Journal of Defence Studies

India’s Pathways for Regional Prominence in Asia-Pacific: Prospects and Challenges

Asian geopolitics currently represents a complex blending of power and paradox, both stable and fluid, with change occurring against an unresolved tension between the direction of economic growth and that of strategic anxiety. With the continent turning into the economic growth engine of the world, regional geopolitics is witnessing friction between Asian powers that had previously kept economic and political separation from one another.

Balochistan, the British and the Great Game: The Struggle for the Bolan Pass, Gateway to India by T.A. Heathcote

The book traces the history and events of the nineteenth century in a sparsely populated desert area of Asia, Balochistan, an area (inhabited by the tribal Baloch people) and brings out the strategic importance attached to the Bolan Pass by the colonial British.

Y.M. Bammi
January-March 2018 |
Journal of Defence Studies

Drones: An Emerging Terror Tool

From the days of their inception, remotely piloted aero models (known popularly as drones) have been feared as a means of spreading terror. Recently, the use of drones by terrorist outfits like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), also known as the Islamic State (IS), has seen an increase and this has brought those fears to the fore. Experts fear that the drones have given terrorists a near-perfect solution for spreading terror and a major terror act may be around the corner as legal and illegal drone activities are on the rise.

Atul Pant
January-March 2018 |
Journal of Defence Studies

Doklam and the Indo-China Boundary

On 19 December 2017, three days ahead of the scheduled 20th Round of Indo-China border talk between the Indian National Security Advisor (NSA), Ajit Doval, and China’s State Councillor, Yang Jiechi (the details of which are yet to be made public), the daily Times of India reported a statement by China that the Doklam standoff posed a ‘major test’ for the bilateral ties and that lessons should be learnt from it to avoid a similar situation of its kind in the future.1 China’s statement was made in the context of the face-off between Indian Army and China’s People’s Liberation Army (PL

A.K. Bardalai
January-March 2018 |
Journal of Defence Studies

Inside the Enemy’s Computer: Identifying Cyber-Attackers, by Clement Guitton

Attribution of cyberattacks is an impending issue in enabling a credible deterrent against both state and non-state actors. It applies equally to cases of a criminal nature as well as to those with implications for national security. The technology underlying cyberspace facilitates anonymity and thus affixing responsibility, that is, attributability, is not merely a technological challenge but a political one as well, especially when nation states have proven prowess in engaging their adversaries in cyberspace.

Munish Sharma
January-March 2018 |
Journal of Defence Studies

South Asian Geopolitics: Has Pakistan Lost its Plot?

Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, by C. Christine Fair, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 343, £27.99

Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War, by Myra MacDonald, London: Hurst & Co., 2017, pp. 328, £25.00‘

High End in the Pacific: Envisioning the Upper Limits of India-US Naval Cooperation in Pacific-Asia

The article argues that India and the United States are poised to strengthen their bilateral strategic convergences, not only in the Indian Ocean but also in Pacific-Asia that lies eastwards of the Malacca Straits, and wherein India’s geo-strategic stakes as well as its military-strategic footprint are likely to increase in the coming years. This would progressively enhance the complementarities between their navies in the western Pacific and its contiguous seas, thereby enabling substantive naval cooperation towards ensuring security and stability in the broader Indo-Pacific region.

Foreign Policy and Sea Power: India’s Maritime Role Flux

The core argument this article makes is that India’s maritime worldview and role conceptions have not only been evolving since the 1950s, but they have also been closely interlinked with how policymakers thought about India’s regional identity and the state’s economic capacity to release resources towards sea power. Today, there are three maritime role conceptions that are vying for the apex’s strategic attention, and they are reflective of a deeper role flux in India’s regional identity.

A Rock between Hard Places: Afghanistan as an Arena of Regional Insecurity, by Kristian Berg Harpviken and Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh

The book, A Rock between Hard Places, is the result of research carried out by K.B. Harpviken and S. Tadjbakhsh, independently and jointly, with encouragement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway. In this book, the authors have examined the events unfolding in Afghanistan from a regional perspective up to 2015, set against the backdrop of the scheduled withdrawal of the United States (US)-led military alliance.

War from the Ground Up: Twenty-first-century Combat as Politics, by Emile Simpson

War from the Ground Up is not easy reading. The author’s erudition, bolstered by a wealth of detail and historical context, makes this one of the more serious studies on contemporary military conflict. Emile Simpson has attempted to arrive at an overall understanding of war in its contemporary and traditional forms by drawing on his experience of three tours as an infantry officer with the Royal Gurkha Rifles in Afghanistan.