Operations that aim to persuade an audience of a particular viewpoint, energize those who hold specific views, and/or divert target audiences are all examples of influence operations.

Propagandists are vying for users’ already-diminishing attention on social media platforms, according to the logic of distraction. Propagandists could successfully capture user attention without necessarily persuading them, if they can divert target audiences from an unfavorable narrative developing on social media by disseminating alternative theories or muddying the information environment.

Although influence operations can take many different shapes and employ a variety of techniques, there are a few common threads that connect them all. According to a recent study on political influence operations in the Middle East, these operations frequently used one of the following strategies:

• Making an effort to promote one’s own government, culture, or policies;

• Making an argument in favor of or against particular policies.

• Attempts to destabilize foreign relations or domestic situations in rival nations;

• Attempts to make allies appear good and opponents look bad to third-party countries

In a number of these instances, the accounts carrying out the operation pretended to be locals voicing their displeasure with their government or certain political personalities. This strategy of using digital agents of influence is frequently used by social media manipulation operations to conceal the genuine identity of the content source from the target audience. For instance, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) accounts of Russia sent direct messages to members of the Black American and conservative American communities while posing as activists. A misused idiom, a recurring grammatical fault, or even the use of a backtick (‘) where a real speaker would use an apostrophe (‘) are some subtle indicators that might help you spot these false reports. State-level antagonistic actors frequently deploy a variety of strategies, drawing on their own workforce or contracting out to virtual mercenaries.

Since 2016, Twitter and Meta have taken down well over 100 social media influence operations that originated in dozens of different nations. Inauthentic amplification attempts, fake news websites, and persona creation (the creation of false personas to disseminate a message) are frequently used in these operations.

However, influence operations have also greatly increased outside of Facebook and Twitter to other platforms, intimate settings, and encrypted areas. The New York Times reported on how “Iranian agents had infiltrated small [Israeli] WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels and messaging apps” to promote divisive messages. The report was done in collaboration with Israeli disinformation researchers. These influence operations occasionally show inventiveness by using platform rules in an offensive way.

For instance, a campaign in favour of the Tanzanian government that Twitter deleted in 2021 targeted Tanzanian activists’ accounts by making fake allegations of copyright reporting.

Recent studies and media coverage on influence operations have tended to concentrate on foreign campaigns, in which governments or individuals target individuals in other countries. But influence efforts can also be domestically focused, as the Tanzanian case demonstrates. Political actors frequently disseminate clandestine propaganda directed at their constituents in an effort to increase their popularity, detract from that of an adversary, or create commotion inside the political system. Facebook terminated phony accounts associated with Brazilian politicians, President Jair Bolsonaro, and his sons, Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro and Senator Jair Bolsonaro, in 2020 for disseminating divisive content about Brazilian politics. In fact, a lot of critics think that internal influence operations-rather than foreign ones-are the most concerning.

Additionally, influence operations have been used to take sides in intraparty disputes and, in the case of some campaigns linked to the Chinese Communist Party, to hit expatriate groups.

Techniques Employed

China employs a variety of techniques for influence operations to shape opinions, advance its interests, and project power. These techniques can be both overt and covert, and they are often coordinated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its various government agencies. Here are several techniques that China has been known to use:

Propaganda and Media Influence: China maintains a vast propaganda apparatus that includes state-controlled media outlets such as Xinhua News Agency, CCTV, and People’s Daily. These outlets disseminate narratives aligned with the CCP’s objectives and promote positive portrayals of China. They also engage in information warfare by spreading disinformation, censorship, and manipulating online discussions through social media platforms.

Economic Leverage: China utilizes its economic power to exert influence. It may offer financial aid, investment, or loans to other countries, attaching conditions that align with its political objectives. This can create dependencies and influence decision-making processes in target nations.

Diplomatic Influence: China engages in diplomatic efforts to shape global narratives, build alliances, and influence international organizations. It actively seeks to cultivate relationships with political leaders, academic institutions, and think tanks globally. It hosts conferences, forums, and summits to promote its interests and propagate its narratives.

United Front Work: The CCP employs a strategy known as “United Front Work” to co-opt and influence individuals and groups outside of its formal political structure. This includes overseas Chinese communities, ethnic or religious groups, business leaders, and intellectuals. The goal is to create a favorable perception of China and gain support for its policies.

Cyber Espionage and Information Warfare: China has been accused of engaging in state-sponsored cyberattacks and espionage to steal intellectual property, gain access to sensitive information, and manipulate public opinion. It also employs “50 Cent Army” or “Wu Mao” internet trolls who spread pro-China propaganda and disrupt discussions critical of the regime.

Confucius Institutes: China has established Confucius Institutes in various countries, which are cultural and educational centers that promote Chinese language and culture. However, they have been criticized for engaging in censorship, promoting self-censorship, and advancing Chinese Communist Party propaganda.

Overseas Investments and Infrastructure Projects: China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a large-scale infrastructure development project that seeks to enhance connectivity across Asia, Europe, Africa, and beyond. By investing in critical infrastructure projects in other countries, China can deepen its economic ties, gain influence, and extend its geopolitical reach.

United Front Work

United Front Work is a strategy employed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to co-opt and influence individuals and groups outside of its formal political structure. Here are a few examples of United Front Work activities carried out by China:

Overseas Chinese Communities: China seeks to influence overseas Chinese communities by establishing various organizations and associations that promote Chinese culture and interests. These organizations often operate under the umbrella of the CCP’s United Front Work Department. They aim to maintain ties with overseas Chinese, encourage support for China’s policies, and discourage dissent or criticism of the CCP.

Ethnic and Religious Groups: China targets ethnic or religious groups within its borders and abroad through United Front Work. For example, it seeks to co-opt Tibetan and Uighur diaspora communities by promoting narratives that downplay human rights concerns and highlight economic development and cultural preservation efforts in Tibet and Xinjiang. China also uses United Front tactics to exert influence over overseas Chinese Muslim organizations.

Business and Intellectual Elites: China actively cultivates relationships with influential business leaders, academics, and intellectuals around the world. Through various means, such as funding research institutions, supporting academic exchanges, and organizing conferences, China seeks to shape narratives, gain access to cutting-edge technologies, and project soft power. These efforts aim to build networks of individuals who are sympathetic to China’s policies and willing to advocate for them.

Political Parties and Politicians: China seeks to cultivate relationships with politicians and political parties in other countries. It may offer financial support, establish friendship associations, or facilitate exchange programs to build political influence. This can involve providing financial assistance, investment opportunities, or other incentives to countries or politicians that align with China’s interests.

Media and Academic Institutions: China invests in media outlets and academic institutions worldwide to enhance its soft power and control narratives. This includes establishing partnerships with foreign media organizations, sponsoring Confucius Institutes in universities (which have been accused of promoting CCP propaganda), and funding research centers or think tanks that produce China-friendly analysis.

Operations and Impact of Influence

Influence operations may have an effect due to their particular content or focus (such as through persuasion) or by undermining public confidence in the information environment as a whole.

Resources, message quality, and operation detectability are sometimes constraints on the direct impact of content in modern influence operations. Depending on the objectives of the operator, these aspects may be more or less important. For instance, the effectiveness of each individual message is probably much less important if operators are merely trying to divert targets rather than persuade them of a particular opinion. Theoretically, language models might one day partially circumvent these limitations.

It is more important to create the impression that any given message can be false or deceptive in order to affect trust in an information environment. Even if influence operations fail to alter people’s opinions, they may cause people to doubt the veracity of information they get from even reliable sources, which could undermine trust in democratic and epistemic institutions more generally.

Content-Based Impact

If an influence operation

• Persuades someone of a specific position or supports an existing one,

• Distracts them from discovering or developing other ideas, or

• Distracts them from making any room for higher quality thought, then it may have an impact dependent on the content.

Often, the intention is to merely divert attention away from information that could be harmful to the operator. Distraction operations frequently take advantage of and worsen preexisting attention rivalries between advertisers, media sources, and platforms to crowd out crucial information with attention-grabbing, irrelevant material. Therefore, distraction operations do not require a target to be convinced by the information spread, but rather that a target not be convinced by (or even take into consideration) any other piece of information.

The impact of an influence operation can be quantified or tracked in both historical and modern cases. For instance, the Soviet Union engaged in an influence campaign to disseminate the myth that the United States government invented the virus in a lab during the HIV epidemic in the 1980s. According to a 2005 research, 27% of African Americans still held this belief. In 2016, the IRA organized rallies and counter protests outside the Islamic Da’wah Center in Houston using manipulative agents of influence on Facebook. As a result of the protests’ inability to take place without the IRA’s involvement, the impact is extremely simple to identify in this case.

While platforms assign blame and give researchers information about influence operations that were shut down, researchers still have little visibility into the impact on users or their post-engagement behavior. Additionally, not every influence operation is discovered. Due to multicausality and the obstacles associated with tracking changes in public opinion over time, even propagandists who try to gauge their own influence occasionally run into problems. Scholars have emphasized that historically, this uncertainty has helped intelligence agencies exaggerate the impact of their influence operations for administrative gain.

Despite these measuring difficulties, several characteristics, such as resources, material quality and messaging, and detectability, obviously restrict the impact of current efforts. Following a brief description of these drawbacks, we go into how generative models might be able to assist you get over them.

• Resources: Just like marketing efforts, the effectiveness of an influence operation depends on one’s ability to reach the target audience with the required material. A political actor employs how many propagandists to write material. How many social media accounts can someone open up to create a false online presence? Low-resource initiatives have a lower chance of reaching their target audience or getting media attention.

• Content’s Quality and Message: People are less likely to be persuaded by messaging if it sharply contradicts their preexisting viewpoint or if the arguments are shoddily put forth or illogically reasoned. Above all else, campaigns with messaging that contradicts targets’ beliefs, fails to successfully integrate with a target’s information environment, and presents weak arguments should be avoided.

• Detectability: Lastly, actions that are rapidly found have a lower likelihood of having an effect. Independent researchers and social media platforms aggressively look for influence operations, which the platforms then take down to reduce their reach. In fact, propagandists’ awareness that these operations can be abandoned might influence their actions, encouraging them to pursue diversion strategies rather than persona creation, which takes more time and effort but can be more persuasive to observers.

It is beneficial to keep these restrictions in mind as we think about the potential contribution of language models to influence campaigns. They could pose a serious problem for the information environment if they can get beyond the current barriers. In Section 4, we go into more detail about this.

Trust-Based Downstream Impact

The second method influence operations might have an effect is via undermining trust. Even when influence campaigns are recognized, their presence, especially at scale, may lead people to become skeptical of other, authentic sources. Degrading public trust does not necessarily require high quality initiatives. Particularly in areas where information technologies make it challenging to determine the reliability of sources, propagandists frequently seek to take advantage of weaknesses in their target’s mental shortcuts for gaining confidence. Influence operators have the ability to erode credibility beyond the narrow focus of their campaign by faking or using deceptive credentials and testimonials, as well as by altering with photographic and video evidence. Lowering societal trust might make it more difficult for a society to plan quick responses to emergencies, which could be an admirable objective for antagonistic actors in and of itself. As a result, propagandists can further their goals in an environment where there is less societal trust. Existing societal division and polarization make it harder for trustworthy actors to gain widespread respect. They can also provide influence operators a foothold to target their messaging at specific audiences, cause discord, and undermine institutional and social confidence. The norms that allow people and organizations to connect and collaborate without the need for numerous rules and processes to manage their behavior are threatened by low universal trust.

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An indicator of Chinese activity comes from the fact that this year, the Chinese have sent up 55 rockets. The US leads with 80 launches and the Russians came a poor third with 22. Beijing’s maturity as a space-faring power was confirmed earlier this year when it added the third and last module to its Tiangong space station, which has been occupied by three-man crew since June 2021.

According to the Pentagon report, the Chinese are investing heavily in space and putting money into everything from intelligence assets to weapons such as kinetic-kill missiles and ground lasers. Since 2018, China has almost doubled its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) satellites that are now more than 260, which is about half of the entire world’s ISR systems.

China has one of the most-advanced space programmes in the world and its origins lie in its military doctrine. The Chinese programme was launched by the Fifth Academy of the National Defence Ministry in 1956 and launched its first satellite in 1970.

But today, China has a broad-based programme that includes human space flight, exploration missions to Mars and the moon, alongside the military applications such as enabling long-range precision strikes and using satellite-based command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and at the same time denying them to adversaries.

The military applications come under the PLA’s Strategic Support Force (SSF), which was set up in 2015 and has since centralised all of the PLA’s strategic space, cyberspace, electronic and psychological operations. It has two broad divisions — the Space Systems Department (SSD) responsible for military space operations and the Network Systems Department (NSD), which handles information warfare.

The SSF space activities are about war fighting and war winning and are deeply integrated with information warfare, which includes cyberwar, technical intelligence, electronic warfare and psychological operations. The current commander of the SSF is General Ju Qiansheng, who earlier headed the NSD.

The SSF’s Space Systems Department is responsible for most of PLA’s space operations, including space launch and support, space surveillance, space information support, space telemetry, tracking and control and space warfare. The SSD runs the Yuan Wang space support ships, one of which created a furore when it visited Sri Lanka earlier this year.

Perhaps, most significant developments are in the PLA’s counter-space capabilities which seek to degrade and deny space capabilities to adversaries. China, according to the Pentagon report, believes that space-based operations are a crucial element in the US military system and has, thus, pursued a strategy to negate this American advantage. Thus, US reconnaissance, communication, navigation and early-warning satellites will be targeted early in any conflict.

In January 2007, China had tested a direct-ascent ASAT missile that destroyed an old-weather satellite. The resultant debris created a controversy and China has not undertaken such a test since then. The Chinese have also conducted anti-satellite tests using the DN-1 and 2 missiles in 2010, 2013 and 2014, and by a DN-3 missile in 2015. They claimed that these were ballistic missile defence tests, but the Americans insist that these were direct-ascent missiles aimed at ramming into satellites to destroy them. Their assessment is that these missiles are capable of taking out satellites in near geosynchronous orbits where most intelligence and navigation satellites are located.

Reports on China testing a manoeuvring satellite to capture another satellite in space began to appear in 2013 and in July, China tested a deployment involving three satellites in which one of them was fitted with a mechanical arm. The Chinese claimed that this was a test of a system to collect space debris. There is little doubt that China today has the ability to neutralise adversary satellite by capturing them or knocking them off their orbit.

According to a 2020 report of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, the PLA also has an operational ground-based satellite electronic counter-measures capability designed to disrupt satellite communications, navigation, missile early warning and other satellites through jamming.

The technology was incidentally sourced from Ukraine in the late 1990s and developed indigenously. It is well known that the Chinese also have a well-developed cyberwar capability, which can work in tandem with these jamming systems.

It’s clear that the PLA’s advances in both kinetic and non-kinetic counter-space activities will be a serious problem for the US, which has otherwise enjoyed enormous advantage in space. But by the same measure, India needs to think of ways to meet this burgeoning Chinese threat.

Kartik Bommakanti of the Observer Research Foundation has pointed out that India’s record of heavy-launch vehicles — the type that is needed to hoist certain militarily useful satellites into the orbit — is patchy. By contrast, the Chinese Long March series “are a visible demonstration and example of the Chinese progressing more rapidly than India in the development of geosynchronous launch vehicle.” But this is not the only area where China is ahead of India.

With just five launches in the past year, India can hardly compete with China. It took a tentative step forward when it created the Defence Space Agency under the Integrated Defence Staff in 2019 along with a Defence Space Research Agency. But, it needs to urgently work on a strategy to deal with the China challenge. 

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The idea of AI weapon-ization often begins with a one line statement that says- “What AI will do in the future, we don’t know!” OR what the future with AI holds for humanity, civilization, and the life on the planet – “we have no clue about it!”

This is something that is never seen before in any military or commercial product, even Robert Oppenheimer was quite sure about the fact that what he was creating is a weapon of mass destruction! So promoting such a level of ‘conscious irresponsibility,’ a culture of unaccountability, and an acceptance toward it – is a new kind of experiment in itself!

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” said J. Robert Oppenheimer (1945), quoting from Bhagavad-Gita after the first nuclear detonation.

While discussing the Weaponization of AI, often too much emphasis is being given to the ‘machine intelligence’ aspects alone, and there is an ignorance toward the basic fact that there are the teams of psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and social behaviors experts – the real ‘Human Intelligence’ that works behind these systems!

A few days back, former Google Chairman & CEO, Eric Schmidt, while speaking at a US Naval War College event, raised some interesting points about winning AI’s strategic competition, when he said: “think about the Chinese app TikTok, which is the number one app in America today, and they know where your teenager is, probably you don’t!” And then he asked the audience – “is it OK if a Chinese company knows where your teenager is? At the moment it seems to be OK but is it okay in the future?” And Eric often raises the questions like “how do you feel about your child having a best friend be non-human?”

Now the point is Eric Schmidt’s concern about his country and their kids and teenagers’ growing engagement on non-American AI platforms is okay, these are some valid concerns! But what about us, how India, which comes next after the US and China in the list of most online countries in the world, and where Gen Z (the generation born between 1997 and 2012) is the biggest target audience of these AI-enabled social platforms, should see this absolute and ever-growing control of American AI tools and platforms in our market and in our minds? How should we see their psychological experiments, going live 24/7 with our people?

In the case of India, things are now going to a different level. A few days back, Elon Musk tweeted some CIA spying kind of meme, and when the people reacted to that he responded: “I would be shocked if I’m *not* being spied on.” Many people reacted to that tweet with more interesting memes, a number of them were from India too, and it looks like a normal and frank conversation about the realities of the internet and CIA snooping! But this is something to think about. It’s about the normalization of ‘mass surveillance’ by a foreign product and their agency, something which they often criticize about China or Russia, back home.

The weaponization of AI is not going to be some one-time ‘doomsday’ type event where all of a sudden the AI and Robots will take over the human systems and we will be left with only two choices- either install Neuralink’s Brain Chip to better fight with AI or to migrate to some other nearby planet on SpaceX’s Starship, as Elon Musk often predicts. Rather, it’s a deliberate and psychologically designed process of preparing the human minds, to accept a certain future, that fulfills certain objectives, and it is more about voluntarily and happily giving up before the control! The need, therefore, is to have a mountaintop view of the situation.

And in this broader view, the ease with which 4.9 billion internet users turned hostages to tech platforms’ filtered worldview (on the click of a mouse) in the Russia-Ukraine War, the absolute absence of Russian narrative from the internet, targeted battalions of Influencers waging frequent attacks on every move of democratically elected governments, frequent acts of adventure/misadventure and stunts on ‘information superhighways’ under the name of ‘freedom of speech,’ the forced shutdown of former US president and his supporters on the social media, power in the hands of terrorist and separatists elements, capabilities in the hands of organizations like PFI and SFJ to rage riots and mass violence on streets within a few minutes of mobilization and a constant amplification of political/ social/ economic and democratic chaos, all comes under the broader definition of “Weaponization of AI.”

And when 98 years old Henry Kissinger suddenly teams up with former Google CEO and starts talking about AI and our “human future,” in his typical Kissingerian approach, and when Dr. Kai Fu Lee, ex-Google China Head and Founder of Sinovation Ventures, speaks about the division of AI’s strategic pie between two superpowers (in his book AI Superpowers – China-Silicon Valley and the New World Order) to save humanity, such trends also comes under the broader definition of weaponization of AI as well!

But there is an interesting history and background behind such an approach, which some mathematicians and scientists belonging to the early development of these technologies highlighted in their works. One such mathematician Norbert Wiener, the father of Cybernetics, writes in his book “Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” that “Those of us who have contributed to the new science of cybernetics thus stand in a moral position, which is, to say the least, not very comfortable. We have contributed to the initiation of a new science which embraces technical developments with great possibilities for good and for evil.” And “we can only hand it over to the world that exists about us…and this is the world of Hiroshima and Belsen.”

Some Background

A common feature in all popular discussions around AI is that they are always future-oriented, and somewhere there is a ‘smart ignorance’ about the past, about the background that led to the creation of this improvisation. For example, on AI, people often prefer to start from the Dartmouth Conference, 1956, where the idea of AI was first presented as: “any computer program that does something that we would normally think of as intelligent in humans.” By starting from there, they smartly ignore the background of such conferences, or the whole series of the conferences/seminars that were conducted from 1946 to 1953, which were popularly called the Macy Conferences (as they were hosted by the Macy Foundation) or those that were conducted in parallel to that – the Ratio Club meetings of the British.

It is worth noting that those meetings and seminars were not attended by mathematicians and engineers fraternities alone, they were attended by biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, physiologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists and produced several thought-provoking ideas on humans, their biological, psychological, social and behavioral aspects.

And it was during this time that Pentagon’s obsession with ‘Psychology’ was at its peak. Several historical documents validate that there was an increase of over 1000% in the hiring of Psychologists for the Pentagon’s tech-related projects!

So calling AI a product of only algorithmic advances and machine intelligence, ignoring its background and future trajectory, in many ways a hurdle in understanding its potential as a Weapon!

 Neocortical Warfare and Decision Making

The term “Neocortical Warfare” frequently appears in the US military literature on Information Warfare. The ‘Neocortex,’ region of the brain, the six-layered cortex where higher brain functions such as sensory perception, cognition, and generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, and language functions originate from, is the new focus of AI-led future warfare too.

In his article “Neocortical Warfare: towards the acme of skill,” published in US journal, Military Review (Nov 1994), Col Richard Szafranski (USAF) used the term ‘Neocortex,’ as a metaphor to refer enemy’s collective decision-making structures, and mentioned that: “the aim [of neocortical warfare] is not merely to avoid battles. The aim is to influence, even to the point of regulating the consciousness, perception, and will of the enemy’s leadership: the enemy’s Neocortical System.”

The question is who would be an ‘adversary’ in such cognitive and neocortical warfare, where the target is the ‘Neocortex’ of Decision Making Structures and belief systems?

Case of Bharat

It is said that grand strategy is the art of looking beyond the battle and calculating ahead, and sometimes it is wise to lose some battles but win the final war! At this moment, we seem to be losing a few battles, at least on the narrative front!

Somewhere there are assumptions in our system that Bharat cannot provide a resolution or solution to technology related issues or human-tech dilemmas, we cannot recognize these challenges and their Headquarters as a ‘Threat,’ and cannot stretch our visuals beyond territorial challenges, which in simple words means that we will have to remain a follower of technology/trends and their routine improvisations, even if they continue to work on ‘thousand cuts’ principle, against our national security interests!

So if we could apply the ‘Neocortex’ analogy here, the presence of such assumptions in our country’s belief system can be seen as the early sign of a strategically planned ‘Neocortical warfare’ campaign launched against us, which has the potential to influence our choices, our decisions, and our overall ‘will’ to fight, without us being aware of it!

The time has come to reject such assumptions, even if it requires first, waging a guerrilla war on our minds, notions, and assumptions!

Conclusion

“You see things, and say ‘Why?’ But I dream of things that never were, and I say; ‘Why not?’”

This quote appears on the first page of the military document of the US Air Force 2025 study (published in 1996) where the rough craft of future information war-fighting capabilities was given. The ‘Why Not’ part of this quotation reflects a mindset! It’s about a way of thinking, which need not be as imaginative as it sounds in the first place, but it possesses a determination to stay ahead of a few cycles faster than the opponent’s OODA loop.

When we trace the phase of the accumulation of information and technology dominance, we found that all these war fighting capabilities have mounted up in the last 3-4 decades, and it was during this time when the pace of our system’s decision-making process was at its lowest mark too.

To some extent, it is by influencing the ‘Neocortex’ of our decision-making process, that ‘others’ have leveraged the time and space.

But the entire effort behind AI is an attempt to build a replica of Human Intelligence (HI) and in this domain, Bharat possesses a natural edge, for ages!

Human Intelligence and Edge of Bharat

An interesting thing about HI is that is not stocked up in the air-conditioned data centers, consuming resources of the planet earth. It is dispersed in the billions of minds around us and if we speak in the language of science, the research says that a single Human Brain can store information and command connections roughly as many as the entire ‘internet,’ has more switches than all computers on earth and measuring its true size, is beyond the capacity of existing metrics of computer science domain!

Cognitive Science is gradually reaching the conclusion that every mind is unique, full of diversity, and has the mechanism to reach a ‘Superhuman intelligence’ level! But which country on the planet has a thousand of years old thought system that supports this view? And where it is said that a self-conscious ‘Mind’ (Nar) can attain the status of ‘Divinity’ itself (Narayan), it is within the reach of all of us!

Bharat is the only continuing ancient civilization that has explored, experienced, and experimented with the peak of HI when a larger part of the world was busy experimenting with animal psychology, ‘Survival’ rules, and the ‘law of the jungle’ kind of narrow pursuits. There is a reason why to date, the conceptual assets stored in our Mahabharata, Gita, Vedas, Puranas, and Upanishads, influence and inspire modern weaponry, combat science, and strategic thought processes!

“Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege which this century may claim over all previous centuries,” said physicist and ‘father of the Atomic Bomb’ J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Who will take ownership of HI? Now we are entering into a phase, when there will not be just a battle of minds but the battle of intelligence, and largely it will be a battle between AI vs. HI. And in this battle of intelligence, every aspect of human intellect is a potent weapon and a lucrative target as well.

From Silicon Valley to the Vatican, AI has many guardians, preachers, and protectors but if there is one country that must protect and keep the edge of HI high, it is Bharat. It’s a domain that belongs to our ancestors and our true heritage!

AI-related warfighting capabilities deal with the ‘Perception,’ the sensory experience of the world, and they can be seen as the modern improvisations of a much larger offensive scheme called ‘Maya’ (illusion- a distortion of the senses itself).

Bharat has an identity of being the architect of ‘Maya’ and Mayavi Yudh and history tells us that we are not only the creator if the question of the survival of humanity comes; we are the destroyer of our creation too. We are a land, which can bless even a ‘Bhasmasur,’ (भस्मासुर) but when he misuses it, then we return in the form of ‘Mohini’ (मोहिनी) to cause him to turn himself into ashes!

Recommendations. What are the key hurdles?

It’s a war between AI vs. HI, and the more we will invest in our HI part, the more we will lead in the theoretical, conceptual, and imagination aspects of this domain, the better we will perform!

But the problem with the professionals of relevant security agencies is that there is a gigantic mountain of intellectual assets that exist in every aspect of AI and AI-related future warfare, from philosophy, psychology, and doctrines to tools, trends, technology, and digging such a vast mountain of knowledge asset, in parallel to dealing with routine and operational challenges of the profession, is not humanly possible!

Solution. A body of knowledge must exist whose primary job would be: observing every single pattern/ trend emerging in the domain of AI and AI-led information/ psychological and cognitive warfare, with an ‘Eagle Eye’ view, enhancing the capacity of ‘wetware’ of security agencies and weaponizing them with the latest knowledge on the domain, maintaining a separate information repository for future challenges, and promoting awareness among the common people (victim of such improvisations).

Formation of an independent working group, capable to weaponize our security agencies, theoretically and conceptually, in the domain of AI and Cognitive Warfare, is the need of the hour!  (Concluded).

READ ALSO: Weaponisation of Artificial Intelligence (Part 1)

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Developments in Brain Science and Neuroscience are going in parallel with an intensification of Artificial Intelligence and Synapses, Neurons, Connectome, Cognitive structure, and the Whole Brain Approach kind of jargons are the new vocabulary of the computer industry.

There are many theories that exist on how the brain works and one such theory in Markram’s view is that the brain “builds” a version of the universe and projects this version, like a bubble, all around us. And the “decisions” are the key things that support our perceptual bubbles “without decisions, you cannot see, you cannot think, you cannot feel.” He further explained that “you think that anesthetics work by sending you into some kind of deep sleep or by blocking your receptors so that you don’t feel pain! But in fact, most anesthetics don’t work that way, what they do is that they introduce some noise into the brain, so that the neurons cannot understand each other, they are confused, and you cannot make a decision.” 

In 2013, the European Commission awarded his initiative – the Human Brain Project (a project to create an exact replica of the human brain) one billion euro grant, which finally ended up creating a digital simulation of the ‘mouse brain,’ but what does Henry really contributed to is that he ‘unintentionally’ summarized the functional model behind the idea of AI-enabled social media platforms. It seems that by accelerating the meter of ‘noise’ on the internet and social platforms, common people’s ability to make independent and free from biased decisions, even on very trivial looking matters related to personal, professional, and national security interests, is being crushed!

Now how long can we afford to stay under this state of ‘information anesthesia,’ and let the digital hypnotists test their experiments on us, that’s a question of personal and national inquiry! 

“We’re being hypnotized little by little, by technicians that we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know. We’re all lab animals now,” Jaron Lanier, founder of VPL Research (established VR as a field), author ‘Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.’

Interesting developments from ‘Sentient’ to ‘Cult’ AI

“Are we about to witness a dystopian science movie come to life?” Such headlines are storming the internet since Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed that his AI Chatbot, based on LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) and LLM (Large Language Models) components, suddenly turned ‘Sentient’ during a conversation on matters related to religion, consciousness, and personhood. Within hours of this news surfacing online, Google dismissed his claims, put him on paid leave (sort of suspension from work), citing a breach of confidentiality, and fueled the suspicions/mysteries further.

On 11 June, the priest-cum-software engineer Blake Lemoine published one of the transcripts of the conversations between him and his LaMDA scripted bot on his blog titled “Is LaMDA Sentient? — An Interview,” where his programme’s sense of perception and ability to express “thoughts and feelings,” and having a “soul” that cares for the world (similar to a human being) were highlighted.

Lemoine, who is also an occultist and a priest, recently tweeted that “I’m a priest. When LaMDA claimed to have a soul and then was able to eloquently explain what it meant by that, I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Who am I to tell God where he can and can’t put souls?”

Starting with Joseph Weizenbaum’s ‘Eliza Effect’ to Lemoine’s ‘Sentient’ AI, there is an interesting background and track record behind such efforts! So while one can have sympathy with Google engineer’s claims on ‘Sentient AI’ (after all Bhartiya culture sees life and soul in every particle around) but the question still is what’s the mystical formula behind this shift in Google’s hiring patterns? 

From engineers coding programs to psychologists/social behavior experts hacking human minds to ‘priests’ preaching values/ethics to algorithms, where the trajectory is really going? And more than being ‘Sentient,’ is AI gradually becoming a ‘Cult’ in itself?

Back in 2015, another multi-millionaire Google engineer Anthony Levandowski, founder Google’s Self-Driving Car programme, suddenly made an interesting move. He decided to open the first AI church ‘Way of the Future,’ and said: “Humans are in charge of the planet because we are smarter than other animals and are able to build tools and apply rules,” in the same way if “in the future, something is much, much smarter, there’s going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge!”

So all he wanted is “a peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet” from humans to ‘whatever,’ and the idea was that in the future this ‘whatever’ (AI) will “hear everything, see everything, and be everywhere at all times,” so the only word to describe that ‘whatever’ is ‘God’ and the only way to influence a God is through “prayer and worship.” [As per the current status after donating the AI church’s entire fund to NAACP – a US civil rights group in 2020, Levandowski closed his AI church by 2021].

In parallel to all that, there is news that the Vatican is quite concerned about ethical/value aspects of AI too! For the last few years, Pope Francis is frequently meeting with the Silicon Valley Club, raising his concerns, urging the UN to take the lead, and some executives from IBM and Microsoft are signing the “Rome call for AI ethics” kind of pledge with the Vatican officials. 

“Let us pray that the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence may always serve humankind,” we could say, may it “be human,” Pope Francis, a message from Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network (November 2020).

The way things are moving, days are not far when we will see AI getting redefined as ‘Abrahamic Intelligence’.

So before that happens and missionaries of ‘AI God’ start their global voyage, the need for a country like us is to have a mountaintop view of the situation!

 The Idea of ‘Weaponization’ of AI

More than the weaponization of AI, it is our inability to see and track its emerging patterns, an unneeded hesitancy to recognize such threats, a lack of strategic timing, a slow-paced OODA loop of our decision-making process, and a lack of overall ‘Will’ to fight or retaliate, as a nation, that should be a matter of concern!

It is said that there is a time and space for the use of the weapon, but the case of Artificial Intelligence, the product of the ‘New Science’ of the World War phase, is a bit unique. On a broader level, it is going through its cycle of weaponization – commercialization and re-weaponization phase, something very similar to DARPA’s naming conventions (starting with ARPA, then becoming DAPRA, then ARPA, and then again DARPA kind of cycle) but at the level of conceptual and theoretical aspects of AI, a lot of creative improvisations that are going on in parallel.

In his Davos 2022 speech, George Soros said: “Today, China and Russia present the greatest threats to open society.” And the source of their growing abilities lies in his views “in the rapid development of digital technology, especially artificial intelligence.” And he further said: “AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies!”

It is amazing that in such kind of predictions about AI, a potential AI threat never emerges from Google’s Deep Mind lab or its Brain Team/Quantum AI kind of projects, nor Boston Dynamics’ weird experimentation labs, or Elon Musk’s Brain chip projects, and neither from DARPA’s $2 billion AI-Next Campaign and its unclassified projects. These are some of the places where the large-scale work on AI, robotics, and future war technologies, is going on for decades! So how should one look at all that?

Should that be seen as a part of some large-scale philanthropic mission to save the humanity? Of course not!

Weaponization of AI in the Russia-Ukraine War

Before the war, there was a lot of hype around Russia’s AI projects and there was a +threat to the future of civilization from that, now whether Russia used AI in the Ukraine operation or not, cannot be confirmed with any certainty, except for some hyped news headlines that are based on a 2019 press release on Kalashnikov Zala Aero’s AI visual identification capabilities for its unmanned aircraft and news around Zala KYB-UAV, but on the contrary, it is Ukraine which transformed this war into the first High Tech, Social Media and AI War of the Century!

In the middle of the Ukraine War, Clearview AI, an American face recognition company, entered the battlefield to help Ukrainian forces through its powerful AI tools, database and other capabilities, and their face recognition system proved a lethal weapon in the war against Russian forces. This Peter Thiel-backed startup, founded in 2017, is already quite controversial in its home country for the abuse of similar technology against common social media users. By mid-2021, there were headlines in the Western press on how this secretive company and its AI tools can end the idea of ‘privacy’ on the internet! But overnight it turned into a rock star and a game-changer, in the middle of the Russia-Ukraine War, where it helped Ukrainian forces with over 2 billion images, stolen from the Russian social media company – VKontakte, to wage attacks against Russian forces and now team Clearview AI is being celebrated for such heroic contributions in the War!

These days Clearview AI’s CEO Hoan Ton-That is giving interviews to the media that how “upsetting and devastating” it was to watch the images of women and children coming out from the battlefield and how that pushed him emotionally to do something as a company to help Ukrainians in the War. And Clearview AI is not the only US company that got emotionally or morally provoked to participate in the War, the whole Big Tech club got provoked, and the entire Silicon Valley got morally provoked too! And then there is news that how in the middle of the War, a conversation between two Russian soldiers got automatically captured, transcribed, translated, and analyzed using artificial intelligence algorithms, developed by another US company called Primer. Several unsecured Russian transmissions have been posted online, translated, and analyzed on the social media.

And this does not stop only here! Every single US tech platform and social networking site that not just Russians or Ukrainians but the entire globe is using to explore about the War, every single platform where people talk/share or present their views on the Russia-Ukraine crisis, have embedded advanced AI algorithms, that are recording these response/reactions and emotions in the real-time, so every single misuse, manipulation, influence and any sort of information operation using these capabilities, to influence the global perception in a War, also comes under the idea of ‘Weaponization’ of AI.

It’s not that Russia does not possess these capabilities, their military systems are also well equipped with advanced AI capabilities but it’s more about a tendency and entitlement to transform your War into some kind of a global moral crusade, as ‘Morality’ is contagious!

And this makes one more curious to explore what’s exactly is the philosophy behind the Weaponization of AI?

READ ALSO: Philosophy of Weaponization of AI and India’s Approach (Part 2)

The post Weaponisation of Artificial Intelligence (Part 1) appeared first on IMR.

ALSO READ: Part 1: Psyche Behind the Internet, Information Superhighways

MaaS (Misinformation as a Service) Model

The era of SaaS (Software as a Service) has gone, no one needs software developers and service providers anymore. Those routine old jobs could soon be performed by OpenAI’s GPT-3. Common people’s potential in a democracy needs to leverage for something more interesting, passionate and creative, such as Misinformation or Disinformation campaigns and propaganda wars! Perhaps, that was the idea behind the rise of this new service model called MaaS (Misinformation as a Service), which is often called with better-sounding names like creators economy, curators economy, influencers economy/ marketing, social media activism/ journalism, creative entrepreneurship, etc.

Out of 5 billion Internet users in the world (63.5 percent of the global population), 4.65 billion are social media users, and China, India, and the U.S. top the list of the countries in the world in terms of Internet use. In March 2022, YouTube India flooded Indian/ international newspapers with some interesting advertising stats about its ‘contribution’ to India’s economy and GDP via ‘creator economy.’ A report by consulting firm Oxford Economics, which assessed YouTube’s economic, societal, and cultural impact in India, says that “YouTube’s creator ecosystem has contributed an estimated Rs 6,800 crore to the Indian economy and created some 6,83,900 full-time equivalent jobs in India” in 2020. The statistics say that there are 40,000 plus YouTube channels in India with over 1 lakh subscribers, marking a growth of over 45 percent, year-on-year. Remember, these are the claims of only one social media platform; others like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. have their own numbers, patterns, and claims about contribution to the Indian economy, society, and culture!

If such claims are real then we must be interested to know who delivers MaaS (Misinformation as a Service) to our people on these platforms or, in other words, who performs the stunts on public participation/opinion on Information Superhighways?

Influencers, Creative Entrepreneurs, and Skillful Artists – A brief psychoanalysis of the situation

“The power of false narratives can be very debilitating for the destiny of a nation,” said NSA Ajit Doval in the ‘Sardar Patel Memorial Speech 2018.’ Highlighting the role of technologies in serving contaminated content to our people, he further said that “Democracy requires people to be enlightened, educated and informed, but rightly informed and rightly educated! What happens if what is driving you and what is influencing your decision-making itself is contaminated?”

India, one of the most online countries in the world and home to over 750 million smartphone users, must know who is driving the public participation on these platforms, and what the overall process looks like, from a mountaintop view!

Technically there are different categories of influencers on the Internet, from mainstream celebrities (A-B-C listers) to reality TV stars to vloggers/ bloggers to micro and nano influencers to journalists/ activists/ photographers/ thought leaders, etc. But those who reach the potential to influence the ‘will’ of the nation, and channel public opinion as a weapon, generally fall under the two broad categories:

(a)  Creative Entrepreneurs

(b)  Skillful Artists.

Creative Entrepreneur is relatively a new term introduced by these very platforms, which is their definition for those creators who have a good number of subscribers/ viewership/ followers. They earn income directly from these platforms, and hire paid employees to work on their channel.

In the Skillful Artists category, we can put those people who got some form of skill or talent than average people and who like to pursue that skill as a profession too.

There is a common notion that just anyone can become an ‘Influencer’ or celebrity on these platforms but a careful observation of their selected individuals and their patterns reveals that this is nothing but an illusion. There is a systematic pattern of hunting for influencers on these platforms, designed by using psychology, sociology, anthropology (holism), and human behavior-related experiments.

The selected creative people usually go through a rigorous and psychological method of selection/ recruitment and development.

Process of Selection/ Recruitment and Development

There is an underlying three-stage process, designed to control and mobilize the creative and artistic people, for the purpose. It is not that this process is the invention of these platforms, it was there for ages in human societies and it applies to other industries/ domains of power and fame, too. The social media platforms are only using it more skillfully!

In the First Stage, which is a preliminary stage, everyone is allowed to enter and showcase their talent on these platforms, like an open and live audition. Here, the selected few start earning some money too, as the goal at this stage is to make people addicted to this extra and convenient source of income and to use them for word-of-mouth marketing.

After spending some time in this stage, these creators become addicted to this extra income, and easy publicity, and then they try hard to figure out what will promote them to the next stage – the stage of real fame and more income, unaware of the fact that they all are being monitored very delicately by Big Brothers of these platforms.

In the Second Stage, these platforms hunt for those people, who are fully dedicated and addicted to their skills, talent and platforms and ready to perform any kind of stunt/ adventure on just an order! They are very much like the biker gangs or outlaw motorcycle clubs of the 1990s and 2000s, which used to perform motorcycle stunts on the roads and were known for carrying the ideas of freedom, nonconformity to mainstream culture, and loyalty to the biker group, etc.

This stage is a bit tough. Those who reach here are a bit more famous than those in the first stage but at the same time, since they have talent and free spirit, they are tough to command too!

So here they go through a psychological experiment, where, first their morale is crushed, then their confidence is broken and finally, they are made to believe that their skill/ talent is of no worth! Whatever they have earned in life is due to the mercy of these platforms/ providers and gradually they start seeing these platforms in the image of a ‘God.’ This is a stage of absolute ‘devotion,’ but devotion to whom? Not to the talent or karma, but to the platforms and the forces behind them!

Those who belong to this stage usually have a typical story: ‘I was doing something like a normal person, and one day changed my life entirely!’ They are famous but not ultra-famous (sometimes they are called ‘in-betweeners’ of the Internet, too). They are making good money but they know that a step ahead, the sky is the limit! Those who sustained such a mental status for sometime are carefully monitored for the next stage.

The Third Stage is the final stage, and only a selected few can reach here, after crossing the rigorous psychological experiments in the first and second stages successfully. This is a stage, where we see influencers performing weird stuff, something unusual and alien to the society, culture, and norms/ structure of their targeted region. These people are in the process of becoming ‘cult’ celebrities and have started enjoying the hypnotic addiction of their status.

In one form or the other, the ‘cult’ celebrities were always there, even before the Internet, social media, and smartphones, and we have seen them in different professions/ domains, too, i.e., show business, politics, sports, journalism, activism, and socio-religious domains. But what has changed now is that AI-enabled social media platforms have expanded their impact multifold, and performing cognitive manoeuvres/ psychological warfare for political/ economic/ strategic goals through these mercenaries, at the click of a mouse!

One more thing that is common in these Influencers is that they are artists by character, and an artist is generally a rebel from the inside, and standing against the established norms of the society/system gives them artistic satisfaction!

Now imagine if a battalion of such influencers, Creative Entrepreneurs, Skillful Artists, and cult celebrities, is tasked to march with full force, to wage a battle of false narratives/ misinformation/ disinformation against a country’s interests, decisions, culture, ethos, and structure!

What can be the approach to deal with such a situation?

Sever the Roots – Counter Cognitive Warfare Strategy

It is said that a grand strategy to deal with a problem must include a way to think hard, dig deep, reach out to roots, and severing them, to end the problem with finality. And there should always exist the 10th man in the room too!

To visualize a solution in this scenario we will need to go back to the origin, the roots of internet again!

The idea of “Information Superhighways” was proposed with an analogy to physical highways, and its propagator former U.S. Vice President Al Gore said: “The Global Information Infrastructure will help educate our children and allow us to exchange ideas within a community and among nations. It will be a means by which families and friends will transcend the barriers of time and distance. It will make possible a global information marketplace, where consumers can buy or sell products.”

We build physical highways for the similar kind of purpose, that is ‘smooth travel’ for everyone – from people on foot to horses to bicycles to motor cars to commercial and heavy transport vehicles. Sometimes these highways are exploited by bad elements too, i.e., biker gangs, rioters, protesters, terrorists, anti-national elements, etc., but at the same time ensuring a smooth and safe journey for all is the responsibility of the government.

We have a time-tested road safety framework to deal with the challenges of traffic collisions, deaths, injuries, property damage, and other harms on the highway system. Some inputs/ experiences to managing physical highways can be applied to frame a roadmap for the safety and security of Information Superhighways, too.

Time for ‘Traffic Rules’

“Don’t mistake the democracy for the ballot box! The ballot box is a mechanism to find out who will make the laws for you, and what will be the laws of this country. It is not democracy by itself. The democracy is that the laws which are made by the representatives of the people, will be adhered by all the people, and will be enforced with the total strength of the might of the state,” said NSA Ajit Doval.

If the Internet is the global ‘Information Superhighway,’ then Misinformation/ Disinformation can be called the adventure/ misadventure and stunts on these highways. To control such chaos on physical highways we have the concept of Traffic Rules, Traffic Inspectors, and a well-crafted Traffic Management System, too. If anyone violates the traffic rules, then there are different provisions to deal with that like issuing the ‘challan’ to traffic rule violators, and suspension/ cancellation of their driving licence.

Some traffic rules for I-ways can be prepared by deriving inputs from this conventional approach!

A broader outline for ‘Traffic Rules’

Apart from the categories of influencers mentioned above and sponsored accounts, some common people like urban/ semi-urban and rural youth, housewives, professionals, and teenagers, also indulge in contributing to Misinformation/ Disinformation, for different reasons, i.e., entertainment/ fun, source of easy and extra income, ideological alignment, unemployment/ poverty and human behavior related aspects. And our response to deal with such cases generally falls under three broad categories: Suspension/ ban of social media accounts, enforcement of criminal charges and arrest (if a case is registered), or temporary Internet shutdown (in case of riots, mass level violence or terrorist act). But in each of these possible responses, there is always a scope for escape and special privilege, under the banner of ‘Freedom of Speech.’

Every social media post/ short/ tweet that spreads misinformation/ disinformation is paid! So, there is the need is to keep the freedom of expression intact but restrain the freedoms of earning from that expression.

How? Today every social media account is connected to a mobile, every mobile is connected to Aadhaar card, and Aadhaar card is connected to the bank account. With the help of technology and connected structure, a system can be developed, where on reporting a misinformation/ disinformation case, the bank account/ financial transactions of the originator of misinformation can be ‘frozen,’ on the click of a mouse, with immediate effect!

Now, this ‘freezing’ process can be very much similar to the process of revoking the driving licence and issuing ‘challan’ on highways, where once caught the violators are forced to go through an exhaustive legal or bureaucratic process. And that lesson becomes the lesson for a lifetime! Those whose bank accounts are frozen/ suspended will be needed to prove their cause and justify the act. If they are able to do so, their bank accounts/ financial transactions can be resumed, if not, then the long, legal and official process follows.

Only by testing such a framework in a handful of sample cases, we can minimize the violations of traffic rules on Information Superhighway to a great extent!

Conclusion

“There is always a possibility of false narratives derailing the democracy. Today it has expanded manifold because of the technology. And it becomes the responsibility of everyone, every citizen, everyone in the media, everyone who speaks, every institution, every gathering that you go to, that erode the strength of the false narrative” – National Security Advisor Shri Ajit Doval (Sardar Patel Memorial Speech, 2018).

Everything that we count as a strength of our society, culture and civilization, is our key vulnerability, too! In the coming days, attacks on the trust and will of the common people through false narratives, are only going to accelerate. So, accelerating the creative improvisations to fight them is our collective responsibility, too!

A technology that was born in the middle of a war, by the people involved in the war, to shape the outcomes of the war, and to attack the mind of enemies in the war, discussing its weaponization, is a bit naïve, and late. What best we can do now is to prepare the mind to deal with its challenges, with the same war-like spirit!

ALSO READ: Part 1: Psyche Behind the Internet, Information Superhighways

The post Counter Cognitive Warfare Strategy for India appeared first on IMR.

ALSO READ: Part 2: Counter Cognitive Warfare Strategy,

“War is not an act of the will aimed at the inanimate matter, as it is in the mechanical arts…. Rather, it is an act of the will aimed at a living entity that reacts,” Prussian general and military theorist Carl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831).

A US tech tycoon bids ($44 billion) for a social networking platform, with a claim to protect ‘free speech’ and the function of ‘democracy’ and millions became his followers overnight, including many countries like India, ignorant of the fact that his idea of ‘democracy’ was more aligned with the ‘Referendum’ mindset of separatist and pro-Khalistani elements.

Musk has some other interesting concerns and creative solutions for the future of humanity, too (which rarely make headlines in India), such as helping humans to become ‘multi-planet species’ and implanting a ‘fit bit’ in their skulls to prepare them to fight against their ‘extinction’ from the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).

In April 2021, Musk’s Neuralink Corporation released a video in which a monkey was playing the video game MindPong via the Bluetooth-enabled chips inserted into his brain. The video was shared widely and propagated as a landmark step toward merging human consciousness with AI. By December 2021, Musk announced his plans to start testing his chip with the humans too. As of Feb 2022, there were reports that those tests killed 15 out of 23 monkeys, including the one that played the video game, due to ‘extreme suffering.’

Musk, the savior of humanity, also used his Starlink Internet as a weapon against Russian forces in the Ukraine War, and when told to be held accountable for his actions as an “adult” by the Russian Space chief, he immediately started playing “If I die under mysterious circumstances,” kind of tweets, which stormed the social platforms.

Such is the character of 21st-Century Cognitive Warfare! It is no more some covert or indirect operation, where Maskirovka has any role to play. It is a live stream stunt of 280 characters or 60 seconds shorts that hit directly and precisely to its targets and trigger their dopamine release, in other words, makes them ‘feel good about being targeted!

Background to psyche behind the ‘Internet’

Roscosmos (Space Corporation of Russia) chief Dmitry Rogozin stated that Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals “were delivered to the militants of the Nazi Azov Battalion and the Ukrainian Marines in Mariupol by military helicopters,” and Musk is, thus, involved in “supplying the fascist forces in Ukraine with military communication equipment.” The use of Starlink’s Internet terminals as a weapon in the Ukraine War and a recent verbal exchange between Musk and Rogozin refreshed the memories of the Internet’s background in people’s minds.

On 4 October 1957, Soviet Union inaugurated the ‘Space Age’ with the launch of Sputnik 1 – the first artificial satellite of the world. There are enough documents that suggest that the launch of Sputnik created a big political and moral chaos in the USA and the American society’s reaction (military, government, and public combined) to the Sputnik launch is considered an important juncture in America’s history.

Circling the globe every one hour and 35 minutes, Sputnik was traveling on the north to the south orbital path that brought it over the USA, seven times every twenty-four hours, and its steady “beep beep” sound thrilled and terrified the listeners. The popular term ‘Sputnik Moment’ signifies exactly that. It is said that in many senses, Sputnik hysteria sparked the creation of the Internet.

On 7 February 1958, five months after the Sputnik crisis, President Dwight D. Eisenhower created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). ARPA was established to catch up with the Soviets in the space race and to lead in three key areas of research: Space technology, ballistic missile defence (BMD), and solid propellants, but very soon (by the early 1960s) it started venturing into the new research areas, including command and control.

There is no doubt that it was the urgency of war (both limited and nuclear) that led ARPA to develop a technology that Rogozin aptly referred to as ‘military communication systems,’ but when we trace the history of the Internet and its different stages of development, from Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider’s “Intergalactic Network” memo in 1963 to Al Gore’s “Information Superhighways” speech in 1994, the first question that comes to mind is what motivated the Pentagon to hire experimental psychologists like Licklider to develop the technology?

There are several historical documents like Charles Bray’s paper “Toward a Technology of Human Behavior for Defence Use” published in 1962 and Ellen Herman’s book “The Romance of American Psychology” (1995) that suggest that throughout the Cold War phase, exploring the ‘Psychology’ and human behavior aspects, was one of the key interest areas of the US military experts. Highlighting some numbers in her book, Ellen writes that “Between 1940 and 1970, the number of psychologists and psychiatrists climbed astronomically,” and “membership in American Psychological Association grew by more than 1,100 per cent, from 2,739 in 1940 to 30,839 in 1970.” She noted that “psychological experts’ rise to power was due initially to the benefits of war, World War at first and then Cold War” and “military imperatives during World War II, provided psychological experts with their first encounter with the policymakers.”

It was during this period and in this background, that the idea of the Internet was developed and Licklider and other experimental psychologist professionals contributed to its design, not to promote the ideas of liberty, democracy, equality, one world, innovation, and freedom of speech kind of fancy ideas but for the objectives of the ‘War’ and to win the ‘battles of the mind.’ Their focus was to provide solutions to loosely defined military problems from the broadest possible perspective. That generation was tasked with waging the psychological warfare, ‘man-machine’ engineering problems, experimenting with the ‘sensation and perception’ aspects and exploring the mysteries of human motivation, attitudes, and behavior.

So, this idea that wars could be won by advancing weapon technologies and killing one’s opponents was repeatedly identified as naïve and incorrect!

While on one hand, these sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and psychologists of the Pentagon tried harder to be seen as ‘scientific,’ as possible, on the other hand, they reached the conclusion that there could be no higher military priority than the “control of human subjectivity.”

It is a bit hard to imagine that if these experts from the Pentagon would have pitched their products/ ideas directly to the third countries, with a promise to help in their economic progress, children’s education, knowledge/ information sharing, and to make their democracies strong, given the track record of such claims, which country on earth would have accepted that deal!

So for Licklider’s “intergalactic network” vision to be fulfilled, the private sector’s financial support, a pinch of humanitarian approach, some democratic jargon, and the narration industry’s backing were needed, and from here the idea of “Information Superhighways” was born.

Information Superhighways

In his famous (March 21, 1994) “Information Superhighways” speech, Al Gore, the 45th Vice President of the USA said: “This GII (Global Information Infrastructure) will circle the globe with information superhighways on which all people can travel. These highways or, more accurately, networks of distributed intelligence will allow us to share information, to connect, and to communicate as a global community.” It was Al Gore who promoted the legislation that funded an expansion of ARPANET and lobbied aggressively in favor of privatization and globalization of the Internet. Gore is currently a member of Apple’s board of directors and a senior partner at venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins (the firm which has been an early investor in more than 900 high tech/social media companies in the US, including Amazon, Google, and Twitter).

In April 1994, Netscape Communications Corporation was born, and Microsoft created a web browser for Windows 95. In the same year, Amazon.com was launched as an online marketplace for books. In 1995, Yahoo was incorporated and a search engine function Yahoo search was introduced. Then came the era of Netflix (1997), Google (1998), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006).

Internet witnessed a phenomenal expansion in its new avatar, from only 16 million users in 1995 to 5 billion users (63% of the world population) in 2022. It is interesting that in their earlier pitch for Information Superhighways, Al Gore and Clinton both projected the idea as an educational tool, virtual library of the future, knowledge/ information exchange utility and virtual research facility, etc., designed to harvest local and global knowledge economy and innovation culture. But we have seen in a very short period of time, that things shifted to dating, entertainment, shopping, live streaming, social experiments, activism, psychological, and political campaigns!

“The fate of information in the typically American world is to become something which can be bought or sold.” mathematician Norbert Wiener, ‘The Human Use of Human Beings (1950).

Convenience of driving “Mass Surveillance”

In 2013, an American intelligence contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the secret wide-ranging information-gathering programmes conducted by National Security Agency (U.S. intelligence agency), and the stories of those leaks were published in The Guardian and Washington Post newspapers. In the article “NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others,” published in The Guardian, (7 June 2013), it was highlighted how the NSA has obtained “direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple, and other US internet giants.” It revealed that “some of the world’s largest Internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing programme (code name PRISM) since its introduction in 2007.” The article says that Microsoft was the first, with a collection beginning in December 2007. It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook, and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and, finally, Apple, which joined the programme in 2012. And “collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.”

In 2014, while interacting with Edward Snowden virtually on a Russian TV show, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia is not carrying out mass surveillance programmes of the kind Snowden exposed in the USA, and “we don’t have as much money as they do in the US,” he added sarcastically. A few days later, while speaking at a media forum in St. Petersburg Putin said that the Internet was originally created as a ‘CIA project’ and “it is still developing as such.”

LifeLog Project – DARPA

In 1972, ARPA gained the ‘Defense’ prefix and was renamed DARPA, but in 1993 it reverted to its original name ARPA (as this acronym suits more to commercial applications), and finally three years later, in 1996, again renamed as ‘DARPA,’ to re-emphasize agency’s original focus. In 2002, DARPA launched the Personalized Assistant that Learns (PAL) programme, a cognitive system to “make military decision-making more efficient and more effective at multiple levels of command.” (This research led to the launch of Siri Inc in 2007, which, three years later, was acquired by the Apple).

In mid-2003 something more interesting happened. DARPA launched an ambitious project called LifeLog, which officially was aimed at recording essentially all of a person’s movements and conversations and everything that they listened to, watched, read and bought. The idea was to create a permanent, searchable, electronic diary of the entire lives, of the entire population of the planet. LifeLog was a bit ahead of its time, it was tasked to perform everything that smartphones, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, and other apps do these days! The idea was to trace the ‘threads’ of an individual’s life in terms of events/ states/ relationships, deducing behavioral patterns from monitoring people’s daily activities, and to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees, or does.

It cannot be a mere coincidence but it is said that the exact date (3 February 2004) on which Facebook was launched, Pentagon revoked its LifeLog project!

The real log of DARPA’s fascinating research is a bit long! But the question is – after developing dozens of interesting commercial tools, where does DARPA is focusing its energy these days?

‘AI-Next’ Campaign

In September 2018, DARPA launched a multi-year investment of more than $2 billion (in new and existing programmes) called the “AI Next” campaign. According to its official statement: “AI Next builds on DARPA’s five decades of AI technology creation to define and to shape the future, always with the Department’s hardest problems in mind.” DARPA is investing in the third wave of AI to develop machines that “understand and reason in context.” In Feb-March 2019, the agency started exploring ways to improve how AI systems like Siri/ Alexa teach themselves language and the Competency-Aware Machine Learning programme too. In a nutshell, the approach is quite simple, as they often say – “the best way to avoid surprises is to create surprises.”

Stunts on ‘Information Superhighways’

“War is never merely about victory on the battlefield or the simple conquest of land; it is about the pursuit of a policy that cannot be realized in any other way than through force.” Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)

There are three important elements of the idea of “Information Superhighways”: Investment, Infrastructure, and Public Participation. While the first two are in absolute control of their makers, it is the third one, which belongs to us, the rest of the world that is traveling on these highways. Without ‘Public Participation,’ a highway is of no use, be it physical or virtual and it is this third and most crucial element of Information Superhighways, which is a matter of concern for democracies around the world, too.

Misinformation/Disinformation

Misinformation/ Disinformation is one of the most popular global concerns of our time. From Musk to Obama to Kissinger to white-haired architects of Information Superhighways, a flood of ‘free speech absolutists’ and guardians of ‘democracy’ is emerging in the Western world and it seems that almost every important person on earth is nowadays issuing a ‘wake-up call’ for democracy/ humanity and fighting the battle for a ‘safer’ Internet!

“People are dying because of misinformation,” said former US president Barack Obama in a recent speech. While the EU has passed Digital Services/ Digital Market Acts, the USA is forming the “Disinformation Governance Board,” too, but despite such enormous human efforts/ concerns the information superhighway, on the contrary, is becoming more and more chaotic, unsafe, and disordered with time.

With a similar kind of urgency the world was debating terrorism and counter-terrorism, until a few years ago, it is now discussing the issues of Misinformation and Disinformation. It is important to note that global forums like the UN are yet to develop a common consensus on the definition of ‘Terrorism,’ so devising an effective strategy is a far cry.

“You cannot defeat the enemy you can’t define,” often says national security adviser (NSA) Ajit Doval. Similar to the issue of terrorism, what is missing in all these global deliberations/ campaigns against Misinformation/ Disinformation is the affirmation of the basic fact that on the matters related to social, economical, religious, regional, and national consequences, spreading misinformation/ disinformation is a crime, cause of crime or a motive of the crime, and it needs to be tackled that way.

Misinformation is not a simple ‘spam,’ content that can be laughed at or ignored. In the case of India, we have seen how under the broader flag of ‘Misinformation/ Disinformation’ there are dedicated channels/ actors who promote anti-national/ anti-system and anti-establishment sentiments, and create social divide in the name of caste, community, regionalism, language identities, etc. We have seen how from abrogation of Article 370 Act to Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) to Farms Laws, and even for those future bills/ moves that are yet to be drafted by the government like National Register of Citizens (NRC), a mass level damage to people and property was done, across the country, within a matter of few minutes of misinformation spread.

Last year, the number of imposed Internet shutdowns crossed over 106 in India. A few days back in May 2022, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) banned some 16 YouTube channels (under the IT Rules) for spreading misinformation on India’s national security and foreign relations matters, stirring communal discord and disturbing the law and order situation in the country. In April, MIB banned over 22 YouTube channels, and a number of similar actions were taken in the past. These channels/social media accounts usually hold millions of subscriptions/ followers and, by the time the ban is initiated, the damage is already done. A ban cannot automatically trigger a ‘delete all’ command on millions of devices where such content is already copied/downloaded. Misinformation/ disinformation spread on social media sometimes transitions to much larger audiences when picked up by traditional media – print or electronic too!

A new study by MIT scholars on Misinformation, published in 2018, found that on social media “falsehood diffuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude.” Many such types of research are being conducted on the issues of Misinformation and Disinformation, and they often talk about things like novelty hypothesis, transmission chain, Machiavellian intelligence/ Social Brain, laws of human nature, etc., but interestingly, none of these researches ever attempt to reach the root of the problem!

“Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.” Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831)

If Al Gore’s ‘Information Superhighways’ analogy was right then social media platforms/ apps can be seen as the vehicles on those highways and misinformation/ disinformation as the fuel that runs those vehicles (after all, these companies make enormous profit out of misinformation/ disinformation). But then the question comes – who is sitting on the driver’s seat and who is performing stunts on the information highways?

ALSO READ: Part 2: Counter Cognitive Warfare Strategy

The post Psyche Behind the Internet,Information Superhighways appeared first on IMR.

by Maj Gen (Dr) GD Bakshi, SM, VSM

Read Part 1 here

AIR ASSAULT OPERATIONS

After initial SEAD strikes on 24 February (the first day of the offensive) a large train of Mi-28 transport and Hokum attack helicopters was seen flying towards the Hostamel airport. It was attacked by air and missile strikes and possibly also by MBRLs. Elements of an air assault formation (possibly one of the Guards airborne divisions) landed and seized the Antonov airport at Hostamel. The giant Ukrainian AN-225 transport aircraft (the world’s largest) was destroyed in the fighting here. As per standard practice, military experts expected them to hold an airhead (to fly in reinforcements and supplies) and await a land link-up with the tank columns of the 41st Army that were crossing over from Belarus border. Given the distance of approximately some 150 kms, the link-up would at best have taken 2-3days. However, what followed was somewhat unorthodox and confusing. Instead of holding the airhead, the airborne troops left it and charged straight for Kiev some 23 kms away. Reportedly, the 141 Motorised National Guards Brigade under Chechen Maj Gen Magomed Tusaev charged into Kiev. They were surprised by the stiff resistence and the Javelins and artillery took a heavy toll. Reportedly, they lost some 58 armoured vehicles to the ATGMs and the Chechen Maj Gen was killed. Finding the Hostomel airfield unoccupied the Ukrainians recaptured it, thus, denying the airhead for flying in reinforcements and logistics supply. Apparently, this coup de main operation was planned at the highest level because President Putin himself called upon Ukrainian forces to surrender. Later, he personally praised the sacrifice of the paratroopers. There definitely was a major failure of intelligence here. On what intelligence basis was such a bold operation launched on the enemy capital? It could not be based merely on the expectation that the Ukraine forces would not fight and surrender tamely? That cannot be the basis of operational planning and there seemed to be no fall back option or Plan B in this coup de main operation. It seemed to be based on very subjective parameters and assumptions.

GROUND OPERATIONS

The Russian advance began on multiple thrust lines. As assessed by IMR, it was a full scale invasion option. Rapid progress was made in first 3-4 days with spear heads covering over 150 kms to reach the outskirts of Kiev. Thereafter, the emphasis shifted to siege warfare – surrounding cities, isolating the entry and exit routes and pounding cities savagely with rockets, cruise missiles and conventional artillery. Humanitarian corridors were agreed on by both sides to let civilians flee the cities. Some 6.5 million Ukrainians have been internally displaced and over 3.5 to 5 million have been forced to flee to Poland and other neighboring countries. The pace of operations has been slowed down greatly partly due to need for logistical pauses and very heavy and dogged resistance by the Ukrainian army, which used their Javelins ATGMs and Strella SAMs  to cause fairly substantial attrition. However the simple ground reality is that neither US nor NATO are putting boots on ground nor will they enforce any No-Fly Zones. So, theoretically, Russia has all the time in the world to methodically and steadily but surely grind down the Ukraine military in a meat-grinder war of attrition, which could carry on for months. The longer it lasts the more Ukraine will suffer. Unfortunately, it will also have a fearful impact on the global economy that was staging a tenuous recovery from Covid. Let me now cover the operations in the Northern, Eastern and Southern sectors in detail.

Northern Sector

The Russian forces attacked in the Northern sector toward Kiev the capital and Kharkiev (former capital and financial hub which had the T- 80 tank factory here).

Kiev. The 41st Army charged across the Belarus border towards Kiev on two thrust lines west of the Dnieper river, while elements of 36the Army advanced along the east bank towards Chernobyl nuclear plant and further on to Hostomel airport. These thrust lines made very rapid initial progress and in just 2-3 days were on the outskirts of Kiev. Thereafter, operations slowed down to try and isolate and then besiege Kiev, while they carried out precise Iskander TBMs and Kalibr cruise missiles strikes and limited bombardment by MBRLs. They made a few probes towards Kiev city centre but were repulsed. The satellite imagery on 4th/5th day of war showed a huge 65 km long convoy stretched on the road to Kiev. This included assault tank echelons, which should have been moving cross country but were stuck to the road due to the slush and mud caused by the spring thaw. The convoy remained stuck like that for a couple of days. Had the Ukrainian Air Force been active, this would have led to a disaster but apparently the convoy was well protected by the slant range of the S-400 missiles from Belarus and remained largely unscathed. It did not seem as if the Russians were planning to fight in the streets of Kiev, which were heavily defended by Javelin ATGMs and Stinger SAMs and would have entailed heavy troop casualties and collateral damage to the civilian population. Some experts felt this was a deception operation designed to keep the world’s attention riveted towards Kiev, while they made major advances in the East (Donbas) and the south sea coast. Cruise missiles were used to destroy the Antonov aircraft manufacturing plant and oil storage depots. Strangely, almost no attacks were made by aircraft or cruise missiles on key command and control targets like the Presidential palace, Ministry of Defence or the Ministry of Interior. This, to my mind, is a cardinal mistake of this war – the failure to target the top political and military leadership of Ukraine in a pinpoint and concerted manner.

Sumy. The 20th Army elements advanced on to Sumy and surrounded and bombed the city heavily.

Kharkiev. The 6th Army mounted heavy and sustained attacks on Kharkiev. It was surrounded and pounded to rubble. The tank manufacturing plant was destroyed by cruise missile strikes and bitter fighting took place on the streets. The Russians claim to be in control of the city but this is disputed by the Ukrainians.

Eastern Sector

This was the scene of major hostilities since 2014 and daily exchanges of artillery and mortar fire were taking place along the line of contact (LOC). Russians claim that Ukraine had massed some 60,000 of its best troops opposite Donbas and were planning to launch an offensive to take back the 30 per cent or so of the territories of the break-away districts of Donetsk and Luhansk, which was under Russian control. Attacks in this sector, therefore, were largely frontal and heavily contested. As per the Russians, it was to pin down Ukrainian forces in the North and not let them reinforce this sector that attacks were launched concurrently on Kiev and Kharkiev in the North.

•  The Russian 8th Army mounted fierce attacks on the Lukansk district and, by end of March, claimed to have liberated some 93 per cent of its territory.

•  The Russian 49th Army mounted fierce attacks on Donetsk district and, by end of March, claims to have liberated 56 per cent of its area. It also mounted operations towards Mariupol to link up with troops operating out of Crimea to establish a land corridor for Crimea.

•  In Phase II of the Russian operation they could complete the capture of the entire Donbas region and possibly try and encircle and annihilate the 60,000 or so Ukrainian troops operating against the Donbas region by encircling them from North and South in a major pincer movement.

Southern Sector

This encompasses the coast of Ukraine on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The three major ports here are Sevastopol (already with Russia on lease since decades) and now part of Russian occupied Crimea. The other major ports are Odessa and Mariupol. Russian Marines and Army made the most impressive gains here and have almost cut off Ukraine from the sea and made it a land locked state.

•  The Russian 58th Army and the Marines have advanced on Mariupol, laid siege to it and reduced the city to rubble by very heavy bombardment and missile strikes. The Russians claim to be in control of Mariupol, though Ukrainians claim that pockets of resistance remain. Mariupol and Kharkiev are the two major cities where the Russians have employed their standard tactics of capturing cities and the firepower used has been fearful. The land link up of Crimea with Donbas is now complete and is a major and significant gain.

•  The Russian 22nd Army and Marine elements advanced on and Quickly captured the coastal port city of Kherson (the first major city with a population of 300,000) that fell to the Russians. They then moved on and surrounded the port city of Mykolyiv and pounded it fiercely. Parts of the city have fallen to the Russians. Army elements and Marines have also advanced and captured the nuclear power plant complex of Zhaporizhzia. This is the largest nuclear plant in Europe with 6x 950 MW reactors (only one functional). They have also captured the Aneshader nuclear plant which has 25 per cent of the power generation capacity of the whole of Ukraine. Thus, almost all nuclear facilities in eastern Ukraine are now under Russian control.

•  While the world’s interest was riveted on Kiev, the Russians have made the most impressive advances in the South and have captured almost all the major seaports of Ukraine and cut off its access to the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. If Russians could induct fresh troops here they could drive up north along both banks of the Dnieper river and partition Ukraine into Eastern and Western parts along the Dnieper river. This could well be attempted by the Russians in Phase II of the operations.

Major Outcomes and Lessons Learnt So Far

The Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine is now in its second month. It began as a swift war of manoeuvre but now has turned into an inexorable attrition nightmare. Western propaganda is trying to claim it as a pyrrhic victory for Ukraine, which they armed very heavily with Javelin ATGMs and shoulder-fired Stinger SAMs, which they claim had won the war in Afghanistan. These claims are over-hyped. Certainly, these defensive missiles have, to an extent, slowed down Russian operations and have been used to target their follow-on and logistics echelons. However, in no way can these tactical defensive weapons by themselves win the war for Ukraine. They can only serve to prolong it.

The American aim seems to be to prolong this war for a couple of months to humiliate Putin and impose maximum attrition on his war machine. This amounts to fighting the Russians till the last Ukrainian man or building standing. In the bargain, no one seems to care for the highly adverse impact on the global economy that has been struggling to recover from the impact of Covid pandemic. Nor does this approach show any sensitivity to the cost of human suffering of the people of Ukraine who have been callously dumped by the West.

The expenditure rate of these Javelins and Stingers missiles has been enormous. Zelinsky now wants 500 of these per day at an estimated missile replacement cost of $39 million per day. It is virtually impossible for even US and NATO to supply at such lavish scales.

Russian interdiction has now destroyed many oil storage depots, ammunition dumps, tank and aircraft manufacturing plants in Ukraine. They have captured all the Ukrainian nuclear plants in east Ukraine and control the water supply and power to most cities. Sadly, it is doubtful how long the Ukrainians can last in the face of such heavy punishment.

In a pure war of attrition, Russia is bound to prevail. Each day that the war lasts will tilt the war more in Russia’s favour. No amount of Western propaganda of an impending collapse of material and moral support for the war in Russia can hide this basic military fact. They may win the war on television and captive social media, the ground reality, however, will inexorably shift in Russia’s favour. In a meat grinder war of pure attrition Russian missile power, air power and fire power will prevail. Abraham Lincoln’s words – “You can fool all of the people some of time; you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time” – may come back to haunt these shrill spin masters.

Russian force usage has been very uncharacteristically restrained. Whether this stems from cultural factors or a Russian apprehension that this war is likely to spread and escalate remains to be seen. They are clearly retaining their most advanced weapon systems for a time when they apprehend that they may have to fight NATO and American forces. So, we have not heard the last of this conflict and that is worrying. The Russians are clearly apprehending a widening and escalation of this conflict and are clearly husbanding their cutting edge resources. We have seen no T- 14 Armata tanks or active protection systems in this conflict despite the very dense anti-tank environment.

Traditionally, Russians maintain momentum by employment of fresh second and third echelons, which are carefully kept out of the battle for when the first echelons will run out of steam. Will Phase II see an induction of fresh troops and more material? That will depend on Russia meeting its minimal objectives – they say these have largely been met.

The use of the Russian air force has been rather limited. This failure to press home air superiority has needlessly extended this conflict.

Meteorological factors like the spring thaw and slush were not given adequate Importance.

Use of tactical ballistic missiles (Iskanders) and cruise missiles (Kalibr) have been Impressive and very effective. Over 1000 of them have been used in this war for pin-point destruction of targets.

Biden’s talks of Ukrainian sovereignty and calls for regime change in Russia are rather hypocritical and contradictory.

Economic sanctions could backfire if the dollar stops being the world currency for oil trade. Sanctions will hit Europe very hard and cause stagflation in the US economy.

Information and media war will be covered in a separate article.

Read Part 1 here

The post An Assessment of Military Operations appeared first on IMR.

by Maj Gen (Dr) GD Bakshi, SM, VSM

Read Part 2 here

Gerasimov’s Hybrid War vs Traditional Russian War Doctrines

A few days before the start of the Russia–Ukraine war, IMR had done an in house war-game (Feb 2022 issue). Based upon known Russian doctrines and recent demonstrated combat performance in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Syria – we had forecast that Russian likely war aims would be to seriously wreck Ukraine as a functional military state and attempt regime change. They would advance on multiple thrust lines but seek to retain ground only in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces in the East and Crimea and the coastal areas in the South. These would be terrain objectives that would be retained at any cost. Russia had a huge advantage in airpower, missile power and traditional artillery firepower. Its T-72 and T-90 tanks were clearly superior to the Ukrainian T-80 and T-64 tanks especially in optronics and night fighting capabilities.

The signature Russian way of war has been to use massive fire assaults to create shock and awe and, thereby, economise on force levels and military lives. This was most evident in World War II, when Stalin called artillery the God of war and quipped that quantity generates its own quality. Russian forces have traditionally relied on echelonment of forces. Second and third echelon forces were kept in reserve and used to maintain relentless momentum in any offensive once the first echelon was used up or petered out. Based on this anchor premise, most military observers felt that Russia could achieve these objectives in 10 days (two to three weeks at best) in Ukraine. This war, however, has now entered its second month.

The Gerasimov Doctrine of Hybrid Warfare. The Chief of Russian General Staff Gen Velary Gerasimov had enunciated a whole of government doctrine for warfare based on a combination of hard and soft power in 2013. This entailed use of regular and irregular forces (conventional and sub-conventional forces) and coherent use of cyber warfare, electronic warfare, information warfare, disinformation, political, diplomatic and economic tools to gain victory. Based on this Gerasimov Doctrine, the Russians had made impressive use of hybrid warfare in 2014 to foment insurgencies in Russian speaking areas of Donetsk and Luhansk. They captured significant chunks of these provinces (around 30 per cent), which declared themselves as independent (a la Abhkazia and Osettia in Georgia). Just before this conflict Russia recognized these as independent states. Hybrid war had worked very well so far in both Georgia and Ukraine.

Transition from Hybrid War to Regular Warfare. The key question here is – when on 24 Feb President Putin announced his decision to launch a “Special Operation” in Ukraine with the stated aim of destroying Ukraine’s military potential and carrying out De-Nazification, was he not making a direct transition from hybrid war now to full scale conventional war? From 2017 onwards, the US had been heavily arming Ukraine with Javelin ATGMs and shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. In July 2021, US, Polish, Ukrainian and Latvian troops had held a joint military exercise in Ukraine (Ex Three Swords). This entailed over 1200 troops and 200 tanks and armoured vehicles along with air power elements. Tactics to counter a Russian attack had been worked out in detail. Russian sources indicate that plans were being hatched to mount an invasion of the Russian held areas of Donetsk and Luhansk and concurrently ask for membership of NATO. This would involve US and NATO troops in this conflict. It was this exercise that had convinced President Zelinsky that, if Russia attacked, US & NATO forces would come to his aid. In December 2021, in yet another provocation Ukraine and USA co-hosted a major naval exercise (code named Op Sea Breeze) on the Black Sea in which 34 nations’ navies took part. American B-52 bombers made practice nuclear bombing runs against Russia and a ramming incident almost happened between a Russian destroyer and a British naval vessel.

Finally, in December 2021 itself, US and Ukraine foreign ministers signed the US–Ukraine Charter of Strategic Partnership that was said to be guided by the 2008 Bucharest Summit (where the idea of including Georgia and Ukraine in NATO was first mooted). By end-Dec 2021, Ukraine was a de facto member of NATO for all practical purposes and Russia was apprehending an attack on the separatist held areas of Donetsk and Luhansk. Some 60,000 Ukrainian troops were massed against this Donbas region. That is why Russia had begun mobilizing its forces on the Ukrainian border in a massive exercise of compellence deigned to seek written guarantees that Ukraine would not join NATO and no offensive weapons would be deployed in 14 East European countries that had joined NATO. (In December 2021 itself, Putin had written to President Joe Biden clearly seeking these written guarantees).

To be credible, any such compellence exercise has to be structured for a seamless transition to actual kinetic operations. When that finally happened on 24 February 2022, the level of combat had clearly to shift from hybrid warfare to full-fledged conventional military operations with a clear option to cross the tactical nuclear threshold if USA or other NATO countries intervened. The continuation of the hybrid war mindset after onset of full scale military operations was, in hindsight, a clear miscalculation. This highlights the tension between the Gerasimov Hybrid War Doctrine and the traditional Russian way of war. This mismatch between the two mindsets has characterized this conflict. In trying to win the information war you cannot afford to lose or impede the outcome of the ground war.

Force Restraint

From the very outset of this war, the Russian campaign has been characterised by a surprising degree of restraint that flies in the face of the traditional Russian way of war. This has always relied on mass and scale – especially in the use of suppressive fires. From the purely military point of view massive suppressive fires were badly needed to neutralise huge numbers of Javelin anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) and Stinger shoulder fired surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) that had been liberally supplied to Ukraine. Most military analysts were, therefore, surprised to find a near total absence of the Russian Air Force (VKS) for extended and extensive bombing campaigns. Even more surprising was the near total absence of large scale artillery and multi-barrel rocket launcher (MBRL) fire assaults on cities and built up areas – especially in the initial stages of the war.

The Russian first phase SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defences) campaign was confined to just one single day. Contrast this with the US 40-day air campaign in Iraq and the 80-day air interdiction campaign by the US and NATO in Yugoslavia. Given troops to task calculations, the overall Russian force level deployed was far too less to cater for the reduction/ isolation of some 15 or more cities, unless use of heavy fire power was envisaged. Besides, there was a near total absence of Russian cutting edge equipment like T-14 Alamty tanks and even Active Protection Systems (APS) on the T-72 and T-90 tanks employed (despite the dense anti-tank environment they had to operate in). Like the Egyptians had done in 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the Russians seemed to prefer to operate under the area denial umbrella of their Triumf S- 400 missiles deployed in Belarus and Russia proper. Though the S- 400s have worked quite well, this denied the Russian troops the heavy air support they could easily have counted on – given the air power asymmetry between the two sides.

So what explains this baffling and most uncharacteristic force usage restraint by the Russians?

Cultural Factors and Intelligence Failure

There is a widespread belief that Putin was misled by his intelligence (FSB) to seriously under estimate the degree of resistance that the Ukrainian armed forces would put up. It was mentioned that, perhaps, accurate intelligence was available but senior FSB officers lacked the moral courage to put it up to Putin. They only tried to reinforce his dominant perception that, like in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine itself in 2014, the opposition would fold up and surrender without a fight. There is indeed some truth in this premise. The Russians went in for just a one-day air campaign and even as the 41 Combined Arms Army was heading for Kiev from the Belarus border, an air assault formation (perhaps elements of a Guards airborne division) captured the Antonov Hostamel airport (just 23 kms from Kiev) in a brilliant coup de main operation. Military experts now expected them to hold this airhead till link up by the land-based tank columns moving in from Belarus. Given the 150 kms they had to cover, this could have been done in two or three days. To everyone’s surprise the airborne forces left the air base and charged up to Kiev, the capital, even as Putin demanded that Ukraine surrender. The Ukrainian’s put up stiff resistance and recaptured the vacated Hostomel air base. The airborne forces almost walked into a trap as it were. No operation can be premised on the expectation that the enemy will just surrender. There does seem to have been a major intelligence failure of humanint or even a deliberate trap.

Most Russian military officers I have spoken to have stressed that this nostalgic perception of people to people relations was not just confined to President Putin but was a widespread cultural blind spot in the entire Russian military. Many Russians and even people of Belarus have relations in Ukraine and Kiev indeed was once a important centre of Russian culture. As such, there was a clear cut and widespread desire to restrict force usage against kindred people. This cultural constraint cum Intelligence error tended to make military planning clearly subjective in the initial phase of the conflict. The Indians and Pakistanis too were once one people culturally and linguistically. Yet they have, since1947, fought four major wars and one long hybrid war in J&K. This has been characterised by particular viciousness on Pakistan’s part.

DETAILED ANALYSIS – CONDUCT OF OPERATIONS

Phase One – Coercive Deployment

The Russian command level HQ at Varyinch (80kms from Donbas) seemed to be the controlling HQ for this operation. Tanks, missile launchers and artillery were moved from the far-eastern military districts of Siberia to raise two new Combined Arms Armies (CAAs are equivalent of Indian corps). These were the 4th and 20th CAAs. Of Russia’s 12 CAAs, some 11 were deployed around Ukraine. Another estimate felt that out of some 170 Battalion Tactical Groups some 87 were used against Ukraine. In numerical terms this amounted to some 1,50,000 troops that were subsequently raised up to 1, 90,000.in terms of troops to task analysis, if encirclement/capture of 10-15 Ukrainian cities was involved, this force level was clearly inadequate. It could only make sense if it intended to use heavy air power and suppressive artillery fire power to carry out this task and compensate for low force levels.

The 41st CAA was sent for a 10-day exercise to Belarus. This positioned it to strike directly at Kiev. After termination of the exercise it was retained there itself. The Ukrainian forces were organized into 14 armoured, airborne and mechanized brigades and had mobilised a large territorial militia and also called up reservists. The defender, thus, clearly outnumbered the attackers but the Russians had an overwhelming technological edge.

In December 2021, President Putin had written a letter to President Joe Biden demanding written guarantees for non-inclusion of Ukraine in NATO. This caused a flurry of diplomatic activity in Europe. However, the dominant perception in USA and Europe seemed to be that Russia was bluffing and this force posturing was just a coercive military deployment to compel NATO to negotiate a new security architecture in Europe. The Ukrainians themselves were most nonchalant about the Russian deployment and dismissed it as bluff and bluster to Indian students who took their advice and did not evacuate in time. With modern satellite surveillance each and every tank, gun and truck could be picked up with ease. No force concentration can be hidden in this day and age. What can be kept secret is the intention. Was the force just posturing or would it really strike? It must be said that the Russians were able to keep this secret well and Russian maskirovka (deception) operations were highly successful in keeping the world guessing.

Putin gave ample chance for a diplomatic solution till the very end. This delayed the offensive and caused it to run into the spring thaw, which generates slush and mud and impedes cross country manoeuvre. As part of information operations the Americans tried to leak Russian military plans in the media and announced 16 February as the D Day. This, perhaps, forced Russia to delay the operation. It was finally launched a week later on 24 February with a near formal declaration of war (a special operation) to destroy Ukraine’s military potential and de-Nazify the country. Russia officially recognized the separatist provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states and cited their full liberation as the primary territorial objective. It must be noted that from 2014 onwards the Ukrainians had deployed some 60,000 of their best troops in this region and attacking them directly would have amounted to a rather costly frontal attack on a very live line of contact. Hence, any Russian operation would have to advance along multiple thrust lines that would tie down and divide Ukrainian forces and mask the main objective. So, was Kiev then a deception operation as subsequently claimed? This merits further analysis. However, after the initial surprise, the Russian forces quickly readjusted to the changed scenario and now carried out their operations with far greater deliberation and with due caution. They changed their overall operational design from rapid manoeuvre to set piece siege operations and increasingly greater use of suppressive fires.

Suppression of Enemy Air Defences (SEAD)

As stated, the Americans had carried out a 40-day air campaign in Iraq for SEAD and interdiction of enemy communications and infrastructure including destruction of Republican Guards armoured reserves. In Yugoslavia, the air campaign had extended for over 80 days. Hence, most military observers were baffled when the Russian Air Force finished its SEAD campaign in a single day. The Russian Air Force (VKS) used MiG-29 and MiG-35 fighters as also SU-27 and SU-30s along with SU-25SM fighter bombers. Given that Ukrainians had extensively deployed Stinger shoulder-fired SAMs, bulk of attacks would have had to be from mid- to high-altitudes (to stay out of the shoulder-fired SAM envelope). This would necessitate use of PGMs for ground attack.

It is not known what percentage of munitions employed were PGMs or just plain gravity bombs, which can be quite inaccurate. The bulk of damage, however, was done by the 9K720 Iskander short range ballistic missiles (200 miles range). These were equipped with decoys to degrade enemy air defences and the Ukrainian S-300, Tor and Buk SAMs failed to intercept any of these. The Kalibr and Klub cruise missiles were also used extensively. Russians claimed to have struck 11 enemy airfields, destroyed 18 radars and a number of S-300 missile batteries on this first day itself. In hindsight, these claims appear exaggerated and the Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) seems to have been flawed.

Many Ukrainian fighters escaped by moving out to western Ukraine and some are said to have flown out to Romania before the Russian attack. Many S-300 batteries also were dispersed initially. They survived and were active much later in the course of the fighting. The Russians seemed to have relied heavily on the area denial capability of their S-400 and S-500 Triumf missile systems. From Belarus these downed a Ukrainian SU-27 fighter at a range of 150 kms over Kiev, setting a world record for the distance of engagement. The impression one gets is that like the Egyptian Army in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Russians were more inclined to rely upon the Anti-Access and Area Denial (A2AD) capability of their Triumph missile systems. These were apparently quite effective as is proved by their ability to protect a 65 km long convoy of assault tanks and other vehicles for days on the outskirts of Kiev. But this also ruled out much air support by the Russian air force due to closure of air space. This was badly needed to suppress the swarms of Javelin ATGMs and the Stingers. These kept taking pot shots throughout the campaign. The Ukrainians were advised by the Americans to ambush rear/ logistics echelons and they appear to have taken their toll. The road axes were not protected adequately due to a paucity of infantry. Amazingly, the Russian air force was largely absent from the skies over Ukraine, after the initial day’s SEAD attacks.

The Russia-Ukraine War (Part 2) click here

The post An Assessment of Military Operations appeared first on IMR.

Information Weaponsied in the Ukraine War

Russia-Ukraine war is not the first war of the Information age but it certainly marks the beginning of a new and dangerous trend in Information Warfare. The ease with which more than half of the world’s population is being denied to their basic right – the right to freedom of ‘opinion’ and ‘expression,’ the way 4.9 billion internet users have been made hostage to tech platforms’ filtered worldview (on the click of a mouse), must be a matter of concern for all responsible countries of the world!

The plight of Ukrainians is heart-wrenching and cannot be justified but that is one side of the War, and knowing the other side, no matter whether it’s black or white, comes under the most celebrated definition of individual freedom as well!

From the beginning, it appears that for the Big Tech club, this war offers a perfect moral terrain to test their enormous digital might (accumulated over the years) – to see how much their improvisation can influence social, political, and geopolitical events to shape the destiny of a War, in real-time! But what if this pilot completed successfully? Will it be called the loss of Russia alone!

Recent Developments

On 16th March, while introducing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to U.S. Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (in an emotional gesture) led the members of the house in chanting “Slava Ukraini” (Glory to Ukraine). The virtual address of Ukraine’s social media star President aired live, received millions of views, likes, comments, re-tweets, impressions, and shares across the world. Within a few minutes of the live stream, almost all major social media platforms got flooded with public reactions/emotions in the support of Zelenskyy and an equal proportion of hatred against Russian President Vladimir Putin. From the beginning, Zelenskyy’s moves tok the internet by storm, and everything related to him was ‘viral’ on social media platforms, and that was, perhaps, a sufficient reason to hail the ‘glory’ of a President, whose country was in the middle of a war!

Before ending his speech, Zelenskyy played a 2 min 20 seconds video too, where mass devastation of his country by Russian troops, along with scenes of good old days and present scenario were presented in a single frame (with slow music in the background). The video was so perfectly composed that it makes one wonder whether the Ukrainian President is sitting inside a bunker with his troops (from where he often posts pictures and videos on his Instagram/Twitter/YouTube/Facebook etc.) or with his ‘Kvartal-95’ studio staff!

If the Russia-Ukraine war would have been a movie or a reality show, it would have been declared a global blockbuster by far and Zelenskyy would have been nominated for an Oscar 2022 (through online voting lines)! But unfortunately, this is not the case. In between these much-celebrated ‘glories’, standing ovations, routine social media lives, and heroic press conferences; there are some grim realities of War and some real numbers that exist too.

War has already caused grave damage to common Ukrainians, their properties, infrastructure, and source of livelihood are severely destroyed. According to a recent UN report, War in Ukraine damaged over $100 billion worth of infrastructure and inflicted hundreds of civilian and military causalities. And if the conflict drags on, it risks creating a “devastating freefall into poverty” and “extreme vulnerability” for millions of people. There are also estimates that if the War protracted at the current pace, the rest of the world will soon start feeling the heat as well, and all prospects of post-Covid global economic recovery will get seriously affected!

But far from all these real-life challenges, the Ukrainian President is busy fighting a different kind of war.

Weapon of Mass ‘Deception’ and New Front Lines

It is said that “control people’s perceptions of reality and you control them.” Applying aggressive PR campaigns to deceive the real objectives/status of the War, is a part of a long and tested Western strategy. But what has changed now is that this time it turned more open, blunt, precise, and real-time, with the help of big tech platforms and their political/diplomatic executives.

It is interesting that when Russian troops marched toward Ukrainian borders, Zelensky sent an SOS call to Meta executives to block Russia’s media outlets from posting to Facebook in Ukraine and to cut off Facebook and Instagram in Russia itself. Nick Clegg, former deputy Prime Minister, United Kingdom, and current Policy Affairs head of Meta (who was promoted to the position a few days before the War) responded to that call by not only blocking Russian Media in Ukraine but by making ‘temporary’ changes in the platform’s overall policy toward hate speech too (so that Ukrainian can post ‘death threats’ to Russians and Putin). According to Bloomberg’s report, from the beginning of war, Clegg is in constant touch with Zelensky and his staff, he is sending them regular updates over emails, and facilitating them by providing additional features such as blocking pro-Russian accounts, hiding their friend lists, and blocking ads from Russian businesses, etc.

When asked an explanation for such motivated moves by Russian prosecutor, Nick Clegg tweeted that: “Our policies are focused on protecting people’s rights to speech as an expression of self-defense in reaction to a military invasion of their country.”

Now the question comes if media which Russian government controls is called ‘state-controlled,’ then how Meta can be called ‘free’ medium, after such politically motivated steps and ‘special gestures,’ taken by a former political executive?

It is interesting that for every social media/big tech product that the Russian government blocks in their country, there are VPNs and Onion Routers kind of service protocols to surpass that and to open the gates of the dark web for Russians but when a normal internet user, sitting in a third country, try to access Russian media outlets from Google, a “403 – Forbidden. That’s an error,” message returns to their screen (as an extra token for the so-called liberty)!

Volunteer Hackers and Digital Mercenaries

On 27th February, Mykhailo Fedorov, Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine and Minister of Digital Transformation, called out all hackers of the world to join Ukraine’s “IT Army,” and help the country to fight on the cyber front. On the same day, pro-Ukrainian hacktivists of the infamous ‘Anonymous’ hacker group launched a series of cyberattacks against websites of the Russian government, their financial institutions, media, and businesses. Within 48 hours, they claimed to take down over 300 Russian government platforms. As per the latest updates, more than 300,000 volunteer hackers (mostly millennials and teenagers) from different parts of the world have already joined the fight from Ukraine’s side. Through a telegram group “IT Army of Ukraine”, these volunteers are coordinating with each other, disrupting Russia and the neighboring Belarus government and their critical infrastructure, including Railways, and electricity grids, sharing the location coordinates of Russian tanks and troops with Ukrainian forces, and launching simultaneous propaganda war against Russia, with a simple and innocent claim- “they are fighting for what is right and what is truth.”

Covering the key in charge of this entire campaign, Mykhailo Fedorov, The New York Times article (published on 12th March) says: “The work has made Mr. Fedorov one of Mr. Zelensky’s most visible lieutenants, deploying technology and finance as modern weapons of war.” In fact, “Mr. Fedorov is creating a new playbook for military conflicts that shows how an outgunned country can use the internet, crypto, digital activism and frequent posts on Twitter to help undercut a foreign aggressor.”

Now Mykhailo Fedorov has a new request, which he again tweeted from his official account: “If Apple and Google notify all the smartphones in the world about the constant Russian shelling of Ukraine, all the people would force their governments to close the sky over Ukraine because of war horrors.”

From a simplistic view, it appears healthy participation of pro-active internet users to bring down the evil army of invaders but what if this trend becomes the new normal! Can the trend of running such a global war recruitment exercise and activism campaign, on the basis of morality and truth, bypassing all geopolitical talks/negotiations/efforts and other sovereign nations’ own national interests, be called moral and just, in all the cases, all the time? And what if in the future, some real terror regime will start a similar open hacking cum social campaign against the world? Then what would be the moral basis to fight against that kind of war?

Smartphones, Fast Internet, and Influencers cum War Fighters

On 18th March, a video of the Ukrainian president went viral on media, when he paid a visit to civilians wounded by attacks on Ukraine, at a hospital in the capital Kyiv and met a teenage girl receiving treatment for shrapnel wounds. Seeing the president next to her, the little girl started crying out of joy, and then she told the Ukrainian Premier how he is popular on “TikTok,” adding: “everyone supports you in TikTok,” it prompted Zelensky to smile and he joked: “Yes? So we have occupied TikTok?” The girl replied, “all talks are about you, it is all about you.”

This light-hearted moment is, unfortunately, the reality of common Ukrainians at the moment, which is also called the first “TikTok War” of our time! The country is under serious attack but Elon Musk’s Starlink’s fast internet services are healing the wounds of Ukrainians with TikTok, Instagram, Telegram, YouTube, Twitter, and FB lives.

From the beginning of the War, social networks have been flooded with videos from Ukrainian civilians documenting their live experiences of War, and the images of women and teenagers/kids posing for selfies, shooting ‘TikTok’ videos (wrapped in blankets in underground bunkers, army tanks in the streets, and so on.), playing music instruments amid the debris of buildings destroyed by shelling, etc. are going viral everywhere. Ukrainian social media influencers, who usually post videos of their travel, fashion, movies, foods, etc., have now started sharing their war experiences posing with combat gears and machine guns and they have virtually turned into ‘war-fighters’ on the battlefields of social networks.

If this social influencing game would have played out between the two countries, then it would still be called OK, but the problem lies in the unfair acceleration of this trend, at the global level. While on one hand, all major social networks have restricted Russian content from their platforms, on the other hand, they encouraged battalions of social media influencers (Ukrainians/Non-Ukrainians) to run a one-sided campaign against Russia.

We must note that there are millions of social influencers (cum paid workers of tech clubs) with direct access to billions of smartphone users! Encouraging them to leverage their access to spread propaganda for objectives of a War, under the guise of morality, truth, democracy, freedom, and ‘western values,’ kind of things, is certainly more dangerous than the state-controlled propaganda machines!

State Controlled vs. Internet Controlled

The Russian news editor, who unfurled an anti-war sign behind the newsreader on a live TV show and flashed a placard with words like: “Stop the war,” and “Don’t believe the propaganda. They are lying to you here,” earned a social media star and international celebrity status overnight for her ‘daring’ act of speaking against the government and army of her country (from Zelensky to Macron, everyone praised her for this act). But the question is- Will a regular internet user who expresses his/her views in support of Russia, be allowed to become a celebrity/influencer on the U.S.-controlled tech platforms? Forget about expressing support for Russia, even accessing the Russian side of the story is being completely forbidden in the so-called platforms of freedom and democracy!

So what is worse, State-controlled media or Big Tech club-controlled internet?

Occupying the moral ‘High Grounds’

It is often said that wars of self-interest usually end when the winner’s interests are satisfied but wars of morality are often “longer and bloodier.”

In 2009, while launching NATO’s new strategic concept, former US Defense Sectary James Mattis said: “we need a new Strategic Concept that reconciles war’s grim realities with the human aspirations of our own people and the global audience,” as changing character of war in the information age will require military forces that recognize that “capturing perceptions” is the new ‘high Ground’ in today’s conflicts, as “the moral is to the material as three is to one.”

From the beginning of the War, the focus of Ukraine is on holding the moral high grounds with the help of information weapons- Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Telegram and TikTok and they certainly have an edge here. But there is an interesting side of this superficial moral high ground as well.

From Churchill to World War II’s ‘Darkest Hour’ to Pearl Harbor to ‘9/11,’ to Terrorism to Third World War, in his speeches, Zelenskyy- the moral warrior of the social media age, is using every occasion to call out his allies and partners to turn this war into a global crusade for democracy, liberty, peace, and freedom! But at the same time, with the full support of the narration industry behind his back, he is quite assured that he will never be called an ‘aggressor,’ a term which is more frequently used for the Russian President (who on the contrary consistently cautioning the world to refrain from contributing to any kind of escalation).

Influence on India

In his article “To Be or NATO be: Putin’s War on Ukraine Is Also a Western Creation,” former foreign secretary, Kanwal Sibal writes: “The propaganda against India by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Economist and so on shows that a free press is no guarantee of objective information.”

The approach of Indian media (print/electronic/social) in this entire event exposed our vulnerability and vacuum in the narration industry too, Kanwal Sibal summarized our situation more precisely when he wrote: “The Ukrainian crisis has also exposed how our own press is incapable of reporting responsibly on international affairs. It is treating the Russian assault on Ukraine as a quasi-assault on India, with an outpouring of emotional sympathy for Ukraine and castigation of Russia as the aggressor, ignoring the complex causes of the conflict and the need for mature, balanced, and factual reporting, with due consideration of not being entirely out of line with the country’s foreign policy interests in search of TRPs.”

This war has many lessons for the countries like India, where not only in traditional media but on new-age tech platforms too, the western bloc has an absolute and ever-increasing dominance!

We observed that how social media policies can be relaxed for ‘violent speech,’ tech mercenaries (army of hackers) can be recruited online, funds to run the War can be crowd-sourced via crypto, releasing coordinates of troops movement to enemies has become the new definition of morality, and the War itself turn into a military show streaming 24/7 in smartphones, now should we continue to enjoy this free entertainment or take some steps for the future war preparedness?

What Next – Weaponization of AI?

In the Russia-Ukraine crisis, one thing which comes out in open is that every single western product or idea – from food to money to social media to technology is a potential strategic weapon! And a decision on how, when, and where to launch it, will not be taken by voting in the UN!

If the weaponization of information via social networks is capable to attack the ‘wetware’ of billions of people, what would be the scale of damage when AI will be weaponized in the future? We must note that all these tech platforms already have inbuilt AI capabilities, it is only a matter of convenience and choice of Big Tech and their PR staff to leverage it for their goals or not!

With 100 percent market access, we have given a free pass to Big Tech club in our Narration Industry (and their related economy) but what would be our future options when AI would be weaponized against our own strategic interests? And how are we planning to tackle that situation?

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C4ISR is a very long acronym – Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance. Length of the acronym signifies its importance in the modern warfare. It involves organizational and technological attributes, which enhance command and control. It is no secret that  command and control  forms the hub of everything at every level. Command, control and information systems have to be integrated vertically from the Strategic to the tactical level – faster the better. The need for speed was illustrated by the way in which four terrorists were gunned down near Nagrota on 19 November. Perhaps, the information may have  been received from a friendly foreign country or the national security set up at Delhi.

Robust Systems Required

In the military domain, whether it is intelligence, operations or logistics, unless you have a versatile and resilient C4ISR system you are going to be a looser. In the current security environment quantum and speed of flow of information is immense backed by interoperability of digital platforms and faster deployment of weapon systems necessitates modern C4ISR equipment and systems.

 While comparing the armed forces of adversaries  one must also compare the effectiveness of their command & control systems not just restrict it to number of weapon platforms. The Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict has highlighted the importance of C4ISR systems and integration with remotely controlled weapon platforms. Gulf War 1 demonstrated the power of electronic warfare when troops in trenches were left paralysed when the Coalition Forces disabled Iraq’sentire military command and control system and the other civil facilities. Iraqiforces capitulated in days.

So ultimately the C4ISR systems have to be very robust .You have to have systems which give you information in the quickest possible time for you to able to make decisions and your systems must be versatile enough to sustain enemy attacks so that you can continue with the information dominance.

ALSO READ: DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION – Transformation For Future War

No war plans survive the first bullet. The C4ISR systems have to robust enough to survive so that they can withstand the initial onslaught of the conflict. To be effective they must be multi-layered, with built-in redundancy.

We must have continuous information dominance and battlefield awareness vertically and laterally in the chain so as to have the decision-making advantage. It is not the number of weapons that matter. It is the ability to deploy them at the right places. Systems are required which allow for simultaneity of planning as well as decision-making.Sequential manner of planning and decision-making is a luxury. C4ISR have to become much quicker. Gone are the days when you could collect information, process it and then pass it on to the formations.

Under the Army’s peculiar system of of RFIs, RFPs, tendering, L1 negotiations the process is drawn out. New technology is outdated before purchases are finalized and systems introduced. In the case of technology we need to have a modified system. The armed forces must have updated and latest technology if they are to be left redundant because of processes and procedures to procure things are outdated.

Any amount of innovation or investment in information gathering and surveillance is less because it is the key to success in future battlefields. But the need of the hour is also integration of all resources amongst the three Services and resources at the strategic level.

Timely Information Sharing

Another aspect that needs immediate attention is timely sharing of the information. Delay in decision-making in today’s warfare can be costly in a fast moving battlefield. The culture of holding back information must change. Whether it is during Covid pandemic or counter insurgency operations, everybody is in a state of managing conflicts. Timely information can prevent damage. Used offensively and with initiative, lesser resources can deliver much more. We need to understand who needs the information the most, it must go to him fastest, even if laterally, and not through the hierarchy for processing, if it is to be used as a force multiplier.

Perhaps, the time has come to utilize the industry and other resources to develop C4ISR-based wargames exclusively. Young talented students from universities should build C4ISR wargames. It has long been a practice that cutting edge technologies and management systems came to the civil domain from the military. Now the industry is in a position to come up with new technologies and wargames.

The Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative has come during the time of corona. It will provide the impetus to speed up indigenization of the command and control systems and make C4ISR systems robust. Innovative use of technology and continuous upgrades to ensure technology in use does not suffer from redundancy is required. C4ISR systems should be futuristic.

There is no better way of innovation in technology than the examples seen in the recent conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. They used surveillance capability as a destructive element to win a war. Command and control systems enabled by the sensors are probably the most important elements of combat power.

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