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About the event: When states go to war, they must devise a strategy that anticipates how their use of military force will achieve national objectives. But that choice is heavily constrained. This book project shows how wartime strategy is a function of both dispositional and situational factors - that is, the military’s abiding organizational preferences, and the government’s contingency-specific decisions, respectively. This presentation focuses on one of the book’s key theoretical contributions: how a military’s structure and processes reveal its unwritten warfighting preferences. In the Indian case, official doctrine pronouncements suggest a military that is postured to fight state of the art maneuver warfare. But, in reality, its entrenched preferences have not changed in over half a century, and heavily favor attritional combat. Doctrine, of course, is not destiny - states like India can and have fought differently under certain extraordinary conditions. But absent those rare conditions, the Indian Army’s attritional preferences dominate the state’s strategic options, which has implications for conventional deterrence and strategic stability.

About the speaker: Arzan Tarapore is a Research Scholar whose research focuses on Indian military strategy and regional security issues in the Indo-Pacific. In academic year 2024-25, he is also a part-time Visiting Research Professor at the China Landpower Studies Center, at the U.S. Army War College. Prior to his scholarly career, he served for 13 years in the Australian Defence Department in various analytic, management, and liaison positions, including operational deployments and a diplomatic posting to the Australian Embassy in Washington, DC.

His academic work has been published in the Journal of Strategic Studies, International Affairs, The Washington Quarterly, Asia Policy, and Joint Force Quarterly, among others, and his policy commentary frequently appears on platforms such as Foreign Affairs, the Hindu, the Indian Express, The National Interest, the Lowy Institute's Interpreter, the Brookings Institution’s Lawfare, and War on the Rocks.

He previously held research and teaching positions at Georgetown University, the East-West Center in Washington, the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, and the RAND Corporation.

He earned a PhD in war studies from King's College London, an MSc from the London School of Economics, and a BA (Hons) from the University of New South Wales. Follow his commentary on Twitter @arzandc and his website at arzantarapore.com.

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