Terming India to be the “ultimate swing state” in the ongoing global geopolitical competition, the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen Anil Chauhan, said that the global balance of power can shift should it choose to align with the existing or the emerging centres of power and that is the current importance of India geopolitically.
“India will also be a kind of a stabilising force which can protect trade, data portion and balance rival parts in the Indian Ocean region. So I believe that India must pursue a wholehearted national strategy which balances both continental security and its maritime ambitions,” he said while speaking at the Military Literature Festival in Chandigarh on Sunday.
Gen Chauhan underscored the centrality of the Indian Ocean in the global order, which is the world’s primary maritime highway linking the largest manufacturing hub of East and Southeast Asia with the biggest energy producers of the Middle East and the fastest growing consumer markets of South Asia and Africa. the market of the future.
“India's Indian Ocean strategy should leverage its peninsular geography, island depth, strategic outposts and diplomatic standing to achieve regional stability and contest external forces,” he said. “India stands at the confluence of Eurasia and the Indo-Pacific. Its population, technological prowess and rapid economic growth position is the driver of global demand and innovation. Growing partnerships and inter-dependency, multi-aligned foreign policy allows us to engage with competing blocs,” he added.
Delving on contemporary battlefield scenario, the CDS said that the nature of warfare and warfare itself is changing, with multi-domain operations, integrated deployment of multi-capabilities across land, sea, air, space, cyber and cognitive domains expanding the aperture of the strategy.
“Future battlefields are not going to be recognised by service boundaries and integration, rapid decision-making and seamless exploitation of information are now keys to victory. “India's joint doctrine for multi-domain operation recognises that no domain can be siloed and no service can operate in isolation,” he remarked.
Glimpses of what lies in the future were actually visible to a large extent during Operation Sindoor in May this year. These operations were entirely different from the kind of wars fought earlier and had set new benchmarks for conducting war in the future, he said.
“In Operation Sindoor, the action was multi-domain and integrated, with a combination of kinetic as well as non-kinetic missions executed in a distanced kind of environment, which are networked. And to some extent, in this particular operation, we also used artificial intelligence to understand future courses of action,” the CDS said.
Gen Chauhan said that technology, long range weapons and precision strike capability have reduced the relevance of geography in the context of warfare. With long-range bombers and missiles, you can target things at a vast distance. Warfare is extended towards space that provides a total amount of transference.
Similarly, cyber and digital warfare operate in a kind of borderless, interconnected digital domain, where distances, terrain and boundaries are of no consequence at all. Attacks can originate anywhere in the world to target any kind of a command system. Cognitive warfare, cognitive operations target the human mind and transcend geography by occupying not ground, but perceptions. They influence beliefs, erode morale, incite unrest, manipulate leadership and affect visions, he added.
The major impacts of these technological developments on warfare, the CDS said, are the death of distance because weapons now have a global reach, the demise of surprise and the disappearance of offensive manoeuvre.
“Surprise is no longer an element, because you can see everything today. Probably, deception may be more important than surprise. The disappearance of offensive manoeuvre is because today anything that moves is visible, it can be tracked. If it is tracked, you can actually hit that,” he said.
