The inaugural meeting was held the chairmanship of Doval

NEW DELHI: The newly-created Defence Planning Committee led by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval for facilitating comprehensive defence planning held its first meeting here on Thursday, defence ministry officials said.

The inaugural meeting was held the chairmanship of Doval.

Besides the three Service Chiefs, the committee comprises Defence Secretary Sanjay Mitra, Expenditure Secretary Shri Ajay Narayan Jha, Foreign Secretary Vijay Keshav Gokhale and Chief of Integrated Defence Staff Lt General Satish Dua, who is also the Member Secretary.

The members deliberated upon the Geo-strategic landscape and agreed to chart a time-bound action plan in keeping with its broad mandate. A draft national security strategy is likely to have been discussed during the meeting.

The Defence Planning Committee (DPC) has been mandated to also prepare drafts on international defence engagement strategy, a road map to build a defence manufacturing ecosystem, to boost defence exports and prioritise capability development plans for the armed forces.

For these tasks, the DPC would first analyse relevant inputs for defence planning such as national defence, security related doctrines, foreign policy imperatives, operational directives, defence acquisition plans, including the Long Term Integrated Perspective Plan. The DPC was created mid-April as a permanent body under the NSA.

To provide refined inputs to the DPC, four subcommittees on policy and strategy were built for assessing external risks and define security priorities, plans and capability development for creating the draft integrated capability development plan, defence diplomacy for identifying foreign acquisitions to achieve strategic leverage and defence manufacturing ecosystem, which includes policies on R&D and indigenisation.