The late S Kalyanaraman was one of India’s foremost strategic thinkers until his untimely death in 2022 due to complications from COVID-19. He worked as a research fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi. His last book, India’s Military Strategy, concisely explains and assesses the evolution of India’s military strategy towards Pakistan as manifested in their repeated clashes between 1947 and the early 21st century.
Military
China has started to heavily invest in an icebreaking fleet; Chinese naval strategists have written that “whoever controls the Arctic Ocean will control the new corridor for the world economy.” The Eurasian “heartland” is no longer landlocked. The age of Eurasian sea powers has arrived.
The first thing you need to recognize when you are reading an English translation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is that you are dealing with what former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called “known unknowns”. Scholars are not certain about when the book was written (estimates range between 770 BCE and 221 BCE), whether it was written by one or several authors, and what motivated the author(s) to write the book.
The Aristocracy of Armed Talent is a sociological study of Singapore’s military elite, which author Samuel Ling Wei Chan defines as uniformed Singapore Armed Forces officers who wear one or more stars in the Army, Navy or Air Force. The author models this work on the sociological studies of political elites by Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels, as well as the path-breaking studies of civil-military relations written by Samuel Huntington, Morris Janowitz, and others.
Japan’s current defense policy is shaped by three principal factors: domestic politics, perceptions of external threats, and its alliance with the United States. In her new book Japan Rearmed, Sheila A Smith, a Japan expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, meticulously explores the evolution of Japan’s military policy from the beginning of the Cold War to the present.
The great British geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder wrote that great statesmanship requires “geographical capacity” and “an insight into the minds of other nations.” He explained geographical capacity as a “mind which flits easily over the globe, which thinks in terms of the map, which quickly clothes the map with meaning, which correctly and intuitively places the commercial, historical, or political drama on its stage.”
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