INDIA IN TRANSITION. Our muddled defence establishment

Indian national security policymaking has traditionally suffered from a lack of central strategic planning: an organised process, fully integrating civilian and military defence institutions, that sets long-term defence objectives, and then ensures these are met through procurement and posturing fulfilments.

Instead, defence policy development largely consists of a combination of procurement wish-lists submitted separately by the three military services, alongside intermittent initiatives principally formulated by the Prime Minister.

Recent examples of the latter include Prime Minister Modi’s decision to raise the FDI permissible in a defence project to 49 per cent; the removal of the Rafale combat jet from the normal Ministry of Defence tender process; and Modi’s personal lobbying of Lockheed Martin to establish a defence manufacturing base in India.

Reforms to the current national security policymaking process are required to better ensure clarity of political objectives and accordant resourcing throughout all elements of Indian foreign and security policy.

Indian defence experts have been calling for reforms to the current system for decades. Core elements of the policymaking structure include a lack of integration of the three military services; the absence of a single military Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) to speak for the three services to the Prime Minister; and the overweighting of the policy structure by mostly non-expert civilian officials.

Among other examples of resultant dysfunction, this overall system led to a “near-total lack of transparency and open communication between the Indian Army’s top leaders and Indian Air Force (IAF)” in the early stages of the Kargil war. Additionally, the Indian Army was only able to obtain 5 per cent of its planned armour from 1992-97, with this increasing to only 10 percent from 1997-2002.

Modi has recognised these problems and initiated reforms to India’s defence policymaking processes. Modi, along with Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, have directed most of their energy toward fixing procurement. The Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), chaired by the Defence Minister, intends to clear a substantial backlog of procurement tenders left by the outgoing government. With multiple tenders approved at each DAC meeting, the council had processed a total $22.5 billion worth of tenders by the end of August 2015.

The government’s interest is in encouraging joint military planning in cyber, special operations, and aerospace (space). This will concentrate on all three services in working together on defence issues. The government is also considering the appointment of a CDS.

While these are promising steps, much remains to be done toward the goal of a coherent, integrated defence policymaking process. The ultimate success of defence reforms relies, to a large degree, on Modi’s personal interest.

That said, Modi has particularly done little in structural terms to cultivate and strengthen a community of like-minded reformists both inside and outside the government that could continue this agenda after he leaves office.

Measures to build this community within government could include permitting lateral entry of external defence experts to staff the Ministry of Defence, rather than continuing to hire only generalist civil servants through the standard civil service recruitment system.

Modi could develop this community outside government by relaxing strict defence information classification rules, which currently mean that several defence reform reports and an official review of the 1962 China war are unavailable to the public. This hinders the development of societal defence expertise.

However, adopting these measures, while helpful in the long term, would still leave a core problem for Indian defence policymaking — the lack of integrated, directive central planning, as shown by the Kargil and armour examples above — largely untouched.

Modi should institutionalise a regular strategic defence review process. This would involve regular assessments of the threats facing India. Opinions would be sought of political, intelligence, defence, external affairs, and military officials within government, as well as parliamentary officials.

Public submissions from defence experts and interested citizens outside government would also be solicited as part of this strategic defence review process. Informed by this assessment, the Cabinet Committee on Security would decide on the core political objectives guiding India’s defence policy for a defined period.

A central defence planning body — such as an empowered National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) — would then publish the political objectives and main findings of the assessment.

Working with the NSCS, the military with a coordinating CDS would develop plans based upon these political objectives. The process would be repeated every few years, institutionalising integrated defence planning.

This process would go further than the isolated occasional reviews seen to date, including the Arun Singh committee report of 1990 and most recently the Naresh Chandra committee report. These reviews have had little public input, thus hindering the development of societal defence expertise, and are normally immediately shelved upon completion.

While the Group of Ministers report of 2001 did lead to partial changes of the defence policymaking structure — most prominently with the creation of an Integrated Defence Staff intended to improve inter-service coordination — no review to date has successfully resolved the core dysfunctions of the defence policymaking process outlined above.

An argument against establishing a strategic defence review process could be the existence of a National Security Advisory Board (NSAB), established in 1998, that performs some of these review functions.

However, the last board completed its two-year term in January 2015 and a new board has not yet been constituted. More broadly, the NSAB has only an advisory remit. The board is not empowered to formally restructure and direct the defence policymaking process to implement its recommendations.

Introducing a strategic defence review process would help address several key challenges for the defence reform agenda. Modi’s personal energy would be replaced with a dedicated institutional process as the engine of further reforms. Procurement priorities would then be decided by a predetermined central plan directed by clear political objectives.

The current policymaking process delivers a fraction of planned equipment requirements and perpetuates poor interservice relations. Continuing with this system in the absence of this reform threatens to limit India’s defence projection and, thus, rise as a power.

The writer is a lecturer in strategic studies at the University of Plymouth. This article is by special arrangement with the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania