India stands today at a decisive inflexion point in its national security governance. Its strategic environment has become denser, faster, and more unforgiving. Military power now intersects continuously with technology, information, economics, lawfare, diplomacy, and perception management. Conflicts no longer announce themselves formally, nor do they conclude neatly with declarations of victory. In this environment, the central challenge before India is not the absence of capability, courage, or intent, but the absence of a fully articulated, codified, and future-proof doctrine of national security governance, one that aligns authority with accountability, political direction with professional military judgment, and strategic ambition with institutional discipline.
This doctrine paper articulates a comprehensive framework for national security governance at the highest level of the Indian state. It is designed not as a commentary on personalities or episodic crises, but as an institutional architecture capable of managing continuous competition, gray-zone coercion, limited wars, major power confrontation, and escalation control in the age of emerging technologies. It draws lessons subtly and comparatively from mature governance models such as the United States' Goldwater–Nichols reforms, the United Kingdom's Strategic Defence and Security Reviews (SDSR and IR), Israel's security cabinet system and war termination doctrine, and the People's Liberation Army's Central Military Commission centric reforms, while remaining anchored in India's constitutional ethos and strategic culture.
At its core, this doctrine rests on a simple but often violated principle: in modern conflict, ambiguity in authority is more dangerous than adversary intent.
National Security Governance as a System, Not an Event
National security governance must be understood as a permanent, continuously functioning system rather than a crisis-response mechanism activated episodically. In an era of hybrid warfare, cyber operations, space contestation, economic coercion, and information manipulation, the distinction between peace and war has collapsed into a spectrum of competition. Governance structures designed for episodic wars are structurally inadequate for permanent strategic contestation.
The United States internalised this lesson after Vietnam, culminating in the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defence Reorganisation Act (1986), which sought not merely jointness of forces but clarity of command, responsibility, and civilian oversight. As then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell observed, "Clear chains of command are not about control, they are about accountability and speed." India's challenge today is analogous but more complex, given nuclear deterrence, multi-domain conflict, and civilisational scale.
National security governance must therefore integrate political authority, military command, intelligence assessment, technological oversight, and diplomatic signalling into a single, continuously exercised system. Fragmentation, parallel channels, or personality-driven decision flows undermine deterrence stability and crisis control.
Political direction and professional Autonomy: A Necessary Equilibrium
Democratic civil–military relations require political supremacy; effective warfighting requires professional autonomy. These are not contradictory principles but complementary ones provided boundaries are clearly codified. Political leadership must define objectives, constraints, and risk tolerance. Military leadership must retain exclusive authority over operational design and execution within those parameters.
The UK's SDSR and later Integrated Review processes offer a useful reference point. British Prime Ministers exercise firm political control, yet operational command remains insulated from ad hoc political intervention once decisions cross into execution. As former UK Chief of the Defence Staff General David Richards noted, "Political control ends where operational judgment begins; otherwise, responsibility dissolves into confusion."
For India, this equilibrium must be formalised through written delegation protocols, crisis-time authorities, and escalation matrices approved ex ante by the Cabinet Committee on Security. Informal understandings or personality-based trust are insufficient in high-risk environments involving nuclear-armed adversaries.
The CDS and Jointness: From Structural Reform to Doctrinal Maturity
The creation of the Chief of Defence Staff was a necessary structural reform, aligning India with global best practices. However, structure without doctrine invites ambiguity. The CDS must not exist in a conceptual vacuum between political authority and service chiefs. His role in advisory functions, capability prioritisation, joint planning, and crisis coordination must be unambiguously codified.
PLA reforms since 2015 demonstrate the risks and benefits of centralisation. The PLA's Central Military Commission has consolidated authority dramatically, enabling speed and integration, but at the cost of extreme central dependency. China compensates for this through relentless internal war-gaming, simulation-driven command training, and doctrinal rigidity. India must seek the benefits of integration without replicating authoritarian centralisation.
A mature Indian doctrine must ensure that jointness enhances professional military judgment rather than diluting it through over-centralised political or bureaucratic control.
War-Gaming, Red-Teaming, and Strategic Anticipation
No national security system can function credibly without institutionalised war-gaming at the highest levels. The absence of shared escalation models between political leaders, military commanders, and intelligence heads produces hesitation, mixed signalling, and reactive decision-making.
Israel's National Security Council institutionalises scenario-based planning across the entire conflict spectrum from routine deterrence management to multi-front war termination. As former Israeli NSA Yaakov Amidror observed, "War is decided before the first shot, in the quality of preparation and clarity of authority."
India must embed continuous war-gaming into CCS processes, involving not only uniformed leadership but also diplomats, technologists, cyber specialists, and economic policymakers. These exercises must explicitly address escalation thresholds, attribution dilemmas in cyber and space, autonomous system failures, and information warfare blowback.
Emerging Technologies as Governance Challenges
Artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, cyber operations, space systems, and information manipulation are not merely new tools of war they are governance disruptors. Speed compresses decision time; autonomy dilutes human control; data overload obscures signal; and attribution uncertainty destabilises deterrence.
Think tank studies from RAND and IISS repeatedly warn that AI-enabled decision systems risk "automation bias", where human leaders defer excessively to machine outputs. Former US Secretary of Defense James Mattis cautioned, "The enemy gets a vote, but machines must never get a veto."
India's doctrine must mandate human-in-the-loop control for all lethal decisions, clear audit trails for algorithmic inputs, and predefined authority ceilings for autonomous responses. Technological integration without governance safeguards invites accidental escalation.
Conflict Shaping and War Termination as Core Strategic Functions
India's strategic discourse has historically focused on conflict initiation and response, often neglecting conflict shaping and war termination. This is a critical omission. As Clausewitz warned, "No one starts a war or rather, no one in his/her senses ought to do so without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how one intends to conduct it." Modern conflicts demand an additional clarity: how they will be limited, controlled, and terminated.
India's doctrine must integrate military action with diplomatic off-ramps, information narratives, economic signalling, and third-party stabilisation mechanisms. War termination is not a sign of weakness; it is the ultimate expression of strategic control. The United States' experience in Iraq and Afghanistan underscores the cost of tactical success without political closure.
Accountability, Credit and the Moral Architecture of Command
Healthy national security systems align authority, accountability, and credit. When political leadership monopolises success while institutions absorb failure, moral hazard emerges. Professional advice becomes risk-averse, innovation is stifled, and candid dissent erodes.
Goldwater–Nichols sought to address precisely this pathology by clarifying who commands, who advises, and who is accountable. India must internalise this lesson without replicating foreign models mechanically. Responsibility must follow authority transparently, especially in crises involving force.
Explicit Critique: What This Doctrine Prevents
This doctrine is designed to prevent outcomes that current ambiguities risk enabling: the erosion of professional military autonomy through informal political intervention; the centralisation of operational decisions without corresponding accountability; escalation driven by symbolism rather than strategy; delayed responses caused by authority confusion; technological miscalculations arising from inadequate human oversight; and post-crisis blame displacement that weakens institutional trust.
Without reform, India risks drifting toward a system where decisions are personalised, responsibility is diffused, and institutions hesitate at critical moments not due to lack of courage, but due to lack of clarity.
Clarity as Strategic Power
In the final analysis, national power is not merely a function of weapons, budgets, or rhetoric. It is a function of governance. Clarity of authority, discipline of process, and maturity of institutions are force multipliers in their own right.
India does not require louder nationalism or greater centralisation. It requires doctrinal clarity, institutional confidence, and strategic restraint backed by credible force. The buck must stop clearly, constitutionally, and institutionally.
In an era where wars are shaped as much by decisions not taken as by actions executed, clarity is not caution it is power.
[Major General Dr. Dilawar Singh, IAV, is a distinguished strategist having held senior positions in technology, defence, and corporate governance. He serves on global boards and advises on leadership, emerging technologies, and strategic affairs, with a focus on aligning India's interests in the evolving global technological order.]
