Top military commanders converge in Delhi as Integrated Defence Staff opens five-day CORE security review

New Delhi: Senior officers of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard, together with officials from the ministries of defence, external affairs, and home affairs, gathered here in the national capital on Monday for the start of a five-day triservice programme examining national and regional security challenges. Organized by Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff (HQ IDS), the “Combined Operational Review and Evaluation” (CORE) programme is being held at the Manekshaw Centre and will run until Friday.

HQ IDS is the apex triservice organization responsible for the higher management and integration of the Indian Armed Forces. A defence ministry official said the programme is meant to sharpen participants’ grasp of emerging challenges and to prepare them to take balanced, well-informed decisions in future leadership roles.

The five-day agenda spans a wide range of themes. These include emerging regional and global security challenges, the technological transformation of warfare, strategic communication, and the growing need for closer civil-military coordination on complex security questions.

The presence of officers from the external affairs and home ministries, alongside the armed forces, appears deliberate. It reflects HQ IDS’s stated intent of exposing senior military leaders to perspectives beyond the purely operational domain, with interactions planned with subject-matter experts and outside speakers to widen that lens further.

HQ IDS was set up in October 2001, following recommendations of the Kargil Review Committee, which had examined the shortcomings exposed by the 1999 Kargil War. It now functions under the chief of defence staff, a post created in January 2020 to serve as the government’s single-point military adviser and to push the three services towards greater jointness.

The organization is currently headed by the chief of integrated defence staff, Air Marshal Tejinder Singh, who took charge on July 1. He reports, in turn, to the chief of defence staff, General NS Raja Subramani, who assumed the post on May 31.

Jointness, in other words, is not a buzzword at HQ IDS – it is the organization’s reason for existing.

The CORE programme is not an isolated event on the HQ IDS calendar. Two days earlier, on September 12, 2026, Major General Sanjeev Dogra (retired) addressed mid-level and senior officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard on the United States & Israel-Iran conflict, as part of a separate professional military education session at the same headquarters.

Taken together, the two sessions point to a broader pattern. HQ IDS appears to be using its professional education calendar to keep India’s higher military leadership attuned to fast-moving conflicts well beyond the country’s immediate borders, not only to threats closer to home.

The timing carries its own significance. India’s security establishment has, over the past two years, had to contend with a volatile western neighbourhood, a watchful northern border, and a rapidly shifting Indo-Pacific order – circumstances that demand precisely the kind of integrated, multi-agency thinking CORE claims to promote.

Whether the programme translates into sharper decision-making in an actual crisis is, as ever, a question only a real test can answer.