Shekhar Gupta: Our 'joota hai Japani' defence

The past 20 years, under three PMs, have shown us the defence Budget is not about to go higher than its ballpark of 1.5 per cent of GDP, besides pensions

Three things have triggered this week’s thought process. 

• The wide dismay in the strategic community over the stationary defence Budget;
• The statement by renowned American strategic scholar Christine Fair to ThePrint’s Srijan Shukla that the Lashkar-e-Taiba isn’t another terror organisation but a low-cost special operations unit of the Pakistani army for waging asymmetric warfare India can’t match. And that India can’t defeat Pakistan in a short war;
• The interesting findings in the book authored by the late Air Commodore Jasjit Singh, talking about how the Indian Air Force (IAF) gave Israeli engineers access to its old French Mirages so they could be modified