Following Op Sindoor’s success, defence panel urges rapid military modernisation

Underscoring India’s success in Operation Sindoor — undertaken in May as retribution to the terrorist attack in Pahalgam — Parliament’s Standing Committee on Defence stressed the need for urgent military modernisation to meet the wide spectrum of threats that have emerged in the contemporary battlespace.

In May, the Indian Armed Forces had carried out precision strikes on terrorist camps in Pakistan as well as successfully targeted several key Pakistani airbases and air defence and other military sites while effectively neutralising a series of attacks by enemy drones and missiles along the western borders.

“The committee notes that the country’s recent military operation is a testimony to the Armed Forces’ mounting prowess in both conventional and modern warfare,” the committee said in an apparent reference to Operation Sindoor in its report tabled in Parliament today.

“The committee is cognizant that a paradigm shift in the strategy of warfare is taking place in contemporary theatre of war where non-conventional means such as non-kinetic warfare, cyber warfare, cognitive warfare, etc are being increasingly employed,” the report observed.

"In this regard, the committee recommends that urgent and coordinated efforts by all the stakeholders i.e. the Ministry of Defence, Services, Defence Research and Development Organisation, Defence Public Sector Undertakings etc may be made to achieve excellence in hybrid and modern war tactics,” the report stressed.

The committee called upon the stakeholders in the defence sector to work in mission mode, while also leveraging technological innovations, human resource, strategy and tactics to further bolster our operational preparedness in all dimensions of warfare.

The committee also pointed out that conventional wars were earlier fought in only three modes – land, air and water — but recently there has been a paradigm shift in the technology used in fighting a war.

“There have been innovations and experiments in western countries, and the use of drones, space, cyberspace, kinetic and non-kinetic format etc has enveloped the sphere of war, which can be fought from very distant locations through a remote controlled mode,” the committee observed.

The Ministry of Defence said that information, cyber and digital media have acquired considerable significance. The Armed Forces are also correspondingly becoming increasingly dependent on digital assets. These digital assets, however, are vulnerable to deliberate/unintended disruption/infection, which may have an effect on the operational performance of the Armed Forces and needs to be guarded against.