Tri-service seminar Ran Samwad to debut multi-domain theme

The second edition of the CDS-conceived tri-service seminar turns to multi-domain operations across land, air, sea, cyber, space and the cognitive domain.

What happened

• The Ministry of Defence announced that the tri-service seminar Ran Samwad will be held on 9-10 April 2026 at the Air Force Training Command, Bengaluru.
• The second edition carries the theme "Multi Domain Operations: An Imperative for Addressing Conventional and Irregular Threats".
• Deliberations are intended to build a roadmap for multi-domain conflict spanning land, air, sea, cyber, space and the cognitive domain.
• The agenda is framed around a Whole-of-Nation approach, doctrinal adaptation, training reform and civil-military fusion.
• Ran Samwad — fully styled "Ran Samwad — Conversations on War, Warfare and Warfighting" — was conceptualised by the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), General Anil Chauhan, as a first-of-its-kind tri-service initiative.
• The inaugural edition was held at the Army War College, Mhow, on the theme "The Impact of Technology on Warfare".

Background & context

Ran Samwad sits inside a larger reorganisation of how India's armed forces think, plan and eventually intend to fight together. For most of independent India's history the Army, Navy and Air Force planned, trained and procured largely in their own silos, coordinating only loosely through the Chiefs of Staff Committee. The push toward joint, integrated warfighting gathered pace after the 1999 Kargil conflict, whose review committee flagged the absence of single-point military advice to the government and weak inter-service integration. That diagnosis eventually produced the office of the Chief of Defence Staff and a dedicated Department of Military Affairs.

The post of Chief of Defence Staff was created in late 2019 and operationalised on 1 January 2020, with General Bipin Rawat as the first incumbent. The CDS is a four-star officer who heads the Department of Military Affairs in the Ministry of Defence, serves as the Permanent Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and is the government's principal military adviser on tri-service matters. General Anil Chauhan, who conceived Ran Samwad, assumed the appointment in 2022. A central mandate of the office is to drive "jointness" and, ultimately, the raising of integrated theatre commands that pool the assets of all three services under a single operational commander.

Ran Samwad is the intellectual companion to that structural project. Rather than a parade or an exercise of troops, it is a seminar — a forum where serving officers, veterans, strategists, scientists, academics and industry come together to debate doctrine before it hardens into policy. The inaugural edition's focus on the impact of technology on warfare reflected the recognition that drones, precision munitions, electronic warfare and artificial intelligence have reshaped the modern battlefield. The 2026 edition extends that line of thought from technology to the architecture of operations themselves: the multi-domain idea.

It helps to place Ran Samwad inside the wider family of military "thinking" platforms rather than the family of military "doing" platforms. India's armed forces run two broad streams of activity that aspirants routinely confuse. The first is the stream of field exercises — joint and combined drills where troops, ships and aircraft actually manoeuvre, such as the in-house tri-service joint exercises and the many bilateral and multilateral exercises India conducts with partner nations. The second is the stream of doctrinal and educational forums hosted by institutions such as the Army War College at Mhow, the College of Defence Management, the National Defence College and the various service war colleges, where ideas rather than units are put through their paces. Ran Samwad belongs firmly to this second stream. What makes it distinctive is that it is explicitly tri-service from inception and is owned by the CDS's office rather than by any single service school, which is precisely why it can host an argument about joint doctrine that no single-service seminar could convene with equal authority.

The "multi-domain operations" concept that frames the 2026 edition is itself part of a global shift in military thought. Several major militaries have, over the past decade, moved from talking about the three classical domains of land, sea and air toward an integrated view that adds cyberspace, the space domain, the electromagnetic spectrum and the cognitive or information domain. The common thread is that effects achieved in one domain — a satellite blinded, a network paralysed, a population's perception manipulated — can decide outcomes in the others. India's adoption of this vocabulary at an official tri-service seminar signals that the concept is moving from academic discussion into the way the services intend to plan and train.

For Prelims

• Name & literal sense: "Ran Samwad" translates roughly as "battlefield dialogue" or "conversation on war" — formally "Conversations on War, Warfare and Warfighting".
• Nature: a tri-service (joint Army-Navy-Air Force) seminar, not a field exercise and not a multilateral event.
• Originator: conceptualised by the Chief of Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan; held under the Ministry of Defence.
• Second edition: 9-10 April 2026, Air Force Training Command, Bengaluru; theme on Multi Domain Operations against conventional and irregular threats.
• First edition: Army War College, Mhow (Madhya Pradesh); theme "The Impact of Technology on Warfare".
• The five-plus-one domains: the multi-domain framing names land, air, sea (the three classical physical domains) plus cyber, space and the cognitive domain.
• Operating concept: a Whole-of-Nation approach with doctrinal adaptation, joint training and civil-military fusion.
• CDS office context: the post was operationalised on 1 January 2020; the CDS heads the Department of Military Affairs and is Permanent Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee.

Why it matters

The problem Ran Samwad addresses is conceptual, and it precedes hardware. India can buy aircraft, ships and missiles, but unless the three services share a common language for how a future war will be fought, those assets cannot be combined effectively in real time. "Multi-domain operations" is the doctrine that treats land, air, sea, cyber, space and the cognitive contest as a single, continuously contested battlespace rather than separate theatres handled by separate services. The cognitive domain — perception, information, narrative and decision-making — is the newest addition and reflects the reality that adversaries increasingly try to shape opinion and confuse decision-makers before, or instead of, firing a shot.

The 2026 theme deliberately pairs conventional and irregular threats. Conventional threats refer to state-on-state, force-on-force conflict along borders; irregular threats cover insurgency, terrorism, proxy actors, grey-zone coercion and sub-conventional pressure that stays below the threshold of open war. A multi-domain posture is meant to handle both without switching to entirely different playbooks. The "Whole-of-Nation" framing widens the circle still further, acknowledging that space, cyber and cognitive contests draw in civilian agencies, the private technology sector, telecom and space industry, and the information ecosystem — none of which a uniformed service controls alone. Civil-military fusion is therefore not rhetoric but a practical requirement for fighting in these new domains.

For India specifically, the seminar feeds directly into the theatre-command project. A roadmap built collaboratively across the services lowers the friction of eventually placing Army, Navy and Air Force assets under unified theatre commanders, because the doctrine will already have been argued through in a shared forum. By rotating the venue across service institutions — the Army War College for the first edition, an Air Force training establishment for the second — Ran Samwad also signals that ownership of joint doctrine is shared rather than dominated by any one service.

The choice of Air Force Training Command as the 2026 venue is itself instructive. Of the modern domains, space and the electromagnetic spectrum sit closest to the Air Force's traditional expertise, and locating a multi-domain seminar at an air-power training establishment reinforces the message that air, space and cyber are increasingly studied together. The deliberate pairing of conventional and irregular threats in a single theme also matters for a country that simultaneously faces conventional pressures along its northern and western land borders and a long history of sub-conventional and proxy challenges. A doctrine that forces a choice between preparing for one or the other would be a poor fit for India's strategic reality; the seminar's premise is that the same multi-domain toolkit must stretch across the whole spectrum of conflict.

For Mains