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GMF celebrates its 40 year history and Founder and Chairman, Dr. Guido Goldman at Gala Dinner May 09, 2013 / Washington, DCGMF held a celebratory gala dinner at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, Wednesday May 8.
In this podcast, GMF Vice President of Programs Ivan Vejvoda discusses last month's historic agreement to normalize relations between Kosovo and Serbia.
Anchor Elaine Reyes speaks with Andrew Small, Transatlantic Fellow of the Asia Program for the German Marshall Fund, about Beijing's potential role in brokering peace between Israel and Palestine
Gentle Giant
March 06, 2013 / Dhruva Jaishankar
Foreign Policy
This article originally appeared in Foreign Policy. Click here to read the full article.
FOREIGN POLICY -- India, as FP's James Traub recently discovered, is comfortable living with contradictions. A country that is the world's largest, and possibly its most competitive, democracy has seen its national politics dominated by a single party. A rising international player, India often appears less willing than ever to exercise its power globally. And while India's economy feels like it's in the doldrums, it has more than doubled in size over the past seven years.
There is perhaps no bigger contradiction than India's military. In terms of personnel, India, with some 1.3 million active troops, has for many years boasted the world's third-largest armed forces -- after the United States and China. It is a full-spectrum force, possessing nuclear weapons, remaining active in international peacekeeping missions, and confronting a range of domestic insurgencies. India is also the world's largest importer of conventional weapons systems, sourcing advanced combat aircraft, missile systems, and submarines from Russia, Israel, France, and the United States.
Yet given its enormous size, India's military has relatively little political or bureaucratic clout -- particularly when compared to China's People's Liberation Army -- and consequently less say in resource allocations. While the army, air force, and navy each enjoy considerable autonomy, the trade-off has been a diminished role for the armed services in influencing national security policy. Since a disastrous intervention in Sri Lanka between 1987 and 1990, New Delhi has also evinced little interest in undertaking foreign military operations, other than occasional humanitarian or U.N. peacekeeping missions. But what is perhaps most striking given the nature and scale of the threats it faces is the country's anaemic military spending.
Click here for the full article.
Dhruva Jaishankar is a Transatlantic Fellow with the Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) in Washington DC. Jaishankar is also a Fellow at the Takshashila Institution in India and an occasional columnist forThe Indian Express.
