How North Korea was Armed China and to a lesser extent Pakistan have helped North Korea with its nuclear and missile development programmes. Prabha Rao | October 30, 2017 | Issue Brief
South Asian Geopolitics: Has Pakistan Lost its Plot? Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, by C. Christine Fair, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 343, £27.99 Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War, by Myra MacDonald, London: Hurst & Co., 2017, pp. 328, £25.00‘ Abhay Kumar Singh | October 2017 | Journal of Defence Studies
High End in the Pacific: Envisioning the Upper Limits of India-US Naval Cooperation in Pacific-Asia The article argues that India and the United States are poised to strengthen their bilateral strategic convergences, not only in the Indian Ocean but also in Pacific-Asia that lies eastwards of the Malacca Straits, and wherein India’s geo-strategic stakes as well as its military-strategic footprint are likely to increase in the coming years. This would progressively enhance the complementarities between their navies in the western Pacific and its contiguous seas, thereby enabling substantive naval cooperation towards ensuring security and stability in the broader Indo-Pacific region. Gurpreet S Khurana | October 2017 | Journal of Defence Studies
The Trump Challenge to the JCPOA Trump’s new policy statement on Iran has enveloped the UNSC-approved Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in a shroud of uncertainty that could lead to further instability in conflict-ridden West Asia. S. Samuel C. Rajiv | October 24, 2017 | IDSA Comments
India’s Strategic Connect with the World The various connectivity projects put forward by India show its involvement as an investor in capacity-building efforts in the recipient countries across sectors of their particular needs and choices, not as an overarching and imposing economic power. Sreemati Ganguli | October 23, 2017 | IDSA Comments
A Rock between Hard Places: Afghanistan as an Arena of Regional Insecurity, by Kristian Berg Harpviken and Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh The book, A Rock between Hard Places, is the result of research carried out by K.B. Harpviken and S. Tadjbakhsh, independently and jointly, with encouragement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Norway. In this book, the authors have examined the events unfolding in Afghanistan from a regional perspective up to 2015, set against the backdrop of the scheduled withdrawal of the United States (US)-led military alliance. Y.M. Bammi | October 2017 | Journal of Defence Studies
Foreign Policy and Sea Power: India’s Maritime Role Flux The core argument this article makes is that India’s maritime worldview and role conceptions have not only been evolving since the 1950s, but they have also been closely interlinked with how policymakers thought about India’s regional identity and the state’s economic capacity to release resources towards sea power. Today, there are three maritime role conceptions that are vying for the apex’s strategic attention, and they are reflective of a deeper role flux in India’s regional identity. Zorawar Daulet Singh | October 2017 | Journal of Defence Studies
War from the Ground Up: Twenty-first-century Combat as Politics, by Emile Simpson War from the Ground Up is not easy reading. The author’s erudition, bolstered by a wealth of detail and historical context, makes this one of the more serious studies on contemporary military conflict. Emile Simpson has attempted to arrive at an overall understanding of war in its contemporary and traditional forms by drawing on his experience of three tours as an infantry officer with the Royal Gurkha Rifles in Afghanistan. Alok Deb | October 2017 | Journal of Defence Studies
Examining the US Defence Acquisition Apparatus: What can India Learn? The United States (US) defence acquisition apparatus, arguably the biggest in the world, has undergone several reforms in the past 100 years. The reforms, which have focused on both structural and procedural aspects of acquisition, have led to establishment of authority and accountability in acquisition; articulation of a detailed regulatory mechanism; a dedicated university to impart training to acquisition workforce; and a clear incentive structure for the domestic industry. Laxman Kumar Behera | October 2017 | Journal of Defence Studies
Standing Committee on Defence’s Prescription for increasing Capital Budget May Not Work The Thirty-first Report of the Standing Committee on Defence (SCoD)1 was submitted to Parliament on 9 March 2017. The report examined the capital outlay for the defence services for the year 2017–18, procurement policy of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and defence planning. A glance through the report showed that, apart from a rather sketchy analysis of these issues, the committee has only ended up making hackneyed observations and recommendations that have been made repeatedly in the past without much success. Amit Cowshish | October 2017 | Journal of Defence Studies
