Civil-Military Fusion as a Metric of National Power and Comprehensive Security

For decades, democracies including India have kept the civil and military spheres apart-out of fear of militarization, competition for resource allocation from a common pool, even to privilege business & commerce over security.The results, however, has often been sub-optimal in terms of delivery.In sharp contrast, China went the other way.Through its doctrine of Military-Civil Fusion (MCF), it has seamlessly linked civilian capacities and military prowess-in shipbuilding, semiconductors, AI, and the emerging storm of technologies-using commercial scale and capital to fuel its strategic-military ascendancy.The United States once practised civil-military integration with great agility, only to retreat into silos, and is now struggling to rebuild lost synergies.