New Delhi. India needs a new civilian-military joint duty programme to ensure that the government has a clear, long-term policy on the country’s defence and strategic interests, and the armed forces work in that perspective smoothly and effectively.
Simply put, this means that officers from the civilian side and the armed forces should complete at least one year of duty in each other’s agencies or components to be promoted to the next higher levels within their own spheres.

There is a need amongst our civilian bureaucracy and the military to soon implement a new human resources policy that should enhance the careers of both the military professionals and the civilian officers.

This policy has to have the potential to transform the way we work together, and provide information to the country’s security policymakers for informed decision making.

The programme could be similar to that set forth in the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 in the US, which mandated reforms in the US military. It was based on the premise that the US armed forces would not be able to .ght and – more importantly – win future wars as separate and distinct services.

Rather, the system would have to learn to fight “jointly” as a seamless, integrated whole.

The most powerful means of achieving that integration involved a strategic human resource policy: The requirement that an officer serve in a joint, multi-service combatant command in order to qualify for a flag rank.

Today, jointness is the second nature, and part of the military’s DNA.

Jointness is also a requirement for the shadow wars of the 21st century against terrorists.

The US learnt this lesson tragically on 11 Sep 2001, when its military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies failed to “connect the dots” that could have warned – or given an indication at least – of the horrific attacks.

In India, we have had our own share of shadow wars and proxy wars – call them whatever – but we do not seem to have fully learnt appropriate lessons from our own or others’ mistakes.

Indeed, realizing how jointness had contributed to a far more integrated and effective civil and military bureaucracy elsewhere, a Group of Ministers Committee (GoMC) had created the Integrated Defence Staff (IDS) in November 2001. It includes Service officers, civilian officers and scientists interacting on policies and plans, operations, intelligence, international affairs and net assessment.

So how is this personnel policy going to help reform our nation’s vast bureaucratic and military apparatus?

Joint duty is all about ensuring that out senior career leaders acquire a broad, enterprise-wide focus; that is, deep understanding of how each agency and element of the setup contributes to our overall mission.

It is also about developing leaders with an ability to integrate all of the assets – human, technical and weapons to accomplish that mission.

In today’s threat environment, our leaders will need to build and leverage collaborative networks across the board and also beyond, networks that can provide rapid information, intelligence insight, and the ability to integrate and influence actions across organizational boundaries for expediting meaningful decisionmaking.

There are net-centric leadership competencies, and you will not find them among the core qualifications list promulgated by any of the offices of personnel management. However, it is believed that they are essential to our mission, and they can be mastered only through joint duty.

Thus, joint duty becomes a key component of the civil-military leadership development and succession strategy.

For those personnel who aspire to be senior leaders in their respective services, their career plans should now include a one-to-three year tenancy to another agency, like the of.ces of the Ministries of Defence, External Affairs, Finance, Home as well as intelligence bodies as Officers on Special Duty (OSD).

We need to maximize opportunities for personnel who want to participate in this process. However, joint duty would not necessarily guarantee a promotion as selection would still continue to be based on overall merit.

We believe that this is a matter of national security. When joint duty is approved, there would be a need to set a very aggressive implementation schedule.

The goal is to have virtually all senior civilian and military positions include joint duty as a mandatory quali.cation requirement. In doing so, there is a need to strike a balance – we do not want to put to disadvantage any personnel by implementing it too rapidly. We do though need to set the mechanisms in motion to build a more capable, collaborative and effective leadership corps.

While this is made even more challenging by the fact that the MoD has four major departments, other ministries have not really interacted with the military. The programme should enjoy the full support of each department and agency heads to make this work.

With the encouragement and support of the senior leadership, joint duty will then be an integral part of becoming a civilian and military leader in the national security apparatus.

The author is Deputy Chief of the Integrated Defence Staff (IDS). He delivered this lecture at the First National Seminar on Aerospace Technologies (N-SAT) held by India Strategic on Sep 25-26, 2008.