Arms and the Game: Accepting Competition and Encouraging Cooperation

The article approaches the issue of jointness through new lenses. It first describes how and why arms of the military, the ‘Services’, are different from each other. Airpower is shown to be the emerging technological paradigm, triggering paradigm competition. Next, it draws an analogy between anarchy in international relations (IR) and the existence of the services. It then looks at game theory as used in IR to understand both why inter-organisational competition occurs and how cooperation can evolve with a certain kind of behaviour—reciprocity. It also uses the anthropological/biological lens to show how competition and cooperation will always coexist. The article concentrates on the behavioural solution towards cooperation, while commenting briefly on the alternative structural solution, which most writings on the subject focus on. Finally, it lays out some measures possible in the Indian scenario, in tune with cooperation behaviour theory