Time to take stock

India's military is unique in facing a multiple-front threat without a long-term security strategy

Another year has dawned, with New Delhi’s strategic and diplomatic czars contemplating a bleak geopolitical landscape. Notwithstanding the efforts of our vaunted foreign service, intelligence establishment and well-regarded military, India remains the world’s only major country that faces alone a three-and-a-half front military threat.

On land India faces two nuclear-armed adversaries acting in concert; and seemingly unending insurgencies in Kashmir and the north-east. Simultaneously, India’s navy must oversee a gigantic maritime theatre in the Indian Ocean, which China seeks to encroach upon. Meanwhile, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) continues its illegal, three-year-long occupation of Indian territory, apparently provoked to aggression by