THE LESSONS NOT LEARNED

FULL SPECTRUM India’s Wars 1972-2020

- Sandeep Unnithan

By Arjun Subramaniam HARPERCOLLINS

Writings on the military history of India broadly fall into three categories—accounts of single wars, biographies and government histories. Academic histories of India’s myriad post-Independence conflicts have rarely been attempted. This is what makes Arjun Subramaniam’s Full Spectrum refreshingly different. The author, an accomplished fighter pilot and retired Air Vice-Marshal turned military historian, turns his sights on doing an all-encompassing sweep of India’s military operations over the past half a century—from counterinsurgency in Punjab and Kashmir and the single-theatre Kargil War to the ongoing standoff with China in eastern Ladakh. It is a sequel to his well-received 2016 book India’s Wars: A Military History 1947-1971. Read together, both books cover all of India’s post-Independence conflicts and are thus must-reads for scholars and general readers alike.

Subramaniam is a natural storyteller with an eye for granular detail. His accounts of military operations are dispassionately told and described in meticulous detail from the perspective of the participants.

The encyclopaedic sweep of the book is its greatest strength, but also a weakness. The operations are not covered in the detail that many of them deserve. The