The Ministry of Defence has revised the rules for serving the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) to a maximum age limit of 65 years.
New Delhi| In a major announcement, Army Chief General Bipin Rawat has been selected as India’s first Chief of Defence Staff. The announcement comes days after the cabinet gave a nod to the proposal of having a CDS.
The Ministry of Defence has revised the rules for serving the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) to a maximum age limit of 65 years. If one of the heads of all three forces is appointed, the rules of service of Army, Navy and Indian Air Force have been changed to extend the retirement age to 65 years, to a maximum age of Chief of Defence Staff.
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The rank of Chief of Defence Staff is above all three armies. Security experts have been demanding it since the Kargil War of 1999. After Kargil, the Group of Ministers (GOM), headed by the then Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani, had also recommended CDS for better coordination between the three armies. The GOM had said in its recommendation that if there was such an arrangement during the Kargil war and the three armies would come into the battlefield with better coordination, the loss would have been much less. It has been implemented 20 years later.
Many countries of the world, including the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Japan, have a system like Chief of Defence. These are the positions in the armies of NATO countries. It is being reported that in order to tackle the challenges of limited land, long borders, shorelines and national security with limited resources, India needed the post of Chief of Defence for a unified Defence system.
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