible, what combination of coercive pressure and bargaining could lead to peace? The authors provide, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of the violent and non-violent options available to India for compelling Pakistan to take concrete steps towards curbing terrorism originating in its homeland. They draw on extensive interviews with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, in service and retired, to explore the challenges involved in compellence and to show how non-violent coercion combined with clarity on the economic, social and reputational costs of terrorism can better motivate Pakistan to pacify groups involved in cross-border terrorism. Not War, Not Peace? goes beyond the much discussed theories of nuclear deterrence and counterterrorism strategy to explore a new approach to resolving old conflicts.




Army and Nation


Book Description

Steven I. Wilkinson explores how India has succeeded in keeping the military out of politics, when so many other countries have failed. He uncovers the command and control strategies, the careful ethnic balancing, and the political, foreign policy, and strategic decisions that have made the army safe for Indian democracy.




The Wellington Experience


Book Description

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.




India’s Grand Strategy


Book Description

As India prepares to take its place in shaping the course of an ‘Asian century’, there are increasing debates about its ‘grand strategy’ and its role in a future world order. This timely and topical book presents a range of historical and contemporary interpretations and case studies on the theme. Drawing upon rich and diverse narratives that have informed India’s strategic discourse, security and foreign policy, it charts a new agenda for strategic thinking on postcolonial India from a non-Western perspective. Comprehensive and insightful, the work will prove indispensable to those in defence and strategic studies, foreign policy, political science, and modern Indian history. It will also interest policy-makers, think-tanks and diplomats.




India's Wars


Book Description

India’s armed forces play a key role in protecting the country and occupy a special place in the Indian people’s hearts, yet standard accounts of contemporary Indian history rarely have a military dimension. In India’s Wars, serving Air Vice Marshal Arjun Subramaniam seeks to rectify that oversight by giving India’s military exploits their rightful place in history. Subramaniam begins India’s Wars with a frank call to reinvigorate the study of military history as part of Indian history more generally. Part II surveys the development of the India’s army, navy, and air force from the early years of the modern era to 1971. In Parts III and IV, Subramaniam considers conflicts from 1947 to 1962 as well as conflicts with China in 1962 and Pakistan in 1965 and 1971. Part V concludes by assessing these conflicts through the lens of India’s ancient strategist, Kautilya, who is revered in India as much as Sun Tzu is in China. Not merely a wide-ranging historical narrative of India’s military performance in battle, India’s Wars also offers a strategic, operational, and human perspective on the wars fought by independent India’s armed forces. Subramaniam highlights possible ways to improve the synergy between the three services, and argues in favor of the declassification of historical material pertaining to national security. The author also examines the overall state of civil-military relations in India, leadership within the Indian armed forces, as well as training, capability building, and other vitally important issues of concern to citizens, the government, and the armed forces. This objective and critical analysis provides policy cues for the reinvigoration of the armed forces as a critical tool of statecraft and diplomacy. Readers will come away from India’s Wars with a greater understanding of the international environment of war and conflict in modern India. Laced with veterans’ intense experiences in combat operations, and deeply researched and passionately written, it unfolds with surprising ease and offers a fresh perspective on independent India’s history.




Active Defense


Book Description

What changes in China's modern military policy reveal about military organizations and strategySince the 1949 Communist Revolution, China has devised nine different military strategies, which the People's Liberation Army (PLA) calls "strategic guidelines." What accounts for these numerous changes? Active Defense offers the first systematic look at China's military strategy from the mid-twentieth century to today. Exploring the range and intensity of threats that China has faced, M. Taylor Fravel illuminates the nation's past and present military goals and how China sought to achieve them, and offers a rich set of cases for deepening the study of change in military organizations.Drawing from diverse Chinese-language sources, including memoirs of leading generals, military histories, and document collections that have become available only in the last two decades, Fravel shows why transformations in military strategy were pursued at certain times and not others. He focuses on the military strategies adopted in 1956, 1980, and 1993-when the PLA was attempting to wage war in a new kind of way-to show that China has pursued major change in its strategic guidelines when there has been a significant shift in the conduct of warfare in the international system and when China's Communist Party has been united.Delving into the security threats China has faced over the last seven decades, Active Defense offers a detailed investigation into how and why states alter their defense policies.