Professional Military Education In India – Quo Vadis?

Editor’s Note

The raising of an Indian Defence University has remained a nebulous idea, often springing to life for a few weeks, only to fade again, thereafter. The Admiral sites the fast changing character of war as the pivotal argument for establishing institutions to impart military education. Defence officers need to be educated not just in warfare but across a range of faculties. Our neighbour, Pakistan has two defence universities, while the Chinese flaunt dozens.

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The Greek thinker Thucydides is said to have once remarked that a nation which makes a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.  It is no surprise that several nations have established ‘defence universities’ to promote academic rigour and enhance strategic thinking in their armed forces. In India’s own neighbourhood, it is reported that Pakistan has created two universities for its armed forces, while China has three, although a report of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) lists as many as sixty Chinese universities with military and security links.  Where, then, is the long overdue Indian Defence University (IDU) and our home-grown effort to develop the intellectual and doctrinal underpinnings for integrating the defence forces in order to realise the aim of theaterisation?

The sublime yet violent ‘Nature of War’ and the ever-changing and evolving ‘Character of Warfare’ impose a premium on military education and the academic preparation required to cope with current and future security challenges.  War, as Clausewitz informs us, is a continuation of politics by violent means.  In earlier times, a monarch who understood the political environment would also often lead a conflict personally, and political acumen and mastery of the art of war were conflated in the sovereign. However, over time, this has changed, and as politics and warfare drifted apart, the quintessential political dimension of war required that those who practised the art of war were to be well-versed with the political, social, economic, diplomatic – and increasingly, technological – dimensions of a conflict. 

While the nature of war remains constant, its character is subject to change.  The sublime yet violent ‘Nature of War’ and the ever-changing and evolving ‘Character of Warfare’ impose a premium on military education and the academic preparation required to cope with current and future security challenges. Given warfare’s dynamic and chaotic character, military officers are often expected to produce results in the face of nebulous initial information and rapidly changing circumstances. It is one of the major lessons that emerge from the ongoing crises in Europe and West Asia. Field and staff officers are being called upon to display a large amount of tolerance for ambiguity since not many predicted state-on-state conflict in Europe or expansion of West Asian crises into the Arabian Sea, along with a resurgence of Somali piracy added to this dangerous mix.

Tolerance for ambiguity is best built through Education and not the Training of officers. The latter emphasises skill sets or What and How, while the former seeks to answer the question Why? This recognition of the need to educate the defence forces, not only in matters of warfare but across a range of faculties, has been widely acknowledged by militaries across the world. Thus, to meet the complex challenges of Peace and War, there is a need to provide officers with the capability to respond to such situations. It is usually done at regular intervals through a well-constructed Professional Military Education (PME) continuum that augments their abilities to correspond with changing assignments and enhanced responsibilities over long career spans.

As per a US governmental review of the historic PME reforms initiated in the mid-1980s, officers must think critically, communicate well, conduct themselves with integrity and lead others to perform strenuous tasks in difficult and often dangerous situations.  Although the passage of the watershed Goldwater-Nichols Defence Reorganization Act of 1986 ushered in wide-ranging structural reforms in the US military, its professionalism is perhaps owed in large measure to ‘Ike’ Skelton, whose report to the US Congress significantly reformed military education in the US armed forces. This report called upon the Department of Defence to focus educational institutions on specified learning objectives, enhance the quality of both civilian and military faculty, establish a two-phased system for the education of joint officers, and form an Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defence University, among other things.

Indian Defence University

The Indian armed forces are among the world’s most professional and experienced militaries.  However, like others, they, too, need a broad-based education system founded upon academic rigour.  This realisation came soon after independence when, in 1967, the Chiefs of Staff Committee (COSC) mooted the setting up of a Defence Services University.  In 1982, a Study Group constituted by the COSC submitted its report and emphasised the need to set up an apex educational body for the armed forces in the form of the Indian Defence University.

Two decades later, in the wake of the Kargil conflict, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) appointed a committee under the chairmanship of Dr K Subrahmanyam to examine the establishment of a National Defence University. Based on the recommendations of this committee, the MoD tasked the Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff (HQ IDS) with a project to establish the Indian Defence University (IDU).  In May 2010, the Union Cabinet accorded ‘in principle’ approval for the setting up of IDU in Gurgaon, and the Prime Minister laid the foundation stone on 23 May 2013. The project has not made much headway, even though a draft bill was prepared in 2015, and comments and suggestions from the public were sought.

Some experts have lamented the lack of urgency in pushing the case for the IDU at higher levels and called upon the government to transparently communicate its intentions and provide a clear update on the project’s current status, even as the Services have, time and again, renewed their endeavour to take the project forward.

Despite some optimistic reportage in 2017-18, progress on setting up the IDU has been slow. In 2018, Dr Subhash Bhamre, the Raksha Rajya Mantri (MoS, Defence), stated in the Rajya Sabha that the estimated expenditure on the IDU had not been finalised. Some have even suggested that after the establishment of the Rashtriya Raksha University (RRU) in Gujarat, there may not be a need for an IDU. This argument is flawed, as comparing the IDU and RRU is like comparing apples and oranges. 

The RRU Act of 2020 does not specify education related to ‘defence’ in its objectives. It is also seen that the subjects covered by RRU are in the internal security domain and are more relevant to the state police, CAPFs, and policymakers in these domains. 

For fundamental clarity, it is important to understand that, unlike the police and para-military forces, the armed forces of a nation are not its first responders but the last option in a degraded path after all other resources available to the nation are exhausted.  Designed to impart training for police and para-military work, the RRU is thus not even suitable for preparing officers for low-end military operations, let alone educating them in the management of war and prosecution of plans. 

On the contrary, since the military is often called upon to train police and paramilitary forces in niche areas, a place could be found for the RRU by subsuming it within the IDU or making it an adjunct via an MoU between the two universities.  However, this would result in both universities losing their targeted focus since internal security requires as much effort as defence from external threats across the spectrum of conflict. 

India’s armed forces run several world-class cadet training academies along with a host of specialist professional schools, as well as fine educational institutions for grooming future operational commanders. However, while these institutions constitute a rich and vast ecosystem of professional training, two things are lacking to make the sum of all parts greater than the whole¾firstly, an overarching and integrated framework of PME and, secondly, a multi-disciplinary approach to strategic thinking. Although the armed forces have initiated some steps to address these lacunae by affiliating with universities, these are inadequate.  Another deficiency lies in the faculty, who are neither experienced nor exposed to military theory.  

The IDU would, therefore, remedy the shortcomings in India’s PME system by providing a central institution of higher military learning through a well-qualified faculty with a mix of academicians and serving and retired officers from the military and civil services. It would offer the practitioners’ perspective on the degree programmes that would run parallel to various career-linked PME courses.  Such a mixed faculty would bring together the expertise of civilian academics that complements the experience of military faculty¾the ideal melding of Theory and Practice. 

The university’s curriculum would vary among the various colleges and other institutions that would be governed by it. However, it would need to offer a variety of additional subjects relevant to national security and defence – both in sciences and humanities. With its focus on ‘defence’, the IDU would need to lean on think tanks to pursue areas beyond hard security. Think Tanks play an important role and should be encouraged to build constructive dialogue with the IDU, especially through critical surveys and reviews of defence matters. After all, as the old adage goes, if everyone is thinking the same, then no one is thinking!

The realisation of the IDU is long overdue. Whatever the reasons for the delay, there is a cost attached to it, increasing by the day, that needs to be borne in terms of defence preparedness, strategic culture, inter-service cohesion, and integration.  The Indian armed forces require their personnel to transition from training, an occupational necessity, to education, empowering them to make more informed decisions and exercise better strategic choices. Although this need was articulated almost six decades ago, its urgency is felt today more than ever.  The need of the hour is to operationalise the IDU as soon as envisaged, with a mixed faculty of practitioners and academia, so that the entire gamut of imparting meaningful military education to officers can begin in earnest. 

Admiral Karambir Singh (Retd)