For decades, the civil and military components of India’s strategic policy have operated in silos. Whether due to bureaucratic inertia, a fear that society may become unduly militarised, a lack of political will, or a recalcitrance in this sphere towards innovation, India has been unable to develop a comprehensive defence ecosystem and transfer civilian innovation to defence applications. However, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has, counterintuitively, moved in the opposite direction over the past 40 years – not just blurring these water-tight compartments but also institutionalising civilian innovation and industry capacity at scale to generate strategic military advantage.
Given the nature of direct competition in the Indo-Pacific, India urgently needs to fast-track incremental reforms and rethink the separation between civilian and military spheres. This is where Lt Gen Raj Shukla’s (retired) latest book, Civil-Military Fusion as a Metric of National Power and Comprehensive Security, is a timely, necessary intervention, and much-needed contribution to India’s strategic debate.
As a former commander with over four decades of experience across operational, ideational, and training verticals in the Indian Army, Shukla benefits from a rare insider understanding of how decisions are made and how policies are shaped within the Indian armed forces. His book precisely details the gaps in the existing system, identifies demands, and answers the question of how to address them. A standout feature of his argument throughout this book is the India-specific modelling of civil-military fusion. Unlike most scholars and practitioners in the past who have tried to impose the American or Chinese models on India, Shukla develops India’s own CMF model – a tribute to experience and knowledge.
The book answers two essential questions: Should India craft its own CMF model? What principles, priorities, and safeguards would make CMF work in a democratic setting? In doing so, it maps global best practices and methodologies and provides solutions for implementing it the Indian way. For instance, the author briefly highlights three pillars for success for India – IDEX (Innovation for Defence Excellence – a Ministry of Defence-driven incubator for harnessing the start-up ecosystem), iCET (Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies), and INDEX (India-US Defence acceleration ecosystem). He argues that it is essential to leverage these three initiatives to succeed in technological domains such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence, robotics, drones, automation, space, quantum, and bio sectors, and their military applications.
Furthermore, the books present ways to incorporate individuals alongside institutions outside the government-bureaucratic maze. A key issue here has been the systematic exclusion of talent from the formal national security ecosystem. Shukla argues that lateral entries could be cross-pollinated across NITI Aayog and the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS). The author furthermore proposes a disruptive but essential idea of appointing one of the Deputy National Security Advisors for NSCS from outside the government – a domain expert. This would challenge existing norms but jolt the institutional system into greater efficiency and innovation.
Finally, the author concedes that CMF has been sown in Atmanirbhar (self-reliance) in defence initiatives, a trend that is slowly but surely reflected in India’s defence industrial complex. However, the pace of this shift does not meet the challenges posed by India’s strategic environment. Therefore, Shukla calls for elevating these initiatives to a game-changing level and for synergising energy and innovation among the armed forces, private companies, start-ups, academia, technological institutions, and large corporations and conglomerates. In his view, these parallel initiatives, alongside political will, bureaucratic buy-in, and sustained institutional reforms, could lay the groundwork for India to operationalise its civil-military powers.
One minor limitation of the book is its brevity. In just over 100 pages, the author provides a primer that comprehensively highlights policy gaps, limitations within existing structures, international models, and the Indian approach to implementing these policies. It keeps the reader engaged but leaves them wanting more. Shukla should consider a second expanded edition with greater empirical depth across each vertical. It is essential and would be timely.
Suyash Desai is a political scientist and a non-resident fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia, United States.
