Words of Wisdom

A must read for those involved in military selection, training, education or decision making

Observant FORCE readers would have read Executive Editor Ghazala Wahab’s Read, Reflect, Repeat First Person column in the January 2018 issue with delight and a sense of déjà vu. In her prescient take, she pithily observed not just a decline in the reading and reflecting habits of officers, but, more worryingly, the unexpected, cavalier attitude of a few senior officers towards this decline who disparaged it as an issue of no consequence. The February 2018 FORCE issue set a precedent by publishing overwhelming reader support for Ms Wahab’s insights and concerns and reinforced her take that such institutional absence of intellectual underpinnings in officers and its informal acceptance may not bode well for the military if left unchecked or glossed over.

Such deep-rooted concern about this and many other indices of apparent institutional mindset in the selection, training and education of young officers is also the subject for veteran army officer Col Vinay Dalvi’s Beyond the Victory India Campaign: Articles and Debates by Military Veterans, a well produced effort of Pentagon Press, Delhi and his fourth book in his ‘Victory India’ series since 2013.

The series focuses on identifying deficiencies in and setting things right in the ‘cloaked in secrecy’, little understood or openly discussed military selection-training-education domain which is exclusively and inexplicably steered not by the military’s HQ Integrated Defence Staff (HQ IDS) but by an inaccessible civilian scientist dominated and led Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) Laboratory; the Defence Institute of Physchological Research, (DIPR). This establishment, much to the chagrin of the military, routinely takes minimal inputs from the military (represented in innocuous junior or medium level positions in its establishment) while conceptualising the selection/training/education or modifying the domain to meet current and future military challenges. It has been defending the vintage selection/training norms handed over on Independence and justifying them with obduracy even as the originators, the British, have long since discarded their norms and created new selection norms in line with current realities. Dalvi and his Victory India Team write with frankness, insight and pedigree on what in this opaque DIPR system needs correction and how, backed by substantial research and international bench-marking. If taken up, these suggestions can lead to qualitative military officer improvement to handle current and emerging challenges in the increasingly complex Indian security environment which has mind-boggling external and internal dimensions.

Beyond the Victory India Campaign: Articles and Debates by Military Veterans is only superficially a c