The challenge of management of human resources may be the most profound in the security sector in the years ahead given transformations happening globally and enhancement of human potential and opportunities for individual growth. The national security sector extending from the military to private security guards denotes the plethora of skills sets required which vary from that of handling highly sophisticated and lethal missile arsenal, to commandeering large aircraft carriers and submarines to securing public space in metropolitan cities.

Manpower costs are increasingly becoming unmanageable and are driving national security planners towards thinking creatively about what used to be called ‘affordable defence’. Despite leap-frogging from third to fourth generation weapons technologies in the short span of about two decades, modern armed forces are still far from being able to effect substantive reductions in manpower by substituting fighting personnel with innovative technologies while ensuring operational effectiveness.

Supersession is too important an aspect of organizational existence to be dismissed lightly. It is a situation to be managed jointly by the organization and affected individual with the clear understanding that organizational interests are overriding. The Human Resources Management (HRM) approach aims to ensure that staffing manning of an organization effectively meets the quantitative and qualitative aspects at all times to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. An important element of HRM is Human Resource Planning (HRP).

In practice, it has been found that a peacetime army tends to atrophy and lose its war fighting orientation. It develops a lopsided emphasis on peacetime routine, spit and polish. In fact, a wartime army may well be the very anti-thesis of a peacetime army. Years of non-use of the military instrument sometimes results in the rusting of its value system and ethos.