General Anil Chauhan, India's Chief of Defence Staff, arrived in London this week for the first-ever official visit by an Indian CDS to the United Kingdom. The agenda covered cyber security, intelligence sharing, defence industrial collaboration and joint exercises. All sensible. All, if we are honest, insufficient for the scale of what India actually faces.
Imagine the greatest military strategists in history were handed India's file. What would they say?
Chanakya, India's own, would speak first. He wrote in the Arthashastra that a king must never fight two enemies simultaneously if it can be avoided by any means. India today faces precisely that: China and Pakistan have operationalised a triadic rivalry in real time. In the May 2025 crisis, Pakistani forces used Chinese-origin missiles, Chinese satellite intelligence was shared with the Pakistan Air Force, and Beijing publicly pledged to "safeguard Pakistan's sovereignty." This is not a two-front threat in theory. It has already been tested in practice. Chanakya's counsel would be unambiguous: before modernising a single weapons system, fracture the alliance that makes two fronts possible.
Sun Tzu would agree, and go further. Supreme excellence, he argued, is breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting. China's military strategic guidelines now accept early use of long-range precision strikes to paralyse an adversary's decision-making - targeting infrastructure, communications and civilian systems, not just soldiers on a border. The battlefield India prepares for is not the one China intends to fight. Sun Tzu's advice: stop preparing for the last war. The next one begins in space, in cyberspace, and in the electromagnetic spectrum, before a single boot crosses the Line of Actual Control.
Clausewitz would read India's defence budget and raise an eyebrow. War, he wrote, is the continuation of politics by other means - which means the politics must be coherent first. India spends close to 1.9% of GDP on defence, compared to America's 3.5%, and over 55% of that budget goes on personnel rather than modern capabilities. An army optimised for employment rather than warfighting is not a deterrent. It is a jobs programme with rifles. Clausewitz's prescription would be brutal in its clarity: a nation that wishes to be taken seriously as a rising power must fund the instrument of that ambition accordingly.
Liddell Hart, the British strategist who gave the world the indirect approach, would look at General Chauhan's London visit and see something more consequential than diplomacy. The UK and India ran their largest-ever maritime exercise in 2025, bringing together both nations' Carrier Strike Groups. India has embedded officers as instructors across all three UK service academies. The UK has established a dedicated Defence Partnership-India office. Liddell Hart would recognise what India is quietly building: a web of interoperability with Western militaries that provides strategic depth without formal alliance commitments. His advice would be to accelerate it, and to extend the same logic to Japan, Australia and France in the Indian Ocean, where China is constructing an overseas basing network stretching from Djibouti to Cambodia to Pakistan's own Makran coast.
All four would converge on the same point that New Delhi's strategic culture has historically resisted: clarity of purpose. India has spent decades cultivating strategic ambiguity as a virtue, maintaining space between Washington and Moscow, between the Quad and non-alignment. In a world of moderate rivalry, that is wise. In a world where Pakistan and China have laid direct fibre-optic cables between their military headquarters, run joint exercises specifically to achieve weapons interoperability, and in May 2025 effectively coordinated operations against India in real time, ambiguity is not sophistication. It is delay dressed up as doctrine.
General Chauhan left London this week with stronger ties, agreed frameworks and good will. The strategists would not dismiss that. They would simply note that good will has never, in the history of warfare, substituted for a credible plan.
Net-net: India knows who its friends are. The question the greatest military minds in history would press is whether India knows who its enemies are - and whether it is preparing for how those enemies now fight together.
Alpesh B Patel OBE has advised governments and worked in the US Congress on foreign policy and national security
