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Flashback to 22 September 2022:
Gen (then Lt Gen) Anil Chauhan was delivering a keynote address at BharatShakti’s annual India Defence Conclave. A week later, he and his better half were scheduled to travel abroad to meet their daughter.
However, destiny and the government had other plans, as he was appointed as India’s second Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) at the end of September 2022.
The post was lying vacant since 8 December 2021 after Gen Bipin Rawat, India’s first CDS, had died in a tragic helicopter accident.
The announcement of Gen Chauhan’s appointment evoked surprise and shock. For the new CDS, this was all the more challenging. Not only to don the uniform again, but also to be elevated to the ‘Four-Star Rank’.
But, as he had done throughout his military career, Gen Chauhan, who had retired as Eastern Army Commander in 2021, took up the new responsibility with aplomb.
The task was humongous!
The government was clear that it wanted a cohesive, future-ready military. Gen Rawat had begun to shake up the conservative military thinking, but had not gotten too far.
As CDS, Gen Chauhan, wearing three hats (as CDS, the Principal Military Adviser to the government, the permanent Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC), and as Secretary, Department of Military Affairs), was responsible for transforming the armed forces. But the task of integration and jointness was easier to plan than to achieve.
For decades, the three services had functioned in tight silos. The compartmentalisation had to be broken, mindsets had to be changed, and fostering unity in thought and action was the key.
So, unlike his predecessor Gen Rawat, Gen Chauhan adopted a twin-track approach: persuading the military brass of the need for cohesion and convincing the juniors to act in unison. To work top down as well as bottom up.
The undeclared motto was ‘one force, one mission, one objective‘. The military needed to think, plan and execute together.
The COSC became more than a meeting ground. It was now a think forum. Chiefs of Staff from the three services ideated, brainstormed, discussed, argued, and ultimately agreed on common points to develop a joint roadmap.
On the lower steps of the ladder, Gen Chauhan’s gentle but persuasive logic began to shift perspective: his thought-provoking ideas and ability to listen to genuine feedback provided much-needed momentum. Over 200 interactions at different levels of command, in military training institutions, in the field formations, began to turn the tide. Soldiers, air warriors and sailors began to rethink and gradually accept the idea of jointness and integration.
He divided the transformation process into three parts, explored through a strategic lens: balancing Ends (the creation of Integrated Theatre Commands, or ITCs), Ways (jointness and integration), and Means (institutional, cultural, and policy instruments).
He began with Jointness, which he believed operates in the cognitive domain. It is about fostering trust, bonhomie, and a shared professional culture across the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force. He traced its roots to the National Defence Academy, where the three services would be forged together from the very first day of their military careers. While the spirit of camaraderie sows the seeds of Jointness 1.0, we now need to transition towards Jointness 2.0, developing a genuinely joint culture that complements rather than replaces Service-specific cultures, he often said in at least four major interactions with me on public platforms.
The second prong of the process he concentrated on was integration. Integration, by contrast, is measurable and functional. One of his major achievements is to work across eight verticals, including operations, intelligence, logistics, training, communication, and human resources.
Some examples worth highlighting include the successful integration of Akashteer-IACCS and IMSAS systems, which proved effective during Operation Sindoor; progress on the Joint Communication Architecture (JCA); and the establishment of Joint Services Training Institutes.
Overall, he often noted that 197 integration initiatives have been identified, with considerable progress having been achieved on 163 tasks directly linked to theatre commands.
Several institutional and cultural shifts are at play to move different wheels of the engine of jointness and theaterisation. Gen Chauhan credits the Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff (HQ IDS), once seen as a stopgap or last-mile posting, with becoming the nerve centre for joint reforms and an essential part of the theaterisation machinery. He highlighted the shift in narratives through ‘Future Warfare Courses’ and ‘Ran Samwad‘ seminars, emphasising multi-domain operations rather than single-Service primacy.
During his three-and-a-half-year tenure, the CDS also spoke about the culture in the Armed Forces and how it manifests in a particular pattern of behaviour. While noting that culture-building takes time, he admitted the existence of three Service-specific cultures, each deeply rooted and each with its own source of identity and cohesion.
The need of the hour now, he emphasised, is to create a fourth culture, a joint culture, that integrates the three without undermining any of them. To do so, he felt cultural change must be complemented with policy change in a way that makes reform irreversible. He repeatedly emphasised that developing a joint culture through symbology, joint staffing, and tri-service recruitment ads is among the initial, yet essential, instruments for bringing about this cultural change.
The way forward has been charted out. The COSC conducted 23 ‘Op Tiranga (formal discussions between Chiefs and CDS) meetings across six different Chiefs of Staff of the three armed forces, leading to a formal proposal on ITCs being submitted to the government earlier this month. Minor differences, he admits, remain, but the direction is described as irreversible. While the CDS has mentioned that significant consensus has been reached on conceptual issues, he also clarified that theatre commands are not the final destination but a structural enabler for Multi-Domain Operations (MDO), which integrates traditional domains (land, sea, air) with emerging ones (space, cyber, electromagnetic, and cognitive).
For new-age warfare, new ideas were needed. A rank-agnostic Future Warfare Course, two Joint Commanders Conferences, a Cognitive Warfare Capsule, Ran Samwad, Parivartan Chintan, and courses and seminars at different levels were approved, all designed to inculcate critical thinking and ask the right questions.
The first Joint Commanders Conference in 2024, which brought together the entire apex military team, took the idea further. Its theme, “Sashakt and Surakshit Bharat: Transforming Armed Forces”, reflected the need to adapt to a changing operational environment. The second JCC, which concluded on May 8, 2026, revolved around the theme “Military Capability in New Domains,” and in a way was Gen Chauhan’s joint farewell since he retires on May 30.
More importantly, even in his busy schedule, Gen Chauhan authored three books, articulating his vision and the government’s desire for a more robust and united military. He engaged extensively with the defence industry and delivered multiple speaking engagements at national and international conferences to build public confidence and project India’s new thinking to the world.
As Secretary of the Department of Military Affairs, the CDS became part of the larger governance structure, rather than the earlier practice of military leaders remaining on the periphery. The results were evident in Operation Sindoor.
A top government functionary has described Gen Anil Chauhan as the “Hero- Man of the Match – of Op Sindoor”, the fulcrum around which the planning and execution of the 88-hour Operation against Pakistan revolved. Although critics have panned him for a misstep (failing to articulate India’s clear victory during an international media engagement), there is no doubt that a die-hard OG soldier has truly transformed into a purple military thinker and elder statesman.
That’s Gen Anil Chauhan for you: calm, collected consensus builder. As he prepares to hang up his boots once again, the best tribute the current generation of Indian military officers can pay him is to implement quickly the plans he has painstakingly developed to make the Indian military truly future-ready and combat-efficient.
Nitin A. Gokhale
Author, thought leader and one of South Asia's leading strategic analysts, Nitin A. Gokhale has forty years of rich and varied experience behind him as a conflict reporter, Editor, author and now a media entrepreneur who owns and curates two important digital platforms, BharatShakti.in and StratNewsGlobal.com focusing on national security, strategic affairs and foreign policy matters.
At the beginning of his long and distinguished career, Gokhale has lived and reported from India’s North-east for 23 years, writing and analysing various insurgencies in the region, been on the ground at Kargil in the summer of 1999 during the India-Pakistan war, and also brought live reports from Sri Lanka’s Eelam War IV between 2006-2009.
Author of over a dozen books on wars, insurgencies and conflicts, Gokhale relocated to Delhi in 2006, was Security and Strategic Affairs Editor at NDTV, a leading Indian broadcaster for nine years, before launching in 2015 his own digital properties.
An alumni of the Asia-Pacific Centre for Security Studies in Hawaii, Gokhale now writes, lectures and analyses security and strategic matters in Indo-Pacific and travels regularly to US, Europe, South and South-East Asia to speak at various international seminars and conferences.
Gokhale also teaches at India’s Defence Services Staff College (DSSC), the three war colleges, India's National Defence College, College of Defence Management and the intelligence schools of both the R&AW and Intelligence Bureau.
He tweets at @nitingokhale
