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Ran Samwad seminar pushes Multi-Domain Operations

The tri-service strategic seminar that anchors India's military shift to Multi-Domain Operations doctrine.

What happened

The second edition of Ran Samwad, a tri-service strategic seminar held under Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff (HQ IDS), opened in Bengaluru on 9 April 2026 as a two-day event.
It was organised by the Air Force Training Command and inaugurated by the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), General Anil Chauhan.
The seminar was built around the theme "Multi-Domain Operations (MDO): An Imperative for Addressing Conventional and Irregular Threats."
All three service chiefs — the COAS (Army), the CNS (Navy) and, through the CISC, the integrated staff — addressed the gathering, framing future war as a contest fought simultaneously across many domains rather than on a single front.
The recurring official message: jointness is no longer optional, and India must build the structures, platforms and mindset to fight as one integrated force.
The seminar is held annually on a rotational basis among the three services, making it a fixed fixture in India's military-reform calendar rather than a one-off conference.

Background & context

What "Ran Samwad" literally means. "Ran" is dialogue or discourse on war ("Ran" evokes battle/battlefield, "Samwad" means dialogue), so the name signals a structured strategic conversation among the armed forces on how India will fight future wars. It sits within a wider wave of institutional reforms aimed at converting three separately-organised services into a single joint warfighting machine.

Where it comes from — the jointness reform chain. Ran Samwad is run by HQ Integrated Defence Staff, the inter-service body created to coordinate the Army, Navy and Air Force. The reform spine it belongs to includes the post-1999 Kargil Review Committee recommendations, the creation of HQ IDS, the 2019 establishment of the post of Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) and the parallel Department of Military Affairs (DMA) in the Ministry of Defence, and the move toward integrated theatre commands. Ran Samwad is the doctrinal-discussion forum that feeds this larger restructuring — the place where the conceptual case for joint, multi-domain warfighting is argued and refined before it hardens into structure.

What Multi-Domain Operations is. MDO is a warfighting doctrine in which a military synchronises actions across all domains at once — not just the three traditional physical domains of land, sea and air, but also space, cyber and the cognitive domain (information, perception and decision-making). The premise is that a modern adversary will probe across every domain simultaneously, so an effective force must sense, decide and act jointly across all of them in near-real time, rather than fighting service-by-service. At the seminar the Chief of Integrated Staff Committee (CISC), Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit, framed modern conflict as unfolding at once across space, cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum and the cognitive domain — the operational logic that MDO is designed to answer.

How it compares to its predecessor idea. MDO is the successor to the older notion of joint operations and "combined arms." Joint operations sought to make the three services cooperate; combined arms coordinated different arms within one service (infantry, armour, artillery). MDO goes further: it treats space, cyber and cognition as full warfighting domains in their own right, on par with land, sea and air, and insists that effects in one domain (say, a cyber strike or an information operation) are planned together with kinetic effects rather than bolted on afterward. The key distinction the aspirant should hold is that MDO's defining addition over earlier joint doctrine is the explicit, co-equal treatment of the non-physical domains.

Who runs it and the administering chain. The forum sits under HQ Integrated Defence Staff, which is headed by the CISC and works under the Chief of Defence Staff; the CDS is also Secretary of the Department of Military Affairs in the Ministry of Defence and the Permanent Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. This edition's organising responsibility fell to the Air Force Training Command, consistent with the seminar's rotation among the services. That chain — Air Force Training Command organises → HQ IDS hosts → CDS inaugurates → MoD/DMA owns the reform — is the institutional pathway a complete note on Ran Samwad should carry.

For Prelims

Event: Ran Samwad, 2nd edition · tri-service strategic seminar · Bengaluru, 9–10 April 2026.
Conducted under: HQ Integrated Defence Staff (HQ IDS) · organised by Air Force Training Command.
Inaugurated by: CDS General Anil Chauhan.
Theme: "Multi-Domain Operations (MDO): An Imperative for Addressing Conventional and Irregular Threats."
The six domains of MDO: land · sea · air · space · cyber · cognitive. (Count = six — the three classical physical domains plus the three modern ones.)
Cadence: held annually, on a rotational basis among the three services.
Army platforms cited (by the COAS, Gen. Upendra Dwivedi): Integrated Battle Groups (IBGs) · Divyastra Drone Batteries · Command Cyber Operations Wings — described against the backdrop of a "dispersed, undeclared world war."
Operational example cited: Operation Sindoor, invoked as proof of jointness in action.
Navy trajectory (by the CNS, Adm. Dinesh K. Tripathi): on course toward a 200-plus ship Navy by 2035, pursuing uncrewed and autonomous solutions per the Indian Navy Vision for Unmanned Systems 2022–30.
The leadership map (so the "who-said-what" pairs are survivable): CDS = General Anil Chauhan · COAS (Army Chief) = General Upendra Dwivedi · CNS (Navy Chief) = Admiral Dinesh K. Tripathi · CISC = Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit.
Integrated Battle Group (IBG): a self-contained, agile combined-arms formation (smaller than a Corps, built around brigades) designed for rapid, calibrated offensive or defensive action — the Army's structural answer to faster, jointer war.

What it is NOT: Ran Samwad is not a military exercise or wargame with troops in the field — it is a strategic seminar / doctrinal dialogue. It is not an Army-only event — it is a tri-service forum under HQ IDS, this edition organised by the Air Force Training Command. MDO is not the same as "combined arms" within a single service, and it is not limited to the three physical domains — its defining feature is the addition of space, cyber and cognitive. The "cognitive domain" is not a synonym for the "cyber domain": cyber concerns networks and data; the cognitive domain concerns perception, information and the adversary's (and one's own) decision-making.

Why it matters

The problem Ran Samwad addresses is structural, not rhetorical. India's three services were raised, trained and equipped largely as separate institutions, each with its own doctrine, procurement and command culture. Recent and ongoing conflicts show that a single act of war now spreads instantly across satellites, networks, the electromagnetic spectrum and public perception — domains that no one service owns alone. A force that fights service-by-service is slower to sense, decide and act than one that fights jointly, and that gap is decisive in a fast, "dispersed, undeclared" conflict of the kind the Army Chief described.

MDO is the doctrine meant to close that gap, and Ran Samwad is the forum where the case for it is made to the people who will have to implement it. The platforms cited at the seminar are the concrete expression of the idea: Integrated Battle Groups compress decision cycles on land; Divyastra Drone Batteries and Command Cyber Operations Wings extend reach into the air-unmanned and cyber domains; the Navy's drive toward a 200-plus ship fleet by 2035 with uncrewed and autonomous systems extends it at sea. Invoking Operation Sindoor as "proof of jointness" matters because it lets the leadership argue from a real operation rather than from theory — the doctrine is being presented as already validated, not merely aspirational. For the aspirant, the significance is that India's military modernisation is being framed less as buying better individual platforms and more as integrating them across domains — the same shift that defines theatre commands and the CDS reform.

For Mains

Anchor

Ran Samwad and the Multi-Domain Operations doctrine can anchor a question on India's military jointness and the move toward integrated theatre commands — the forum where the doctrinal case for fighting across all six domains is argued.

Exemplification

Use the cited platforms — Integrated Battle Groups, Divyastra Drone Batteries, Command Cyber Operations Wings and the Navy's unmanned-systems vision — as concrete examples of how doctrine is being translated into force structure across land, air, cyber and sea.

Substantiation

Supply hard data points: six MDO domains; a targeted 200-plus ship Navy by 2035; the Indian Navy Vision for Unmanned Systems 2022–30 — to substantiate arguments on naval expansion, indigenisation and emerging-tech warfare.

Problematisation

The very need for an annual jointness seminar flags the underlying problem the release itself implies — that single-service silos in doctrine, procurement and command culture still slow integrated warfighting, which reform must overcome.

Way-forward

Frame deeper integration — theatre commands, shared cyber and space enablers, joint procurement and a common doctrinal language across services — as the way forward for credible deterrence in a multi-domain threat environment.

Position

The government's stated stance, voiced by the CDS and service chiefs, is that modern war is fought simultaneously across all domains and that jointness is an operational imperative, not an option.

Deploys into: India's defence reforms and military jointness (theatre commands, CDS, HQ IDS); emerging technologies in warfare (cyber, space, unmanned and cognitive domains); and internal-and-external security challenges and the security forces' role in addressing them.

Ministry of Defence · 2026-04-09 · PRID 2250618 · PIB source ↗