Rahul Bedi 
Chandigarh: Six months after categorically declaring that India did not need a written-down National Security Strategy (NSS) document, chief of defence staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan recently executed a volte face by stating that one such text was necessary and is being formulated.
Speaking on ‘Future wars and the Indian armed forces’ at the India International Centre (IIC) earlier this week, India’s senior-most military officer declared that a ‘written [national security] document’ was being worked out, after having stated just the opposite in late May.
Speaking at a book launch in New Delhi on the earlier occasion, General Chauhan had contested the insistence by many in the security realm of having a written NSS. He had argued that an NSS comprised policy, processes and practices, all three of which were adequately addressed when needed, foreclosing thereby the need for a scripted text.
“The only thing missing is a written policy. I don’t know why people insist on that,” he added, exasperated.
Yet at the IIC on November 20, General Chauhan retracted his earlier assertion, in what a cross-section of serving and retired service officers and military analysts said was symptomatic of a ‘muddled and somewhat ad hoc’ approach towards articulating and verbalising a comprehensive NSS.
Such a document, they maintained, was vital for a nuclear weapon-state like India, encircled by two similarly armed, collusively inimical neighbours.
“India’s NSS has been a work in progress for years and seemingly continues to be so at a time when India’s military is poised to undergo revolutionary changes with the formation of tri-service integrated theatre commands (ITCs),” declared a former two-star Indian Army (IA) officer.
Even an authoritarian state like China, he added, declining to be named for fear of repercussions, regularly produced strategy documents and policy and white papers regularly.
Former IA chief of staff General M.M. Naravane too had unambiguously signposted the absence of an NSS in late 2022. In what was surprisingly the first instance of a former service chief speaking so forthrightly in recent years, he stated that without a clearly enunciated NSS, it would be foolhardy to pursue the creation of ITCs.
Delivering the General K.V. Krishna Rao memorial lecture in Delhi, General Naravane declared that unless an NSS was in place, all talk of theaterisation was simply putting the cart before the horse. Theaterisation is not an end, he said, but a means to an end. And that end, the former IA chief added with uncharacteristic candour, must be specified first in the form of a national defence strategy which, in turn, would flow from the NSS.
He went on to state that the NSS, once formulated, would also make it clear whether the military’s role was just to defend the country’s land borders and territorial waters, or did it extend to the wider primary strategic arc stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca Strait.
Also read: India’s Need for a National Security Strategy Cannot Be Ignored
Thereafter, in October 2023, former national security adviser (NSA) Shivshankar Menon revealed that there had been at least three attempts to produce a NSS, but that in each instance hesitation had come, not from the professionals, but from the political establishment, following which it had failed to materialise.
Presiding over a book launch in the capital, Menon cited political opacity and lack of clarity on multiple security issues for this failure. One such was the CDS’s role – operational or advisory – in the national security matrix and one which had assumed criticality presently in the overall command-and-control structure of the proposed ITCs.
Additionally, there was also the issue of multiple security-related institutions created over time and their relationship, not only with each other, but collectively, the former NSA added.
Even Arvind Gupta, former deputy NSA and presently head of the Delhi-based Vivekananda International Foundation, declared in an essay in 2018 that the “institutions of national security in the present form do not lend themselves to multidisciplinary coordination and synergy”.
In his analysis entitled ‘Securing the Nation: The Indispensability of Institutional Synergy’, he stated that the absence of a network of institutions working closely together was perilously undermining the management of India’s complex national security challenges.
Other military veterans seconded these observations, declaring that it was ‘simply astonishing’ that India still lacked a NSS, despite the recent mushrooming of organisations under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP-led government with the intent of formulating one.
Besides, the BJP’s overt machismo, said the above-mentioned two-star IA officer, in matters of national security was at variance with the country’s overall capability in influencing outcomes in its immediate neighbourhood to its advantage.
Heading this list of national security establishments is the high-rolling Defence Policy Committee or DPC, created in April 2018 as an ‘overarching’ body to manage, analyse and evaluate all relevant inputs relating to national defence and security planning, foreign policy imperatives, operational directives and relevant strategic and security-related doctrines.
Defence acquisition and infrastructure development plans, including the 15-year Long-Term Integrated Perspective Plan, defence technology, the development of India’s defence industry and global technological advancement in the military domain, were also part of the DPC’s remit.
Parallelly, and as part of the all-encompassing national security apparatus, is the Strategic Policy Group or SPG, revamped some six months later the same year, as the first level of the three-tiered National Security Council and constituting its decision-making nucleus.
The Group’s founding responsibility was to foster inter-ministerial co-ordination and the integration of relevant inputs and creating national security policies like the NSS.
Also read: Over-Ambition and Half-Baked Ideas Plague the Military’s Plan for Integrated Theatre Commands
Both organisations are headed by NSA Ajit Doval, and their membership too was more or less analogous, comprising the three service chiefs and the defence and foreign secretaries. DPC members also included the federal revenue secretary and chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee – a responsibility that transferred itself to the CDS in December 2019.
The Integrated Defence Staff, also headed by the CDS, was designated the secretariat of the DPC that encompassed four sub-committees to execute its myriad responsibilities, of which producing a written NSS was one such.
SPG membership, on the other hand, was larger and included heads of the domestic and overseas intelligence-gathering agencies, the cabinet secretary and the respective secretaries of home, finance, defence production, revenue, atomic energy and space.
The scientific advisor to the defence minister and the NITI Aayog vice-chairman too were members of the SPG, which earlier was chaired by the cabinet secretary, who after its refurbishment and expansion in late 2018 now reports to the NSA.
Senior military officers are agreed that the DPC and the SPG were ‘more than qualified’ to devise a written NSS and the attendant National Defence Strategy, recommended by General Naravane, but had simply failed in doing so.
“Nothing of much policy import has been forthcoming from either the DPC or the SPG, whose meetings too have been infrequent,” said a two-star Indian Navy officer, preferring anonymity. At best they appear to be talking shops, centred broadly on inconsequentiality, he added.
But there is more, as these two exalted bodies are supplemented by a host of think tanks backed by either the Ministry of Defence or hand-held by the individual services as part of a gargantuan national security consortium.
These included the Manohar Parrikar Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses in Delhi, the country’s foremost thinktank whose founding charter encompassed advanced research in defence, strategic and security issues, amongst other related matters.
Alongside were three service-sponsored think tanks: the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, the National Maritime Foundation and the Centre for Air Power Studies, all operating out of Delhi.
Supplementing them further was the high-maintenance but low-performance Centre for Joint Warfare Studies, created in 2007 in Delhi to “rise above sectoral and departmental legacies and to examine joint warfare and synergy issues in their entirety”.
However, all these cerebral workshops which were usually hyperactive in conducting seminars and discussions on global strategic matters and national defence policies, have either been deliberately kept out of the NSS formulation loop or, lacking talent, capability and confidence, had themselves simply opted out.
In conclusion, General Chauhan’s recent turnaround declaration at the IIC that a written NSS was in the pipeline, is a reassuring indication that this network of multiple aforementioned national security institutions, created ambitiously in recent years, will finally end up vindicating themselves.
By doing so and delivering a comprehensive NSS, they would reduce dependence on jugaad, or an improvised approach to national security matters, and competently and reassuringly deliver results.