Abhijit Singh

With the INS Vikramaditya’s arrival in India, it is time to undertake a dispassionate assessment of the ship’s possible uses and deployment options. The Indian navy would be well served if it considered employing the ship in a ‘soft power projection’ role – as a versatile asset to be used in diplomacy and regional outreach, disaster relief and humanitarian missions.

• Published: January 21, 2014
• Issue Brief

Vikramaditya’s commissioning has re-ignited an old debate on the relevance of aircraft carriers. Proponents argue that it must play a central role in ‘blue-water’ plans while opponents posit that the carrier’s vulnerability and inadequate logistical sustainability render it an obsolete asset.

• Published: November 27, 2013
• IDSA Comments

India’s acquisition of a deep-sea exploration ship ‘SamudraRatnakar’ is a noteworthy development. ‘Deep-sea mining’ has now been officially recognised as a future frontier of scientific research, a notion first outlined by a National Security Council paper in 2012.

• Published: November 01, 2013
• IDSA Comments

Both India and Australia are trying hard to shed their traditional reticence and engage in the maritime domain, with both sides agreeing to a drastic overhaul of the existing exchanges.

• Published: October 14, 2013
• IDSA Comments

For the past decade, China is known to have actively used ‘three warfares’ (3Ws) strategy—media, psychological and legal warfare—to weaken its adversaries in regions constituting what it perceives to be its ‘core interests’. While a wide range of tools have been deployed, the attacks have remained mostly confined to Taiwan and South-East Asian states involved in the territorial disputes in the South China Sea. But with Beijing’s influence in South Asia and the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) growing, there is evidence emerging of the 3Ws strategy being put to use against India.

• Published: October 2013
• Journal of Defence Studies

Both sides appear to have wisely avoided a gruelling battle of attrition by opting for a tactical truce - not seemingly on account of a preference for peace but because of a pragmatic recognition of the futility of further conflict.

• Published: November 26, 2012
• IDSA Comments

The WMD insinuation by the West, the debate over the impending genocide in Aleppo, and the swelling ranks of refugees, all point to an orchestrated shift in the narrative of the conflict that makes external intervention an ‘inevitability’.

• Published: August 07, 2012
• IDSA Comments

Recent reports from Pakistan seem to suggest the Pakistan Navy (PN) may be on the cusp of developing a naval nuclear missile capability, even as its plans for acquiring a nuclear submarine capability gradually become clearer.

• Published: June 29, 2012
• IDSA Comments

The Agni-V launch is a significant milestone for the Indian scientific community as this is the first missile with a strike-range covering major Chinese cities including Beijing and Shanghai.

• Published: April 23, 2012
• IDSA Comments

While India’s policy elite have surely not been ‘oblivious’ of the tectonic changes occurring in the region, they have been rather ‘impervious’ to the rapidly emerging equations.

• Published: January 16, 2012
• IDSA Comments