New Delhi: Observing that India was facing "newer and non-conventional" threats, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today (Oct 26, 2004) asked Armed Forces to rise to the challenges by carrying out broader reforms in all the three Services through "qualitative upgradation" of the manpower base.

"The imperative of this many layered scenario", Singh said, made it essential that the country put in place new decision-making formats to be responsive to "proximate and concrete challenges as well as to the other more diffused threats".

Warning that failure to anticipate strategic trends and specific events vital to the country's security interests had made India pay a price in the past, Singh said particular focus has to be made for anticipation of such events.

While asserting that New Delhi wanted to devote itself to build a structure of cooperative and mutually beneficial relations with the neighbours, the Prime Minister, in his first-ever address to the top commanders of the Armed Forces, told them, "We have to remain alert about aberrations, strategic ambitions and geo-political motivations in their policies, which can militate against our security and vital interests".