The Deepening India–South Korea Cooperation in Arms Production and Shipbuilding India–South Korea relations are moving towards deeper engagement in strategic industries, such as arms production and shipbuilding Ranjit Kumar Dhawan | | IDSA Comments
India’s BRICS Test: Can New Delhi Hold a Fractured Bloc Together? The challenge before India’s BRICS presidency is not to eliminate internal differences but to manage them effectively enough to preserve functional cooperation. Rajeesh Kumar | | IDSA Comments
Death Sentences to Former Chinese Defence Ministers: Xi Jinping Cracks Down on PLA Corruption Xi Jinping has been using the anti-corruption drive against PLA officers to deal with disloyal personnel or rival factions. Abhishek Kumar Darbey | | IDSA Comments
From American Primacy to Negotiated Bipolarity: The Strategic Meaning of the Trump-Xi Summit At the Trump–Xi summit, Beijing attempted to normalise the idea of negotiated bipolarity, a world no longer organised solely around American primacy. Swati Arun | | Issue Brief
NASM-SR and the Evolution of India’s Indigenous Maritime Strike Capability Naval Anti-Ship Missile–Short Range (NASM-SR) represents an indigenous effort to equip smaller aerial platforms with stand-off maritime strike capability. Rahul Wankhede | | IDSA Comments
A Helium Shock to India’s Quantum Technology Ambitions India's quantum ambitions could be affected if its dependence on helium supply chains is left unaddressed. Shantanu Sharma , Krishna Bhatia | | Issue Brief
Rwanda 1994: A Failure of Leadership and a Preventable Genocide, by Paolo Tripodi The author of Rwanda 1994: A Failure of Leadership and a Preventable Genocide, Dr Paolo Tripodi, is a professor and the ethics branch head at the Lejeune Leadership Institute, Marine Corps University. Before his academic career, he was an infantry officer with the Italian Carabinieri. Dr Tripodi has authored a book and three edited volumes, and his articles have been published in various military and academic journals. The book Rwanda 1994: A Failure of Leadership and a Preventable Genocide is a powerful and meticulously researched work that challenges the conventional narrative of the Rwandan genocide. Instead of focusing solely on the inaction of the international community, the author takes a tactical and operational approach, investigating whether the United Nations’ mission on the ground, i.e., United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) could have stopped the genocide even with its limited resources. His conclusion is a resounding and troubling ‘yes’. D. Padma Kumar Pillay | January-March 2026 | Journal of Defence Studies
The Thousand Years War: Russia and the West, by Achala Moulik History is often written as a sequence of discrete events, each confined to its own time and place. Achala Moulik’s The Thousand Years War: Russia and the West does not restrict to a limited period but presents history as a continuum—a long confrontation between Russia and the Western powers over a millennium. Starting from Viking incursions to NATO’s expansion, Achala Moulik traces the confrontations happening at regular intervals with clarity, balance and finesse. The central theme of this book is that the West has carried out repeated invasions against Russia for centuries because of ideological clashes, and for lure of resources. Many times, Russia has faced the onslaught of geopolitical encirclement, however, each time, it has endured, survived and emerged stronger. Guru Saday Batabyal | January-March 2026 | Journal of Defence Studies
The Art of War by Sun Tzu (Translator: Lionel Giles) Sun Tzu’s The Art of War remains one of the greatest works on strategy, warfare and leadership ever written (around 5th century BCE) with an influence that extends far beyond the battlefield. Believed to have been written during the Ch’in and Han dynasties, the text has stood the test of time, offering insights that remain compelling and instructive for military commanders, statesmen, and even scholars and professionals in other fields such as business and management. Manorama Kuntal | January-March 2026 | Journal of Defence Studies
Redlines Redrawn: Operation Sindoor and India’s New Normal, by Maj Gen Bipin Bakshi, Air Mshl Rajesh Kumar, Amb Anil Trigunayat and Brig Akhelesh Bhargava On 22 April 2025, four terrorists armed with automatic rifles carried out a brutal attack on unsuspecting tourists in the scenic Pahalgam valley of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). This heinous terrorist attack tragically claimed the lives of 26 tourists, thereby significantly disrupting the surge of tourism in J&K that had grown considerably after the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. This attack serves as a major setback to J&K’s trajectory towards normalcy and underscores Pakistan’s consistent subversive attempts to disrupt peace in the Union Territory. To the Indian public, the Pahalgam attacks evoked the painful memories of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, wherein Pakistan employed a similar modus operandi to target innocent civilians. However, unlike 26/11, the Pahalgam attack occurred at a time when India’s political leadership had repeatedly affirmed its policy of zero tolerance to terrorism. R. Vignesh | January-March 2026 | Journal of Defence Studies