Future Force For Future Wars
Context: Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked the top commanders to develop the military into a future force while taking note of the rapidly changing technological landscape.
Changing the nature of wars
- Blurred definitions: Could not say whether we are at war or peace as war is becoming practically limitless in variety.
- Now, new terms denote changes in the de?nition of modern war. These include ‘hyper’, ‘hybrid’, ‘compound’, ‘nonlinear’, ‘fourth generation’, ‘next generation’ and ‘, contactless’.
- Based on political domination: War, at its core, is organised violence waged for political domination.
- If humans are naturally political animals, war will be the proverbial state of nature and peace, the aberration.
- Use of technology: For peace to prevail or been forced, the development of future force capability based on a Third Offset Strategy was announced by the U.S. in 2014.
- It consists of cutting-edge technology, exploration of new operational concepts for utilising such technology, and retaining the brightest in human resource to achieve the objective of peace.
- It provides for autonomous learning systems, assisted human operations, advanced mannedunmanned systems operations and, networkenabled autonomous weapons.
- It impacts cognitive and perceptional domains through weapons, soldiers, robots, and cyborgs.
- Decline of Westphalian terms: Strategists reared in Western-Style liberal democracies, are slowly being forced to come to terms with anomalies in the existing paradigm.
- Anonymous threats: Bypass frontiers without challenging national sovereignty.
Way forward: Confluence technology and a whole-of-government approach -
- Breaking of civilian-military silos: Most important political trend affecting armed conflict in the 21st century will be in the relationship between civilians and those who fight on their behalf.
- Expediting speed of decision-making besides shedding legacy system (organised campaigns, orchestrated by domain led central staff1): To prepare for accelerated future wars, democracies need to master the ‘hybridised effect’ of warfare.
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