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Defence & Security
Mahesh

06/11/23 10:59 AM IST

National Security Strategy

In News
  • After years of deliberations in the military and strategic community, India has kickstarted the process of bringing in a National Security Strategy.
National Security Strategy
  • A National Security Strategy document outlines the country’s security objectives, and the ways to be adopted to achieve these.
  • Updated periodically, it defines traditional, non-traditional threats and opportunities while introducing accountability of agencies tasked with the implementation of such responsibilities.
  • A national security strategy would guide the military as well as critical defence and security reforms with strategic implications, providing a holistic view of the overall national security, the threats and the roadmap to address them.
  • It will include the entire range of newer challenges and modern threats facing India, including non-traditional ones such as financial and economic security, food and energy security, information warfare, vulnerabilities in India’s critical information infrastructure, as well as those associated with supply chains and environment.
Countries having NSS
  • Most developed countries with an advanced military and security infrastructure have a National Security Strategy in place, updated from time to time. The US, the UK and Russia have published national security strategies.
  • China also has such a strategy in place, called the Comprehensive National Security, which is closely tied to its governance structure.
  • Pakistan, too, has brought out a National Security Policy 2022-2026, underlining its national security objectives and priority areas.
Need for NSS
  • A National Security Strategy for India has figured multiple times in military discourses and has long been discussed in the strategic community, but has failed to see the light of day despite three past attempts.
  • The complex nature of the various traditional and non-traditional threats, especially when rising geopolitical tensions have given way to uncertainties, urgency was felt to draft a national security strategy.
  • Former Army Chief General NC Vij (retd) had written in a paper in 2018 that the only political direction to the Armed Forces in existence is Raksha Mantri’s operational Directive of 2009. “It is now dated and hence needs to be revised.
  • Some experts have also highlighted that major military reforms should ideally flow from a national security strategy.
  • Recently, former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon had said that India needs a national security strategy and, in the interim, a white paper on defence detailing its thinking on important issues
  • There have been varying views in the strategic community in the past over why India has not brought out a national security strategy—from lack of a cohesive, whole-of-government effort, to the government deliberately not making public its national security objectives.
Source- Indian Express

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