In Israel, there is a strategic concept known as the campaign between wars. It describes the continuous effort to weaken threats, disrupt enemy capabilities, gather intelligence, shape the battlefield, and postpone the next major confrontation before it erupts into open war.
The phrase may sound contradictory. How can there be a campaign when there is no declared war? Yet that contradiction captures the reality of modern security better than many formal doctrines. The absence of gunfire is not the same as peace. Silence can be temporary, deceptive, and dangerous.
An adversary does not stop thinking because the border is quiet. He observes, learns, recruits, finances, arms, tests, and waits. He looks for weakness, distraction, political division, technological gaps, and complacency. He will attack when the timing, location, and method suit him, not when they suit us.
That is why the period between wars can be more decisive than the war itself. War reveals how well a nation fights. The silence before it reveals how well a nation thinks.
The World Has Entered the Same Reality
What Israel has experienced for decades is becoming increasingly global. Across the world, conflict no longer fits neatly into the categories of war and peace. States use proxies, cyberattacks, economic coercion, disinformation, maritime pressure, political influence, sabotage, terrorism, and deniable operations to weaken opponents without immediately crossing the threshold into conventional war.
The battlefield has expanded. Ports, power grids, financial systems, satellites, social networks, supply chains, data centres, semiconductor plants, shipping routes, and public confidence have all become part of national security.
There is almost no genuine silence anymore. There are only intervals in which the confrontation becomes less visible.
This is the uncomfortable truth behind the campaign between wars. If a state waits until the first missile is launched, the first border is breached, or the first network collapses, it has already surrendered part of the initiative.
The Most Dangerous Enemy Is the Comfortable Assumption
One of the gravest risks during periods of apparent calm is the growth of what Israelis call a conceptzia: a fixed strategic assumption that becomes so comfortable that institutions begin to treat it as fact.
The enemy is deterred. The situation is under control. The threat has changed. The other side is too rational to escalate. Economic interests will restrain it. Intelligence would warn us in time. We have heard all of these arguments before, in different countries and in different eras.
They are attractive because they make uncertainty manageable. They are also dangerous because they encourage decision makers to interpret new information through old conclusions.
The problem is often not a lack of intelligence. Modern states collect extraordinary quantities of information. The problem is the willingness to question the story that institutions have already chosen to believe.
Intelligence should not exist to reassure leaders. Its purpose is to disturb them when reality demands it. Analysts must be allowed to challenge assumptions, present uncomfortable interpretations, and ask the question that bureaucracies often dislike most: what if we are wrong?
Intelligence Is Not Enough Without Action
Knowing that a threat exists is meaningless if the state lacks the will or capability to act before the threat matures. The campaign between wars therefore combines intelligence with continuous initiative.
Weapons routes must be exposed. Financing networks must be disrupted. Command structures must be understood. Hostile technologies must be monitored. Terror organisations must not be allowed unlimited time to rebuild. Cyber threats must be hunted before they penetrate critical systems. Influence operations must be identified before they become accepted narratives.
The objective is not permanent escalation, and it is certainly not war for its own sake. The objective is to deny the adversary freedom of preparation.
Every successful preventive action can buy time. It can raise the cost of aggression, force an enemy to change plans, expose vulnerabilities, preserve deterrence, and reduce the scale of a future war. The cumulative effect may be invisible to the public, but strategically it can be decisive.
Civilian Preparedness Is National Defence
A country cannot live in permanent strategic competition if national resilience is treated as an emergency measure that begins only after sirens sound.
Civilian preparedness must be part of national defence. Medical systems need surge capacity. Local authorities need tested emergency plans. Warning systems must be reliable. Water, food, communications, and electricity require redundancy. Critical databases need protection. Citizens need clear instructions and confidence in the institutions responsible for them.
Preparedness does not mean frightening the public. It means respecting the public enough to tell it that modern conflict does not recognise a clean boundary between the front and the rear.
Hospitals, airports, transportation networks, banks, factories, telecommunications systems, and the information environment may all become targets. A society that understands this before a crisis is stronger than one forced to learn it during one.
Resilience is not simply the ability to absorb damage. It is the ability to continue functioning while under pressure.
Military Readiness Cannot Follow the News Cycle
The military dimension is equally unforgiving. Periods of relative calm often create pressure to reduce readiness, postpone procurement, shrink stockpiles, and assume that warning time will be sufficient.
That assumption can be fatal.
Armed forces must preserve realistic training, reserve readiness, precision capabilities, intelligence integration, cyber competence, air and maritime power, logistics depth, and the ability to move rapidly from routine to full scale operations.
The most dangerous moment for a military is often not during a war. It is after years without one, when routines harden, confidence rises, and readiness quietly becomes theoretical.
A professional defence establishment must prepare for the enemy that exists, not the enemy that is convenient for budgets, political narratives, or institutional habits.
Diplomacy Is Part of the Battlefield
Modern conflict is also fought in ministries, international organisations, television studios, courts, financial institutions, and diplomatic capitals.
A state that begins building international understanding only after war begins is already late. Strategic relationships must be cultivated in advance. Intelligence partnerships, defence cooperation, industrial alliances, access to critical technologies, political dialogue, and strategic communication are all part of preparation.
Diplomacy in the period between wars is not ceremonial. It creates room for action when the crisis comes. It helps ensure that a country is not isolated precisely when it needs partners most.
The ability to explain a threat before it becomes a catastrophe can be nearly as important as the ability to respond to it afterwards.
Industry Is Now a Strategic Weapon
The wars and crises of recent years have demonstrated another reality that many countries had neglected: industrial capacity is national power.
A nation that cannot obtain ammunition, drones, electronic components, spare parts, secure communications, energy equipment, sensors, medical supplies, or semiconductor technology under pressure will soon discover the practical limits of sovereignty.
Stockpiles matter. Manufacturing capacity matters. Raw materials matter. Logistics matter. The ability to repair, replace, and reproduce critical systems matters.
National security planning must therefore include industry from the beginning. Governments should identify critical dependencies, diversify suppliers, create emergency production plans, protect strategic infrastructure, and maintain the ability to expand output rapidly when required.
This is not protectionism disguised as security policy. It is recognition that global supply chains function perfectly until the moment when everyone needs the same critical item at once.
Why This Matters for India
For India, the lesson is especially relevant. India is a rising power with expanding global interests, long borders, growing maritime responsibilities, critical sea routes, a vast digital economy, major infrastructure, and an increasingly important role in global manufacturing and technology.
Its security environment cannot be understood only through the possibility of a conventional war. Terrorism, border pressure, cyber sabotage, maritime disruption, hostile influence, supply chain coercion, and economic pressure can all operate below the threshold of formal conflict.
India’s emphasis on strategic autonomy, domestic manufacturing, technological capacity, and self-reliance provides a strong foundation. But self-reliance should not be understood only as an economic programme. It is also strategic insurance.
A country that can produce, repair, adapt, and sustain critical systems has greater freedom of political decision. A country that remains dependent on vulnerable external chains may discover that strategic autonomy disappears precisely when it is needed most.
The Tea Will Get Cold
There is a slightly absurd image that captures the modern condition rather well. A national leader may wish to sit quietly with a cup of tea, but somewhere a drone is crossing a border, a hacker is probing a power grid, a cargo route is being threatened, a hostile narrative is spreading online, an intelligence service is recruiting an asset, and a factory is waiting for a component that may never arrive.
The tea will get cold.
That is not paranoia. It is the price of living in an age in which strategic competition rarely stops. The challenge is not to live permanently in fear but to remain permanently awake.
The world is entering an era in which the distinction between war and peace is increasingly blurred. Israel’s campaign between wars offers one central lesson: calm must never be confused with security.
The nations that endure will not necessarily be those with the largest armies or the loudest rhetoric. They will be those that use periods of silence to think critically, gather better intelligence, challenge comfortable assumptions, strengthen society, maintain military readiness, build diplomatic depth, secure industrial capacity, and act before threats become disasters.
Because the next conflict is often being prepared precisely when everything appears calm. And history is rarely kind to nations that mistake silence for safety.