Uniform to unicorn

MUCH of India’s policy language still describes service pensions as a “burden.” This is a misnomer. What is called liability is, in fact, deferred recognition; what is dismissed as cost is, in truth, the Republic’s second dividend. From Kurukshetra to Op Sindoor, fidelity has been India’s continuum, and it does not expire at the age of 40.

Op Sindoor was the most recent proof: 22 minutes of precision, 88 hours of vigilance, and conflict stopped cold. Few nations in today’s fractured order can claim such discipline at scale. Fidelity is not new. It carried tanks across the Meghna river in 1971; it carried precision across an unseen frontier in 2025. Fidelity is India’s greatest strategic inheritance.

The Pension Misnomer

The British never designed pensions as recognition. They were a leash, enough to tether loyalty, never enough to grant independence. Free India inherited this design without recasting its purpose, and economists reinforced the mistake, treating pensions as deficit and drain.

But what our ledgers call “pension burden” is in fact renewable capital: 70,000 trained leaders a year, released into the economy with no plan for reuse. Each rupee carries decades of skill, judgment and endurance, capital no other nation discards so lightly.

Our Blind Spot

As Pratap Bhanu Mehta noted in The Indian Express: “Business leaders often complain of weak human capital. Yet they were historically unwilling to invest in building it.”

Meanwhile, every year the Republic treats its most disciplined, mission-ready talent as surplus while spending billions to import or retrain in the same domains. This is not inefficiency, it is industrial blindness, policy can correct.

Commitment versus Contract

India understands enduring trust; it is written into memory. Yet in policy language, that trust is too often flattened into employment. In a democracy where jobs are shortcuts to power, pensions are miscounted as entitlements, and truncated schemes recast service as exposure, covenant as contract.

Short-service schemes have value: they widen intake and bring youthful energy. Many who leave carry discipline into society. But a contract, by design, prepares for exit even at entry. The second dividend rests on long service, where commitment matures into judgment and then into capital; it then links experience to renewal, where startups find their seed.

Steadfastness arises only when the soldier can claim the uniform as home, honour, and, in many cases, legacy.

Contrast Abroad

Where India misnames fidelity as burden, others have abandoned it altogether. Russia and Ukraine fall back on mass conscription — trading experience for numbers, youth for attrition. West Asia fragments into militias where loyalty is bought, not earned. The result is conflict without closure, wars that drag on for years, measured only in ledgers and casualties.

India, by contrast, has within reach a disciplined dividend of veterans — not raw recruits, not hired guns, but men and women at the height of skill and judgment.

The Missed Dividend at Home

Thousands of soldiers join the veteran category each year at the height of their professional ability — leaders, engineers, logisticians, medics, communicators. The Republic spends decades shaping this capital, then discards it with little plan for reuse.

A logistics officer could transform fragile supply chains. A nursing assistant trained in field hospitals could extend primary care to villages. A technician skilled on advanced systems is too often reduced to guard duty at a bank, stick in hand.

Even a reimagined Territorial Army, with urban and rural components, could bridge gaps in security and civic resilience. These are dividends awaiting reinvestment.

From Service Skills to Unicorns

The Republic already forges soldierly skills that mirror the most sought-after capabilities of a startup economy: judgment under stress, logistics at scale, technology in the field, endurance in adversity, and the ability to lead teams in uncertain terrain.

These are not abstractions; they are the DNA of unicorn creation. A second-dividend policy could deliberately match veterans with sectors crying out for precisely these abilities — cyber, artificial intelligence (AI), healthcare, supply chains, clean energy. What India now discards as surplus is the raw material of its next wave of billion-dollar enterprises.

Global Proof

Western veterans have founded unicorns in cybersecurity, logistics and AI, turning battlefield problem-solving into billion-dollar creation. In South Korea, compulsory service has produced leaders in shipbuilding, electronics and gaming, the anchors of its economy. Israel has turned its veterans into the bedrock of its startup ecosystem.

India has its own proof. Naval officer Arogyaswami Paulraj’s work on sonar led to MIMO (multiple input and multiple output) technology, which underpins modern wireless networks. Billions of devices depend on his breakthrough, yet India captured little of that return, letting one soldier’s genius benefit the world but not the nation that trained him.

Changing Character of Warfare

The characteristics of warfare today are no longer defined by numbers and firepower alone. Abroad, the best deployable hardware is on display, yet wars drag into their fourth year without resolution.

During Op Sindoor, we saw something different: affordable imports and smart indigenous hardware, steered by experienced and deeply trained cognitive “skinware.” Twenty-two minutes and 88 hours to conflict termination, followed by the political grand strategy of restraint.

This is a discipline-driven, unbearable combination for any adversary — today, tomorrow, whenever.

Providence and the Pivot

Every conflict we witness abroad is a trial by fire, costly for others, instructive for us. It exposes the limits of contract, and reminds us of what endures. The lesson is clear: India’s second dividend is waiting at home, to serve in uniform and to build unicorns when the spurs are hung.

Our Recipe for Deterrence

Affordable and smart hardware. Unicorns, supported by the second dividend. Fidelity that never retires. Legacy strength as our spine, spread across the nation.

It worked in 1971. It worked in 2025. It will work again. This is the continuum.

Our covenant is fidelity, carried through generations.

Our inheritance is strength, tempered by restraint.

Our future is Atmanirbharta — timeless, indivisible and our own.

Lt Gen SS Mehta (retd) is ex-Western Army Commander and Founder Trustee, Pune International Centre.