The creation of the Department of Military Affairs (DMA) in the Ministry of Defence portends better civil-military cooperation. That India’s civil-military cooperation was in need of structural reform was never doubted. Yet, the implementation of such reform lacked political will, faced bureaucratic resistance, and was stymied by elements within the armed services.

Since the last decade of the twentieth century, network centricity has profoundly transformed warfighting and the outlook of the military. The next level of the networking ladder is Internet of Things (IoT), which has already started to disruptively change the ways in the civil domain, bringing a considerable autonomy to various processes by linking of a plethora of smart devices that are talking to each other. Militaries, in the near future, are also likely to see similar proliferation of IoT, which will bring a material change to their functioning and conduct of operations.

This article posits that military science has been one of the most neglected subjects in Indian history in practice and in scholarship. Greater, popular scholarly focus tends to be mostly on subjects dealing with grand strategy and with it, abstract armchair theorising. While grand strategy is necessary at the political–military level, it is not sufficient as victory or defeat also depends on the capacity of the armed forces to achieve the desired results during the conduct of war.