CDS warns of dual challenge of prolonged and high-tech warfare

Key Highlights

• He noted that adapting to a more complex and dynamic security landscape calls for deep, systemic changes across the military establishment.
• “Preparing for future threats and challenges demands a system-level transformation across how the Indian military thinks about war and organizes for it and nurtures its officers and men,” he said.
• “This will require conceptual or doctrinal shifts, organizational and structural changes, cultural realignment and procedural reforms, so that we can adapt to this kind of change.” Following Operation Sindoor, the military is developing a forward-looking framework to anticipate how warfare will evolve, he said, adding, “we are also looking at a framework that thinks and ideates about how warfare will evolve in the future, which will be part of our headquarters’ ideas as future operations and analysis grow.” Highlighting the dual challenges being faced by the country’s military planners in terms of traditional combat and emerging warfare domains, the CDS said, “The new domains are cyberspace, the electromagnetic spectrum and cognitive warfare,” he said, adding, “warfare, if you look at the old domains, will always be long, brutal?
• We are seeing this happening in Ukraine and Gaza.” “However, warfare in these new domains presents a fundamentally different character.
• Warfare in the new domains would be faster, smarter?