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China’s Military Space Capabilities and Its Implications for India
Full text linkChina’s rapid advancements in space-based capabilities from surveillance and communications to navigation and earth observation, are just not competing against but are also challenging the American supremacy in outer space. With a strong military dimension to its space programme, China aims to make itself combat-ready in fighting an informationised and intelligentised warfare’ as China sees space as a critical domain in international strategic competition. This makes it imperative to understand the nature of China’s space programme, the use of space for Chinese military operations and its implications for other countries
Note from the Editor
Full text linkThis edition of the CLAWS Journal, Winter 2023, is dedicated to the memory of Late Brigadier Narender Kumar, SM, VSM (Retd), a recipient of the CLAWS Scholar Warrior award of 2021 and a Visiting Fellow at CLAWS. His contribution to CLAWS was immense and distinctive and shall forever be remembered. This edition carries eleven articles on the overarching theme of defence and national security, with contributions from strategic experts and practitioners in the field. These articles give our readers a balanced and researched view of issues related to India’s strategic interests, geopolitical developments in our neighbourhood, and measures for developing comprehensive national power and defence capability development.  
Massed Fires to Precision: Is the Balance Shifting?
Full text linkThe need for precision was felt during the Vietnam War. This led to the development of a variety of Precision Guided Munitions (PGMs)which led to these being selectively used in the interregnum. The current war in Ukraine has seen an increasing quantum of MassedFire as well as Precision Fire. In many phases, Russia has been firing 20,000 rounds per day while Ukraine is firing 4000 rounds. Artillery is the principal arm being used for operations. There is a need to see how our environment has been impacted. In our context, the Kargil operation in 1999 was the harbinger for the introduction of PGMs. Gradually we have introduced them and the high point was the usage of Spice 2000 bombs in the strike on Balakot in 2019. Precision weapons are costly and use of these on prioritised targets would be the answer. 
Utility of Military Force in Achieving India’s Strategic Objectives
Full text linkPresent-day conflicts present a dichotomy in the utility of military force in achieving strategic objectives. Since the end of the Cold War, decades of irregular wars over the globe suggested that conventional wars were passe. However, in the past two years, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have brought out that prolonged conventional wars are very much possible even under a nuclear overhang. This article carries out a brief analysis of India’s strategic objectives and the theoretical framework of war. It brings out the uncertainties like future wars, and how preparing for a perfect fit is impossible given the availability of resources. In this milieu using military force requires fresh but realistic thinking. When talking of Military Force for achieving strategic objectives all three Services come into play and have to be considered. This article in its first half looks at the overall Military Force and thereafter goes into the specific Army sphere. Here it gives some key recommendations to ensure as to how can India effectively manage and apply ground forces to meet the current and future conventional and asymmetric threats
Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy: Henry Kissinger
Full text link‘Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy’ is a book authored by Henry Alfred Kissinger, a renowned diplomat and strategist known for his tenure as the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor during the presidency of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Kissinger played a pivotal role in shaping U.S. foreign policy at a critical time. He played a leading role in opening relations with China and in shaping foreign policy which utilised a détente approach towards the Soviet Union. During the Cold War era, he was an integral negotiator in the Paris Peace Accords, which aimed to end the Vietnam War. His efforts earned him a Nobel Peace Priz
The First Three Decades of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in India: Temporal Variation, Sectoral Trends, and Time-Series Analysis
Full text linkThis article presents a synoptic view of India’s FDI journey up to the financial year (FY) 2020 since the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991. A semi-log model suggested that India’s FDI grew at about 20% per year over the last three decades. Meanwhile, sectoral investment patterns exhibited a clear shift from the automobile to the services sector. With a cumulative inward FDI of 697 billion, India’s FDI journey has been promising thus far, yet it lags well behind China and Singapore. An Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) was applied for time-series model development (training, testing, and forecasting) using 29 years of FDI data. The non-stationary behavior of original FDI-time data was circumvented by using their logarithmic functions. Supported by a small prediction mean square error (0.0016), the predicted values for the next two financial years (2020-21 and 2021-22) at 87.9 billion and $94.8 billion, respectively, are considered to be reliable within the 95% confidence limit
Adapting Quickly to Emerging Forms of Warfare in the Indian Context
Full text linkThe military-strategic community is awash with former practitioners, strategic thinkers, and policymakers whose job it is to look at future trends in warfare, influenced as they are by the seductive pull of the latest technological game-changer. In this cacophony of ideas and contestable claims, new means of waging war, for mostly the same old reasons, are discernible and can be grasped by strategic audiences who then look at the specific context in which some of these very ideas could fructify into doable strategic effort for a nation’s overall wellbeing. This paper has tried to view the Indian strategic context without delving into too many specific recommendations for change in our policies, other than to crystallise them, or new structures in the military organisation as it exists. Instead, it tries to view this context through a wide-angle lens, searching for the pros and cons of change in the Sub-continental strategic-military future, and how our top leadership and military commanders could be better prepared, mentally as well as in material capabilities, for a war of the future
Guruji: Life and Spiritualism
Full text linkThe book unravels the depth of regional history, intricacies of psycho-analysis of different phenomena in our life - starting from dream to several transcendental experiences, the intellectual clarity of concepts, the systematicity of rationality and finally, the all-inclusive supreme divinity, overarching our complete existence. While detailing the personal experiences the author brings out the spiritualism simplified and reinstated for individual absorption.
 
Predicting Busts: Analyzing Credit Allocation Patterns During Booms
Full text linkNew MIT Sloan research finds firms producing domestic goods and services most strongly predict potential economic slowdowns and systemic crises, with implications for policymakers looking to bolster the economy and safeguard the financial system.
 
Technological Singularity: Preparing for an Unpredictable Future
Full text linkIn the world of technology, the concept of singularity has gained increasing attention in recent years. Singularity refers to a hypothetical point in time when the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies surpass human intelligence, leading to an unpredictable and exponential growth of technological progress. While this may seem like science fiction, the rapid advancement of technology in recent years has made singularity a genuine possibility.