According to Indian Army's former COAS Gen MM Naravane, a ‘military-technical revolution’ is at the helm of the evolution in warfare

Chief of Army Staff General Manoj Pande on Wednesday highlighted lessons learnt from the Russia-Ukraine conflict on various facets of asymmetric warfare and the scope of digital resilience among others. While addressing the students at the Army Institute of Technology at Pune on the institute's foundation day, General Pande iterated that the Russia-Ukraine conflict has highlighted various facets of asymmetric warfare such as weaponization of economic mechanisms, information warfare, digital resilience, communication redundancy, “all driven by technological prowess”. The Army Chief further stressed that “self-sufficiency” in the Indian Armed Forces and national security cannot be outsourced.

Gen Manoj Pande further stated that amid the current geo-political and geo-strategic landscape, no nation is willing to share its technologies and therefore national security cannot be dependent on the "largesse of others". Earlier, the then COAS Gen MM Naravane addressed the issue of ‘Shifting Domains of Warfare’ on CLAWS Founder’ Day in November 2020. Gen Naravane talked about the “envelope of geopolitical and geostrategic challenges” and stated that its continuous expansion had made it more “difficult to tackle the same than in the past.”

Indian Army Amid Shifting Domains of Warfare

Writing for CLAWs, Gen Narvane said that the understanding of warfare has transformed with changes in the geopolitical and geostrategic environment. Furthermore, he stated that the character and form of war keep evolving, even though the nature of war remains the same. According to General Narvane, battlespaces have expanded from “traditional land and maritime domains to the emerging domains of cyber, electromagnetic, and space making it a “multi-domain” battlespace.”

According to Gen Naravane, a ‘military-technical revolution’ is at the helm of the evolution in warfare. This revolution brings unprecedented firepower, transparency, and depth to the battlefield. “Simultaneity and non-linearity, lethality and dispersion, volume, and precision of fire, advanced technology, mass, and effects, as well as invisibility and detectability,” have been cited as the most significant developments for land warfare.

Meanwhile, in his address at AIT Pune, Army Chief Gen Pande stressed that the current state of security is “founded in the technological edge over the adversary.” He further stated that self-sufficiency in critical military technology and research and development serves as a strategic imperative that cannot be ignored. “The Indian Army is cognizant of these realities," he said.