Gandhinagar, Nov 9 (PTI) To achieve the greater objective of national security, every domain, talent and field of expertise in the country needs to come together, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Army Training Command (GOC-in-C ARTRAC) Lieutenant General Raj Shukla said here on Tuesday.

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He called for the need to create linkages between the "centres of knowledge". "commercial excellence, enterprise and wealth creation", and "defence and national security", symbolized by goddesses Saraswati, Lakshmi and Durga, as well as the growth of military-academia collaboration in the interest of national security.

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At Rashtriya Raksha University (RRU) here for the exchange of MoUs between Army Training Command with the University and Bhaskaracharya National Institute for Space Applications and Geo-Informatics (BISAG-N), the officer highlighted the need for "civil-military fusion."

"In pursuit of our national security aspirations and objectives in the midst of the grim challenges, every domain in India, every talent, every field of expertise will need to come together--the armed forces, wider defence, scientists, technologists, corporates, SMEs, dreamers, start-ups, thought leaders and academicians.. everybody will need to fuse their skills and energies if India is to acquire strategic advantage in intense security competition that engulfs us," he said.

"In my view, the wisdom and skill with which we can conceive and develop pathways of coming together of these three representative icons of Saraswati, Lakshmi and Durga will determine India's place in the international pecking order," he said.

The Lieutenant General further talked about the need to take a "very wide angle view of national security" by breaking down silos and bringing academia and military together as well as through the powerful tool of civil-military fusion.

"The military-academia collaboration must grow in scale and momentum and excel in timelines for a variety of reasons, the most immediate being our northern neighbour China's military modernisation, which is really causing a stir in strategic military circles worldwide," he said.

The key driver of military modernisation of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has been a very robust military-academia collaboration, he added.

There was need for everybody to come together "as part of this robust enterprise of cross-pollination, cross-flows of talents and ideas," to allow India to acquire strategic advantage in the intense security competition engulfing it and help the country attain its place as promised in this world, he said.

He said the Indian Army's outreach to academia has been launched with "considerable thought and clarity of purpose" as it wishes to tap the power of ideation and achieve civil-military fusion to strengthen national security aspirations and objectives.

Speaking at the event, Bimal Patel, Vice Chancellor of RRU, said the university, an institute of national importance, will focus on meeting specific requirements of the Army in the field of Artificial Intelligence, disruptive military technologies, cyber and information warfare, air and space capabilities.

The university will also provide certification for all training undertaken at the institute, he said.

TP Singh, Director General of BISAG-N, said with the signing of the MoU, the Gandhinagar-based institute will develop GIS and IT-based software, customised training content, audio-visual content, and specific projects required by the Army.

A Learning Management System developed by the BISAG-N for ARTRAC and its affiliate institutes was also launched at the event along with 'Chanakya', a biannual publication of RRU on national security.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)