General

Adm DK Joshi has resigned on Wednesday evening as India’s navy chief, taking responsibility for a series of mishaps and errors of judgement by captains of various ships over the past seven months. He has done the honourable thing as a true military leader should do but very few have…

(http://thediplomat.com/2014/02/indias-rising-regional-military-engagement/) Sometime in the latter half of 2013, the top brass of the Indian military had a short but effective brainstorming session with other stakeholders in the national security architecture. The participants were drawn from the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) which functions directly under National Security Adviser (NSA) Shiv…

In the first month of 2014, only this blog entry, ‘INS Vikramaditya comes home…'(http://nitinagokhale.blogspot.in/2014/01/ins-vikramaditya-comes-home-escorted-by.html) has evoked more page views than my latest piece, ‘Should the military brass get so many awards?’ (http://nitinagokhale.blogspot.in/2014/01/should-military-brass-get-so-many-awards.html). But the latter article has also triggered heated and passionate debate over the practice of granting awards in…

This is an unusual blog entry for me. Instead of my usual musings, below is an exchange of emails between me and a retired senior army officer. Self-explanatory. Read onDear Nitin,I write this email on an assumption that you will, like you have done during our earlier sporadic interactions when…