Lt Gen. Rameshwar Yadav (retd)

We have fought five major wars since Independence, besides ongoing insurgencies with complicity of China and Pakistan in the Northeast and Jammu and Kashmir. As a consequence, the enormity of our external as well as internal security matrix prompts a force structure capable of handling multiplicity of military as well non-military contingencies.

Our territorial disputes with China as well as Pakistan lie in vast inhabitable swaths of mountains, high altitude, jungles and riverine terrain. Accordingly, the areas which matter the most for safeguarding territorial integrity fall within the purview of infantry predominant operations alongside all other supporting arms and services.

Moreover, the emerging concept of hybrid warfare has come about as a result of declining window for conventional operations due to nuclear calculus and rise of terrorism world over. It has prompted armies to enhance their capabilities to fight in sub conventional environment with its undefined grey zone operational milieu wherein infantry is best-suited combat element. As a result, besides its primary task of ensuring territorial integrity, the infantry has been the main component of handling the externally-sponsored insurgencies in Jammu and Kashmir and the Northeast due to requisite structural inadequacies of the police forces.

Infantry is the mainstay of UN missions and national power projection beyond our shores, facilitating our strategic reach in areas of our geopolitical interests. Besides this, infantry has a leading role in disaster management and disturbed socio-political contingencies. Hence, infantry is the largest and most versatile component of the armed forces in Indian context; therefore, infantry needs to be equipped, trained, maintained and sustained so as to ensure high quality content of the cutting edge of Indian security paradigm.

Taking a cue from western countries fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the project F-INSAS (future infantry soldier as a system) was conceived t