Rear Admiral K. Raja Menon (Retd.)

Rear Admiral K. Raja Menon (Retd.) is a former Indian Navy officer and submarine specialist who commanded seven ships and submarines before retiring in 1994 as Assistant Chief of Naval Staff (Operations). He participated in military confidence-building measure talks with neighbouring countries and was part of the first Indian military delegation to Pakistan. Following his retirement, he authored several books, including ‘Maritime Strategy and Continental Wars’, which is used as a standard text in the Indian Navy and led to extensive consultancy work with the Integrated Staff and Naval Headquarters; ‘A Nuclear Strategy for India’, which was well received in India and abroad; and ‘The Indian Navy: A Photo Essay’, published as an official gift of the Indian Navy. He also edited ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction: Options for India’, published by Sage India, and authored the occasional paper ‘The US-India Non-Proliferation Divide: The Way Ahead’, published by the Cooperative Monitoring Center, Sandia, USA, in 2005. Admiral Menon has served on the Arun Singh Committee on restructuring India's national defence establishment and the National Defence University Committee. He has been a visiting lecturer at institutes of higher learning of the Indian Armed Forces and organised the first Nuclear Management Course for Indian service officers. He also headed a DRDO-funded study on Pakistani ballistic missiles and their implications for Indian national security, as well as the Naval Headquarters group that drafted the Indian Navy’s new maritime strategy. He has also served as Chairman of the Task Force on Net Assessment and Simulation in the National Security Council and has written for publications including Outlook and The Indian Express.