Faculty presents on Indian defense reforms

Chair of the Department of History and International Relations, Patrick Bratton, Ph.D., gave presentations on Indian defense reforms at two conferences in October: the International Security and Arms Control (ISAC)/International Security Studies Section (ISSS), a joint meeting of the security studies sections of ISAC and ISSS in Springfield, Mass., and the International Society for Military Sciences, an academic organization of several defense and military colleges and academies from all over the world in Helsinki, Finland.

Bratton presented work from his long standing research project on Indian defense reforms. The Indian security community has had a lively debate about defense reforms since the 1999 Kargil War.  Interventional events have been closely watched in India. For decades the focus of the Indian military was clear: maintain a conventional advantage over Pakistan, secure India’s contested borders, and assist domestic security forces with internal conflicts and violence. Recently, new issues and threats have arisen that call this paradigm into question. The focus of this paper will be on the most recent period of reform since 1999, with a particular look on the debate since the ascension of the BJP government under Narendra Modi starting in 2014.