While the end state of the Russia–Ukraine conflict is still afar, an analysis of the conflict and war fighting so far, shows that there are enough early lessons for the strategic and military practitioners to decipher and take note of.
The strategy articulated by Deng Xiaoping in 1990 as a guiding tenet of China's foreign policy was: “Observe calmly, secure our position, cope with affairs calmly, hide our capacities and bide our time, be good at maintaining a low profile, and never claim leadership 1”.
The Indian Army is at the cusp of a huge change. It has to concurrently manage the matter of Women Officers as seamlessly as possible. Success in this venture is predicated squarely on the mindsets of the seniors in charge and the WO community
The creation of the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) in the Ministry of Defence portends better civil-military cooperation. That India’s civil-military cooperation was in need of structural reform was never doubted. Yet, the implementation of such reform lacked political will, faced bureaucratic resistance, and was stymied by elements within the armed services.
The incremental and calibrated improvement in the India-China defence ties has withstood the test of time. The next step in building M2M relations could provide the required impetus to further accelerate the process of strengthening peace and stability along the LAC.
Since the last decade of the twentieth century, network centricity has profoundly transformed warfighting and the outlook of the military. The next level of the networking ladder is Internet of Things (IoT), which has already started to disruptively change the ways in the civil domain, bringing a considerable autonomy to various processes by linking of a plethora of smart devices that are talking to each other. Militaries, in the near future, are also likely to see similar proliferation of IoT, which will bring a material change to their functioning and conduct of operations.
The UK Combat Air Strategy unveiled on July 16, 2018 can actually be termed as the Combat Aircraft Industry Strategy. India, with a nearly non-existing aircraft industry, can benefit by understanding the key rationales underpinning the CAS.
This article posits that military science has been one of the most neglected subjects in Indian history in practice and in scholarship. Greater, popular scholarly focus tends to be mostly on subjects dealing with grand strategy and with it, abstract armchair theorising. While grand strategy is necessary at the political–military level, it is not sufficient as victory or defeat also depends on the capacity of the armed forces to achieve the desired results during the conduct of war.
India needs to factor in the critical issue of reputation for resolve in future crisis situations in order to build its credibility and enhance its deterrence potential.
