Bridging the soldier-scholar divide

 

 

 

The Hindu
04/06/2013

Opinion » Op-Ed

 

Bridging the soldier-scholar divide:
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Harsh V. Pant

 

 

 

 

TOPICS

education

 

 

Last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh laid the foundation for the nation’s first defence university at Binola in Gurgaon which is expected to be fully operational by 2018. Dr. Singh expressed his hope that when completed, the Indian National Defence University (INDU) “will become [a] world class institution of higher defence studies in which we will be able to take justifiable pride.” Given the dismal state of other institutions of higher learning in India, this might be a tall order but at least a first step has been taken towards establishing INDU, a project that has been part of the national discourse for decades now. Though various committees had recommended the setting up of a national defence university, the government had been dragging its feet on the project. Things are finally moving now but it will be quite some time before INDU is up and running.

Outside templates

The nature of the challenges facing defence in the 21st century emphasises the vital requirement of education in a military officer’s career. While a key strength of the military organisation is its cohesiveness, underpinned by doctrine and systems, it is also true that the challenges posed by the use of military force in the world today require officers who can think and act independently of templates or formulaic guidelines. These challenges flow from changes in the strategic environment driven by social, economic and political factors which in turn affect the character of warfare and, by extension, security as a whole. As a consequence, there is a need to focus on enhancing the level of Professional Military Education (PME) in India.

More art than science

The aims of modern PME should be to: develop the military officers’ knowledge and understanding of defence in the modern world; demand critical engagement with current research and advanced scholarship on defence and its relationship with the fields of international relations, security studies, military history, war studies and operational experience; encourage a systematic and reflective understanding of contemporary conflicts and the issues surrounding them; promote initiative, originality, creativity and independence of thought in identifying, researching, judging and solving fundamental intellectual problems in this area of study, and develop relevant, transferable skills, especially communication, use of information technology and organisation and management of the learning process. Indian PME lacks every single one of these dimensions.

A key point to note about the development and application of knowledge in the military context is that it is generally considered an “art” rather than a “science” because warfare is essentially a human and social activity. There seems to be a virtual consensus that there is no single optimal solution to a particular military problem. Moreover, the inherent complexity of warfare makes it impossible to derive universal laws of war and, even if they could be derived, the way they would be applied and acted on would depend on the human interpretation of individual leaders.

Notwithstanding some debate on the issue, the overwhelming consensus is that the analytical tools and assumptions for theory-building in the military setting should be derived from the social rather than the natural sciences. As a military professional, the quality of abstract and theoretical analysis will increasingly underpin the utility and value of the armed forces to its clients (government and society). And it is here that PME in India continues to lag behind most spectacularly. This needs to be rectified with some urgency if India wants to produce military officers who are capable of operating in a highly complex security environment.

Knowledge terrain

It is the task of not only the soldier but the state and the society at large as well to study war, to think about it, to consider it in all its multiple guises, assessing its different constituents, its causes and consequences. After all, if we want peace, we need to be prepared for war. And in order to be best prepared for it, we first need to understand it well. This will be especially true of the emerging strategic environment where understanding the knowledge terrain will be as important for future soldiers as knowing the geography or topology of the battlefield was in the past.

The Indian military needs to evolve a culture of independent strategic thinking on an urgent basis, one that allows its soldiers to comprehend national security in all its various dimensions. The setting up of INDU is a long-awaited step that can help it in achieving this goal if it is led and structured professionally.

Otherwise, there is a danger that excessive political interference, bureaucratic inertia and inter-services rivalry might end up making it another substandard institution of higher learning that dot the national landscape. And that would be a real tragedy because as [Greek historian and Athenian general] Thucydides once suggested, “the nation that makes great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”

(Dr. Harsh V. Pant is Reader in International Relations, Department of Defence Studies, King’s College London.)