Based on an Introductory Talk given at Digitisation & Networking Webinar organiased by IMR on 23 Nov 2020
The topic raises the question – How could we smartly leverage the intersect of emerging technologies with our growing integration in thought and action to take our combat worthiness and combat preparedness to a new high. This is a proposition that is as exciting as it is salient, if we are to gain secure strategic military advantage with our competitors and our adversaries, especially so in an era of growing military burdens and stagnant shrinking budgets, this seems to be the only salvation. A full-fledged technological embrace, fusion of thoughts and structures and our entire approach to integration in joint war fighting so that we, in consequence, produce a single unified paradigm to address the adversaries.
I shall first try and place before you what in my view is the nature and staggering scale of the challenge both in the technological domain and in the domain of integration of joint war fighting. Thereafter, in all honesty, I shall voice some concerns and draw collective attention to the deficits that plague our thoughts and actions in the Indian system and I hope to end on a note of optimism by bringing to the fore the many things driven by this realisation that we in the Indian army and the Army Training Command (ARTRAC).
I presume the other two Services also have, in the last two to three years, enabled us to brace up to the challenge. So first I will address the challenge, then deficit and, thirdly, the actions that are underway to give this whole project of technological embrace and an integrated approach to war fighting added impetus and fillip.
The Challenge of Integration
Let me first take the domain of jointness. The point that I wish to make here is, even as we are celebrating and reaping the fruits of the Chief of Defence Staff (CDS)-Department of Military Affairs (DMA) paradigm that we have recently embraced and one which I will admit is path-breaking indeed, in my view, the CDS-DMA paradigm that we have got in many ways is even more powerful than the US Goldwater-Nichols Act. Yet, we must pause to reflect on the fact that such integration and joint war fighting potential, which will flow from the CDS-DMA structure will suffice only for ‘industrial era’ military so we are already a decade or two behind.
‘Digital era’ militaries, and we are all into the digital era, are already focusing on integrating space and cyber with the traditional domains. We are still integrating land, air and sea, whereas, the whole paradigm has taken a new shift. The Strategic Forces Command (SFC) of the UK is a good example. It has been set up, having seen what they have been integrating land, air and sea over the last two to three decades. They realized it was not good enough so the entire SFC has been set up to achieve transition from an ‘industrial era’ military to a ‘digital era’ military. China’s experiment with the PLA’s Strategic Support Force is similar. So the challenge in the era of jointness is really this – that we have a long road that has to be travelled in terms of thoughts, structures and actions to transit from an ‘industrial era’ jointness to a ‘digital era’ integration. In sum, this is the challenge in the realm of integrated war fighting.
The Challenge of Technology
In the realm of technology, there are a number of examples from the recent past, from Balakot to Aramco, to what happened in Idlib and now reinforced in Armenia and Ajerbaijan, that strategic military competition is increasingly being expressed through the medium of technology. In the crafting of our strategic military futures, therefore, we took into account whole lot of factors – geo-strategic, threats, intentions. Technology now has to emerge as the central pillar. We sometimes tend to forget that on our northern borders, China is a mighty adversary, but it is an adversary, which is a technology super power – one whose economic zoom and military gallop has been driven by deep civil-military fusion. The 5G is a very good example of the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) partnering with the centers of excellence in science and technology to produce a commercial proposition of global standards as also an instrument of sophisticated geo-political influence and control. That is how deep civil-military fusion is and that is how potently sophisticated is the Chinese approach to technology and combining both commercial payoffs and military outcomes.
We have a very intense and a very proximate technological challenge right there on our northern borders. If we are to brace up to the same, it cannot be business as usual. Not only the search for technology but also agile bureaucracies, which enable these technologies. Unfortunately, we have bureaucracies, which are coming in the way of such enablement. We will never get to technological equity unless the bureaucracies become agile – here I refer to both civil and military bureaucracies.
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The third point is the combined impact of disruption and convergence in technology. Disruption is when technology accelerates along a particular line. So, 5G, Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI) – these are disruptions in individual domains. But what is now happening is that these disruptive technologies, which are already altering the character of war are fusing or converging with dramatic effect. The result is what we have seen in the recent conflicts. We have seen a fundamental transformation in the character of war, the combined arms balance, the tone and tenor of our operational art and the nature of the physical fight. Until now, soldiers like you and me said there is a text and context of the fight. While the companies’ and squadrons’ battles constitute the text, technologies and many other factors are the context. We took pride in the fact that the context was right but it could never fundamentally alter the text.
Recent battles in Idlib and Armenia – Azerbaijan should show to us that technology now has the prowess of altering the text. That is how technology can bring about dramatic change. To illustrate this point let me give you two to three examples. If the future is about autonomous weapons and algorithm warfare and that is what people are talking about, better and more adaptive algorithms, a military Internet of Things (IOT) is essential. Such a military IOT will lie at the convergence of AI, Big Data and 5G – the brain, fuel and sensors of such a system. This is no longer in the realm of imagination. China is erecting a military IOT on the northern borders. Idlib is a very good example of three independent technologies – namely swarming, electronic warfare (EW) systems of the nature of Koral and semi-active lasers and micro munitions combining with dramatic effect so that in an engagement of a couple of hours you had 151 tanks, 100 armoured vehicles, 86 canon systems, a divisional headquarters, couple of aircrafts, drones and 3,000 Syrian soldiers dead. Such is the impact of convergence of technologies.
The war between Azerbaijan and Armenia for the Nagarno Karabakh region, has reinforced drone supremacy and taken it to a new high. The obvious conclusions for the traditional players in the combined arms balance – infantry, armour and artillery – is this. Without adequate sensors, without EW cover and counter-drone weaponry, armour, artillery and infantry will facing big trouble. You simply cannot survive in the battlefield just by having more guns, more armour and more infantry. You have to have a very deft combination of sensors, EW cover and counter-drone weaponry or you shall not survive. The great prowess of the drone-artillery complex has come to the fore. Drones were employed in this conflict across the range for Intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, reconnaissance (ISTAR), as also post-strike damage assessment (PSDA) in Operation Springshield 2020, in which the Turkish military faced off with the Syrian Army.
The unmanned aerial systems (UAVs) have been combined with indirect fire to produce great effect. The use of drones to target road-mobile ballistic missiles has come to the fore. In our context, the prospect of targeting the rocket force with this drone artillery complex has been thrown up. The Bayrakltar drones saw huge successes. They rendered the sophisticated air defence (AD) systems like the Pantsir, OSA-AK and Stella, irrelevant. Loiter ammunition of the Israeli kind targeted and took out S-300s. S-300s and S-400s are now vulnerable. The only answer to ensure survivability is a network-centric AD system with a complete air picture and we know how difficult it is to achieve this. So the vulnerabilities of the traditional military to the drone artillery complex, the EW systems, the counter-drone systems has come dramatically to the fore. The last phase of the conflict did emphasise the traditional concepts like fire and manoeuvre and the role of the traditional arms still remains valid, so the text has not gone away, but the text must wake up to the fact that it is seriously challenged by the context.
Scale of the Challenge and Deficits
That much about the challenges in integration, challenges with technology and the many subparts of technology in terms of disruption, convergence what all is happening. There is also the concurrent challenge in the domain of pure material sciences as we transit from this ‘industrial era’ military to a ‘digital era’ military. Deng Xiaoping had famously remarked that “the Middle East may have oil but China has rare earths.” In the 1980s, China took on this initiative to process rare earths and, today, while India and China are equally proficient in stocking of rare earths, but in processing we are dependent on them. In the ‘digital era’ what steel was to the ‘industrial era’ rare earths will be to the ‘digital era.’ All your precision guided munitions (PGM), night vision devices (NVD), satellites, communication equipments, opto-electronics, will all come from rare earths, where we have substantially lagged.
May I also underline the fact that if we are to emerge ascendant in the strategic military competition of the future, we do not have the luxury of an either or option – either technology or jointness. The last revolution in military affairs (RMA) is a very striking example because it was as much about organization adeptness as about technological equity. In Afghanistan, we saw that a CIA operator on top of a mule could cue a B2 strategic bomber to the caves of Tora Bora. Intelligence, traditional instruments of statecraft, the mule and the most sophisticated B2 strategic bomber – were all integrated to dramatic effect. In Iraq, you had a tank or a Bradley commander directing close air support of the F35 on to an emerging tank column directly from him to the F35 and not through all the complex structures like many militaries like ours have. What we saw in terms of extraordinary precision targeting and the elimination of enemy weapon systems would not have happened without changes brought about by the Goldwater-Nichols Act. In some areas there has to be a complete breaking down of silos and a complete convergence of technology. Complete dissolution of silos in the three Services even taken to the inter agency domain.
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A big lesson for India is that we were bypassed by RMA simply because of our refusal to get joined. The principal challenge, today, in my mind is to make the successful transition from an ‘industrial era’ military to a ‘digital era’ force. That is a central challenge. To enable this there has to be complete civil-military fusion. The days of coordination, synergies and all those terms that we keep using, are gone. There has to be complete dissolution of silos in thoughts, structures, attitudes and actions – not only integration of the three Services but a wider inter-agency compact, complete cross pollination of talent no matter where it comes from. It could from Defence Research & Development Organisation (DRDO), from defence public sector undertakings (DPSU), from start ups, private sector, technology entrepreneurs, dreamers or software whiz kids. The military simply has no option. We have to go in for talent from anywhere. Just see what the PLA is doing. They have opened 160 defence laboratories across civil universities in China. They have launched a global hunt for talent. As far back as 2010, Prof Xian Peng was sent by the PLA on a sponsorship to the Heidelberg University in Austria. He did some work in advance quantum technologies and has today designed the quantum radar and is working on quantum technology for China.
Look at the long term strategic thinking, the resolve, the investments in talents across the globe. We will have to do similar. There has to be a massive change in policy framework and attitudinal orientations. In our case it has to be connectivity and security and not connectivity or security. That is unfortunately where our debate is stuck. We have to move to software or quantum enabled encryptions. That is what militaries all over the world are doing. We cannot be satisfied with one or two apps but we have to churn out a million apps. We have to get big in the world of military apps. We have to develop an array of coders and programmers. We cannot have these legacy frameworks of AFNET not talking to AD. This cannot be sustained any longer. A good example is outer space. Despite having a fairly advanced space programme, because of lack of civil-military fusion, there is a paucity of dedicated military satellites. We must now explore the options of commercial launch for military use or invest in systems like high space UAVs, which will give us persistent surveillance for the tactical battle area (TBA). We must bring cyber capacities to the field and not resident in the national capital. We must study the impact of quantum on cyber because quantum is changing the very nature of cyber philosophy – moving it from primacy in offence to primacy in defence.
We have a long way to go but we have begun some focused actions on multiple pathways in the Indian Army. Through integration, civil military fusion, technological convergence, attitudinal orientation make-overs, etc, to enable the transition from an ‘industrial era’ to a ‘digital era’, we have begun taking the first baby steps.
We are revamping the entire professional military training (PME) framework from the National Defence Academy (NDA) to the National Defence College (NDC) through a study ordered by the CDS, so that we produce soldiery ready for the ‘digital era’. We are laying great emphasis on excellence in niche capacities. In the Indian army, we have about 100 officers doing courses abroad in the best universities of the world – Cranfield, Harvard, New York State – in courses like AI, 5G, Big Data, Gun design, tank technology. This is actually happening today. B.Tech/ M.Tech courses are being comprehensively transformed to one of talent management, audit and delivery. Our B.Tech graduates are now audited for what they will give back to the Services. Our M.Techs will be audited. They will produce programmes that are of ‘here and now’ relevance to the Indian Army. We have, in the last two to three years, due to the work of a lot of people – Gen Bipin Rawat, Gen Subrata Saha, Gen AK Channan and whole lot of people – some remarkable products are coming to the fore. We have a low light imagery system going, which will transform the world of image intensification, a ramjet system, which will enhance existing artillery gun ranges by 10 to 20 kilometers. We are investing greatly in offensive drone operations. In terms of swarming, the numbers that we swarm, the capacities in terms of EW systems, precision targeting and the whole business of cooling which is peculiar to drone operations. We have invested in high space UAVs in collaboration with IIT Chennai and IIT Kanpur for better persistent surveillance. We have begun the preliminary work on a military IOT. We are getting a detailed project report (DPR) going.
Soon we will have a proof of concept at the Military College of Telecom Engineering (MCTE) and in some time in the future we will move to deployment. We have invested Rs 5 crores in an AI lab at MCTE and Rs 3 crores in a quantum lab in MCTE.
Big time investments have been made in quantum technologies, both for electronic algorithms to replace these legacy cipher systems as also in securing our networks through the quantum random number generation. We have set up our own laboratory for ballistic and material sciences at College of Military Engineering (CME) Pune at a cost of Rs 3 crores. Our young officers have the liberty or the facility to explore the fusion of different materials and concepts. In consequence, you had Maj Anoop Mishra producing the SarvatraKavach, a ballistic helmet, mine shoes and all. Indian minds exploring with Indian materials in Indian laboratories. Until a year back, we used to do the same thing in a university in Switzerland or UK. Now we are doing it here. We are producing products that will meet immediate needs along the northern borders before the next summers. The fact that we have the best software talent in the world, the lowest data development cost, it is indeed confounding why we should not be leading in algorithm warfare. We have a long way to go but we are seriously looking at algorithm warfare. We are investing in 3D/4D printing to fine tune our supply chain management and ensure inventory reduction. In robotics, we are investing in the robot mules for carriage of loads in the deserts and high altitudes; humanoids to take care of high risk missions. The Indian Army has got intellectual property rights (IPR) in 20 products across the technology spectrum, which will help us with revenue generation in the years to come and will also give us weight in the strategic military sphere.
Not only structural reform but also cultural transformation is being undertaken because we know culture eats structure for breakfast. In terms of our outreach to the private sector, we are saying we need you, we are reaching out to them. We are promoting start ups. We have the Soldier IDEX now – if a soldier who wishes to offer a product, we will fund his experimentation. Consultancy programmes are on offer. If military officers in service offer to code a programme or do something of a technological nature, we will pay them for their services in addition to their pay. A slew of measures have been undertaken to address this issue of converging technology with our evolution and integration. In sum, I you that the Indian armed forces, in general , and the Indian army, in particular, are determined to give a comprehensive fillip to technological embrace, even as we evolve along the integration path. There are obstacles and road blocks but we do know that the only way to address change is to plunge head on into it. We have fully resolved to make a successful and speedy transformation to a smart, agile military for the ‘digital era’.
