OPINION | Reading India's 10-year defence diplomacy blueprint like an op order

On September 3, at Kartavya Bhawan in New Delhi, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh released a document called 'Raksha' — a 10-year roadmap for India's defence diplomacy. Flanked by the Chief of Army Staff, the Defence Secretary, and a lineup of senior officials from three services and the Ministry of External Affairs, he laid out four pillars meant to carry India's global defence engagement through to the mid-2030s.

Most of the coverage that followed did what press-conference coverage usually does — listed the four pillars, quoted the ministry's language about India as an 'anchor of peace, stability and rule-based order,' and moved on to the next story. I want to do something different with it. Every officer trained to read an operation order learns to break it into three questions before judging whether it's any good: what is the intent, how is the force organised to achieve it, and how will it actually be executed on the ground. Let's put 'Raksha' through that same test.

Reading the intent

Strip away the ceremony and the intent behind 'Raksha' is fairly plain: India wants defence diplomacy to stop being something that happens as a by-product of bilateral visits and start being a deliberately structured instrument of foreign policy, on a 10-year clock rather than a five-year one tied to election cycles.

That's a meaningful ambition, and worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as documentation for its own sake. Most militaries, including India's, are good at writing five-year procurement plans. Very few governments anywhere are good at writing 10-year diplomatic plans, because diplomacy runs on relationships and relationships run on personalities, and personalities change with every election. If 'Raksha' genuinely survives a change of government, a change of defence minister, and at least one serious regional crisis over the coming decade, it will have done something India's foreign policy apparatus has struggled with historically: outlasted the individuals who wrote it.

Reading the task organisation

The four pillars — Strategic Partnerships, Capacity Building, Indigenous Exports, Maritime Security—read to a military planner's eye like a fairly standard task organisation. One pillar handles the relationships (Strategic Partnerships), one handles the joint training and interoperability (Capacity Building), one handles the hardware India brings to the table (Indigenous Exports), and one handles the geography India is most protective of (Maritime Security, explicitly framed around India's role as Net Security Provider and First Responder in the Indian Ocean Region).

That's a sensible division of labour on paper. The question any Commanding Officer would ask next is who owns the seams between these pillars — because plans rarely fail inside a single pillar. They fail in the gaps between them. Indigenous defence exports, for instance, only work as a diplomatic tool if the Capacity Building pillar has already built the training relationships that make a foreign air force comfortable flying an Indian aircraft, and if the Strategic Partnerships pillar has done the political groundwork to make that purchase politically viable in the buyer's own capital. If those three pillars operate as separate silos with separate reporting lines, 'Raksha' will read beautifully as a document and struggle badly as an operation.

Reading the execution — and where plan meets the real world

This is the part that worries me most, and it's the part every good military plan spends the most time on precisely because it's the part most likely to go wrong. A 10-year defence diplomacy blueprint is being launched into a neighbourhood that is not standing still to let it unfold on schedule. Bangladesh has just confirmed a Chinese fighter deal. Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan have signed a trilateral defence pact that Ankara now wants to expand. China continues pushing naval presence deeper into the Indian Ocean. None of these developments waited for 'Raksha' to be published before they happened, and none of them will pause while India executes its own 10-year sequence.

There's an old saying every officer hears early in their career, usually attributed to a Prussian Field Marshal but true regardless of who said it first: “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”

It is not a criticism of planning. It is a reminder that planning's real value lies in how quickly you can adapt once the plan meets reality, not in how elegantly the plan reads before it does.

'Raksha' will meet its own version of first contact within months, not years. The genuinely useful question for India's strategic community to ask isn't whether the document's four pillars are well chosen — they largely are. It's whether the institutional structure behind those pillars can adapt fast enough when Bangladesh, or the Gulf, or the South China Sea produces a development that the drafting committee did not anticipate in 2026.

What strategic patience actually costs a democracy

Here is the harder truth sitting underneath all of this, one that deserves more honest discussion than a press release will ever offer. Strategic patience is easy to write into a 10-year document. It is far harder to sustain politically in a country that holds elections roughly every five years, where opposition parties will inevitably ask, at some point before 2036, what exactly this decade-long blueprint has delivered lately.

A golfer playing a long course learns this lesson early — you don't judge a round by how the fourth hole looked in isolation; you judge it by the scorecard at the 18th.

Defence diplomacy, done properly, is an 18-hole game played over a decade. The risk with any government-issued 10-year plan is the temptation to force a good scorecard by the fourth or fifth year, for reasons that have nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the electoral calendar.

'Raksha' deserves to be taken seriously as a genuine attempt to give India's defence diplomacy the structure it has often lacked. Whether it survives the distance between a well-drafted intent and a decade of unpredictable execution is not a question the document itself can answer. That answer will be written, year by year, largely by people who had nothing to do with drafting it.

(Colonel M.V. Shashidhar (Retd) is a Defence & Strategic Affairs Expert, Certified Independent Director (IICA), ESG Advocate and Governance Thought Leader.

Contact: 5cg9220rg@gmail.com | +91-7620080437 | linkedin.com/in/mylapore-venkata-shashidhar)

(The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.)