[Good friends] An AR-15 slug grazed US Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s ear. 2 cms to the right and the world would have witnessed in real time the splattering of his brains by the 5.56mm shell fired from 150 yards out from an unsurveilled elevation. Lucky for him, the 20-year old assassin didn’t use a proper sniper rifle and dial in the expected ballistic deviation at 100 yards as a professional might have done. But damned good shot any way. (Between “the gas operated, air cooled” Armalite-15 designed by the legendary Eugene Stoner and the Kalashnikov it is hard to know which is the bet ..read more

[Rafale in IAF] Intrigued to find an op/ed with the title “Drawing borders in the air” in the Indian Express (1 July 2024) by Air Marshal Diptendu Choudhury (Retd). The title evoked for me the writings of Lt Gen Francis Tuker, commander of the famed 4th Indian Division in the Allied 8th Army in the Maghreb in World War Two who, in 1945, framed “Icarian” India’s military future in terms of its “air boundaries” stretching from the Australian Isthmus across the Indian Ocean to North Africa. Disappointed, that the piece turned out to be just a pitch for more French Rafale fighter aircraft. Concei ..read more

My last book — Staggering Forward: Narendra Modi and India’s Global Ambition, published in 2018 by Penguin in time for the 2019 general elections was prophetic in many respects. Most importantly in its conclusion that reeked of disappointment with his record in office in his first term (2014-2019). Modi, I rued, was too much the statist to go in for a radical structural overhaul of the system and actually shrink the government, get it out of the economy, as he had promised to do and pave the country’s path to prosperity. This because there were precedents galore to prove that deregulating the ..read more

[The standing COAS aspirants] The surprising extension in service of a month afforded the incumbent army chief General Manoj Pande has scrambled the calculations about who his successor will be. The race that was supposedly between the current Vice Chief, Lt General Upendra Dwivedi, and the next senior most officer — the GOC-in-C, Southern Command, Lt General AK Singh, is now more open. All the other theatre commanders, by their seniority — Lt Generals MV Suchindra Kumar (Northern Command), NS Raja Subramani (Central Command), Manoj Kumar Katiyar (Western Command), Dhiraj Seth (South Western ..read more

[CDS, General Anil Chauhan, seeking blessings!] Finally, the Modi government ended the smouldering resistance within the military by notifying the Inter-Services Organisations Act (ISO). I had suggested some 20 years ago to the KC Pant-chaired government committee studying higher defence reorganization and reforms, that whatever the CDS/integration/jointness scheme the committee decided on, it should be imposed on the armed services by government dictat because sending it to the three services for their viewpoints would be to consign it to the trash heap. But it was sent to the services and i ..read more

[The Two Amigos — NSAs Ajit Doval and Jake Sullivan] All of a not so sudden, we have news of India covertly creating alleged mayhem all over the map — in Pakistan by supposedly bumping off a bunch of jihadi terrorists under the protection of Pakistan Army’s Inter Services Intelligence in Lahore and elsewhere, in Canada by eliminating a Khalistani terrorist, Harpreet Singh Nijjar, masquerading as a Gurdwara prabandak in Western Canada, in Australia where Mike Burgess, Director General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) charged an Indian “nest of spies” with trying to s ..read more

[MIRVed Agni-5 launch] FINALLY, the Multiple Independently-targetable Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV) system-armed Agni-5 intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) — the Divyastra was successfully test-fired yesterday. Nearly twenty years late. The MIRV tech has been collecting dust at the Advanced Systems Laboratory (ASL), Hyderabad, for the last 19 years. It was a project lovingly shepherded to near completion by RN Agarwal, the then Director, ASL. He wanted to complete it by the time he retired in 2004. But the project missed the deadline by a year. In part because Dr Agarwal’s approaches since ..read more

Download [Defence Secretary Aramane and CINC, PACOM, Admiral Aquilino at INDUS-X] If one mulled the statement by Defence Secretary Giridhar Aramane at the INDUS-X (India-U.S. Defense Acceleration Ecosystem) summit held February 21, and knows a bit of history of the 1962 War, it was hard to escape the sense of deja vu! Aramane’s spoutings reminded one, in a way, of Jawaharlal Nehru’s abjectly pleading letters to US President John F Kennedy of November 19, 1962, begging for American military help. Of the two letters — the first is considered — 60 years later, to be so humiliating and self-deba ..read more

        [India’s Tapas BH 201 drone] There are good reasons for redoubled skepticism about Narendra Modi’s policy of atmnirbharta (self-sufficiency) in armaments. My books and writings over the past decade have detailed why it seems to be more a political slogan than a serious substantive programme the Indian government, Defence Ministry, and the Indian military are committed to. While the services’ chiefs of staff ceaselessly talk of atmnirbharta, in actual practice indigenous weapons programmes aren’t afforded half a chance to survive an imports-tilted military procurement process. There ar ..read more

             [Army training Agniveers] As a labour-intensive force dealing with disputed borders in Jammu & Kashmir with Pakistan and the fungible Line of Actual Control in the Himalayan Range with China, the Indian Army has always been saddled with an unmanageable problem: How to have a substantial battle-ready force able to hold ground on two fronts and, at the same time, to curtail the mounting manpower-related payroll and pension expenses to ensure the latter does not crowd out the allocations for the former. This is, of course, as much an army problem as a Government of India problem ..read more