Volume 2  Number 3 ● Monsoon 2005 (July-September 2005)

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Indo-US Relations in a Changing World

Many factors had been responsible for India-US relations to oscillate between friendliness to frostiness to the notorious US tilts away from India. Recent years have seen this relationship start to blossom in a way that most observers found difficult to grasp both because of the speed as well as its depth. K Subrahmanyam the doyen of Indian strategic community and former Director of IDSA, India’s premier think tank on strategic and security issues, looks at this relationship in the context of changes taking place in the world to conclude that the two countries moving closer together are but a natural outcrop of the global landscape..

IAF and UN Peacekeeping Operations

India has made unique and extensive contribution to UN Peace Keeping Operations across the world which inevitably brought great appreciation from the UN and the countries where the forces were deployed. But amazingly very little of the experiences are available in print. Air Vice Marshal Kapil Kak AVSM (Retd), analyses the role of Indian Air Force, about which even less is known in the public domain, in UN Peace Keeping Operations..

The Congo Diary

At least one pilot of Indian Air Force kept a diary during the weeks and months when half a dozen IAF Canberra B(I)58 aircraft (for the first time) were deployed for UN Peace Keeping Operations 44 years ago in the Congo in the heart of Africa to support the UN put down the armed action triggered by Katanga province’s secession from the state. We were able to locate the extracts from the diary of (then) young Flight Lieutenant Charanjit Singh which was published in Vayu Aerospace Review more than two decades ago. We are publishing it as a companion to Air Vice Marshal Kak’s article for the readers to get a flavour of those operations.

RMA and Aerospace Technologies (PART-II)

This is the companion piece by Air Commodore M. Matheswaran VM to the first part which was published in the last issue of the Journal (Vol. 2, No. 2, Summer 2005).

Network Centric Warfare

Recent advances in technology have had profound impact in the way modern wars are being fought. Group Captain Rohit Varma VM, a graduate of US Air War College, argues that a series of technological developments ranging from communications, data processing to sensor technologies etc. have led to rapid and effective networking between different systems altering the very nature of the ways are being fought.

Merging Frontiers of Air and Space

The characteristics of atmosphere keep changing till it dissolves into space. There is a view that the medium of air and that of space are significantly different. Squadron Leader K.K. Nair argues that this is not so. Utilisation of the two merging mediums do pose their own challenges, he argues, but the attributes and principles of exploiting them are the same.

Planning to Win

Lt. Col. (Ret) J.P. Hunerwadel USAF in this seminal study argues that good planning to win should be based on a set of principles, focusing on the end state and objectives, a “strategy-to-task” structure as he calls it, that includes a mechanism to analyse the opposing systems and relating them to what is vulnerable within them, and related tools for planning for success.

Nuclear Strategies in the Age of Missile Defences

Contrary to general expectations, the end of Cold War did not result in nuclear strategies shifting toward less dangerous formulations. In fact the policies of dominant powers like the United States and Russia have increased the salience of nuclear weapons and their possible use even in non-nuclear environment argues Dr. Ms. Manpreet Sethi.