General Anil Chauhan said that the absence of a written national strategic policy does not imply that the country lacks a strategic policy.
National Strategic Policy Doesn’t Have To Be Written Down: CDS
General Anil Chauhan said that the absence of a written national strategic policy does not imply that the country lacks a strategic policy. Speaking at the release of book “Crafting a New Indian Art of War,” Gen Chauhan contested the insistence on having a national security strategy in written format. “When we talk about national security strategy, I believe it consists of policy, processes, and practices to succeed. In our country, probably all three are addressed. The only thing missing is a written policy. I don’t know why people insist on that,” Gen Chauhan said.
If we didn’t have a policy, we wouldn’t have succeeded as we did in revoking Article 370 from Jammu and Kashmir, he asserted. Citing the example of Israel, he said, “They (Israel) don’t have a written policy, but they have a policy and follow that policy.” The top military commander also highlighted the successful combating of Covid-19 in a country of 1.4 billion people. “If there was no strategy behind it, how did we achieve our goal? Even the Balakot airstrike and the Uri airstrike — if there was no strategy — how did we do it?
So, there is a strategy, but what is missing is probably a written document. And a written document actually doesn’t count,” the General said. In a significant step to revamp the defence planning institutional mechanism, the government established Defence Planning Committee (DPC) under the chairmanship of the National Security Adviser (NSA) on April 18, 2018.
It was to facilitate integrated planning at the apex level and its focused execution to promote defence diplomacy and indigenisation of the defence sector.
Further, he said that Indian people were ‘quite imaginative’ in the ancient times. “Indians at that time were quite imaginative: they spoke about weather weapons, which we are talking about now, the thought was there.”
“We invented Zero then, which requires imagination.”
