New Delhi: Underlining that the nature of contemporary warfare has changed and there is a growing need to incorporate elements of Multi Domain Operations (MDO), Indian Army chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane has said the relevance of large platforms in winning wars have eroded over time.
“Large platforms which were once the mainstay of 20th century battlefield: the Main Battle Tanks, fighter aircraft and large surface combatants, have been rendered relatively less significant in the face of emerging battlefield challenges in newer domains,” General Naravane said in his inaugural address, conducted virtually on Thursday, at the biennial conference of the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), an independent think tank on strategic studies and land warfare.
This is a sentiment frequently expressed by military thinkers and leaders in recent times in obvious reference to the Indian military. The general’s expression may be indicative of the direction military investments may take in development, acquisitions and procurements of war platforms.
What was interesting was the Army chief’s aligning with western military powers as opposed to non-western ‘adversaries’.
“As we fixed our gaze on building core capacities in land, sea and air they (adversaries) took the battle to the newer domains of space, cyber, and informatics. With Western militaries focusing on amassing massive combat power through the aggregation of large military platforms, viz, tanks, guns and aircraft carrier-led huge naval armadas, our adversaries invested in creating a formidable stand-off enterprise in the form of long range precision fires, PNT (precision, navigation, timing) systems, hypersonic vehicles and robust air defence capacities.”
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“In order to win future wars, mere mastery of the traditional domains of land, sea and air will no longer suffice,” he added that the new domains were that of “cyber, space, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the digital spaces”.
General Naravane also described how a futuristic Indian MDO would be like. “A few years from now, in a typical MDO engagement, a Combat Group assault on enemy dispositions, will be enabled by multiple capacities across domains.”
“So, a High Space UAV System or investments in Low Orbit Technologies will provide the Combat Group Commander with complete transparency of the enemy battle space through real time, persistent surveillance. This could be complemented by a Su-30 reconnaissance mission, hours earlier, with the imagery of key enemy dispositions offloaded into a “tri-service cloud” for instant retrieval.”
“A cyber strike, as part of preparatory bombardment will disable enemy radars, command and control apparatus and electronic warfare systems. Having achieved complete mastery over the battle space in terms of visual transparency as also domination of the electromagnetic spectrum, the kinetics are unleashed. As the traditional fire and manoeuvre elements of the Combat Group launch the physical assaults, a swarm of offensive drones, based on autonomous, AI enabled edge computing and distributed intelligence projects 25 km in depth to neutralise enemy mechanised columns that are moving in for a counter attack.”
“Through such ‘smart convergence’ and the ‘innovative bundling of technologies’ across multiple domains, a futuristic, MDO enabled Indian Army Combat Group, will achieve its mission with surgical precision, in compressed time frames, and at fractional costs.”
