Bookmarked: How To Prepare For War On A Digital Battlefield 

The long-standing animosity between India and its hostile neighbour China has forced the country to be constantly aware of the advancements in warfare to avoid being blindsided. In his latest book The Last War: How AI Will Shape India’s Final Showdown with China, author Pravin Sawhney gets into what the Indian Army needs to do in the growing digital realm of warfare. 

“The cognitive dilemma of the Indian Army will be compounded since the PLA (People's Liberation Army—China’s army) will fight by bringing all domain capabilities across the entire combat zone. This could be done in two ways: as mission set IoMT comprising the PLA’s multi-domain capabilities. Or, by employing capabilities to wage independent wars, namely, cyber war, invisible war (for the electromagnetic spectrum), missile war, light (directed energy weapons) war, drone war, and political war (information warfare),” says Sawhney, a retired Army captain, as he draws a picture of the present and future of war. 

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

The government approved the raising of the DCA (Defence Cyber Agency) under a two-star officer on 28 September 2018. With a modest staff drawn from all three services, the DCA became operational under Rear Admiral Mohit Gupta in November 2019. However, once General Bipin Rawat was appointed CDS (Chief of Defence Staff) on 1 January 2020, he assumed operational command and control of the DCA. The task of the CDS as overall commander of DCA will be to move from coordination to integration of cyber capabilities with the three defence services. Until the appointment of the CDS, the three services did not share their cyber capabilities with the IDH (Integrated Defence Headquarters). The DCA was raised with the modest aim of securing internet, telecommunication networks, and computers including software from cyberattacks. Total focus was on cyber defence.  

Interestingly, according to Wikileaks, RAW was stealthily trying to buy malware meant to infect mobiles and computers. If true, this showed that RAW did not have the claimed cyber offensive capabilities. 

 In a January 2022 article, former foreign secretary Shyam Saran pointed out that, ‘For items like electronic components, the dependence [of India] on Chinese imports is over 70 percent. This cannot change overnight. Given that, it is fair to assume that most of the electronic components of the IAF’s Air Force Net (AFNET), which is the backbone of its network-centricity, most of south India’s BSNL grid and most of the northeastern power grid might have Chinese components as does Air Traffic Control at most Indian airports. Chinese companies could get into power, communication, and defence grids because they are always the lowest bidders. 

If this be so, once the balloon goes up, the army, according to its mobilization plans will requisition trains and civilian aircraft to move troops to the Chinese front. Within hours, there could be panic and uncertainty. Train signals could malfunction, forcing all trains proceeding towards the northeast to stop. No one will take a chance of trains colliding. The northeastern power grids could stop functioning, plunging the entire region into darkness. The airports could report faulty ATC and not allow civilian aircraft to fly. In all this confusion, it will be a long time before cyber specialists are mustered and brought in to inspect various systems. Unaware of the backdoors, they will not know where to start. It will be same story with defence systems. The IAF aircraft will not be able to take off since the AFNET will be disabled by cyber weapons’ assaults. Meanwhile, the radars could come under double attack from cyber and by the PLAAF drones with powerful EW capabilities. Radars would be destroyed the moment they open up. 

Moreover, Indian satellites in various orbits (geosynchronous, medium, and low earth) could be blanked out, including the GSAT series of communication satellites and remote sensing CARTOSAT satellites. India’s Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), operationally called NAVIC, which provided real-time positioning and timing services, could be partially debilitated, destroyed, disabled, jammed, or their inter-satellite links broken. Given this, India’s C4ISR grid would be severely hit. Few have bothered to appreciate China’s massive cyber offensive capabilities; if they had precautionary cyber defensive measures would have been taken. Furthermore, at ISRO, there has been a thin line between commercial and military space infrastructure. There has been too much reliance on commercial satellites to gather images and other data. Commercial satellites, unlike military satellites, are not built to strict security standards. Besides, there are weaknesses in the supply chain that can be exploited. Control stations on ground can be injected with malware. India is not using artificial intelligence and machine learning for spotting and stopping cyber threats. India’s cyber space agency is too small and ill-equipped to take on the Chinese cyber offensive challenge.  
Given the heavily skewed asymmetry, China would go the whole hog, using its cyber offensive capability for whole-of-nation war against India. These include advanced cyber weapons and AI-backed intelligent and autonomous cyber agents. These extremely intelligent cyber agents would decide on their own when and for how long to lie quiet in cyberspace and when to strike and destroy enemy system-of-systems. The success of the military mission would, to a large extent, depend on these autonomous cyber agents and India’s ability to confront them successfully.  The PLA has these capabilities now.

Given this, the raising of the present Defence Cyber Agency to the level of cyber command should be a priority for at least four reasons.

One, since this would elevate cyberspace to a war domain, it would necessitate development of offensive cyber capabilities. This will help create a combination of defensive and offensive capabilities required for cyber stability, at least with Pakistan; China, with over a two-decade lead in cybersecurity, remains far ahead. Used with AI and machine learning, it could increase capabilities to defend systems. With humans out of the loop, patching up of network vulnerabilities would transit from human-speed to automation. Moreover, raising of cyber command could incentivize development of the needed national cyber security policy which should cover future cyber vulnerabilities owing to AI, IoT, and 5G wireless networks in industry and even services sectors.

Two, it will help in defending the military’s networks, especially of the air force and the navy, which are moving fast towards digitization. It becomes more relevant since the IAF is moving towards network centricity. This implies networking of all sensors, systems, weapons, and command and control centres for increased situational awareness and for enhancing tempo of operations. The downside of network centricity is more cyber vulnerability since the enemy will have more physical and signal infiltration nodes. Physical cyber intrusions could happen through systems hardware like cockpit controls, while signal infiltration could come from infrared and radio frequency sensors. For these reasons, it is critical to integrate cyber operations with IAF’s defensive and offensive operations. Since all services would be networked at some future time, planning for integration of cyber operations with conventional war planning becomes essential.

Three, it will help in protecting the defence industrial complex which makes platforms and weapons. It is no secret that most technology in the defence public sector undertakings is imported even for systems that are built under the ‘Make in India’ category. The cyber command could be a watchdog to ensure all technologies are rigorously tested for backdoors and spyware.

And four, cyber command would blend cyber and EW (electronic warfare) in operations, like the PLA has done, and the Pakistan military is in the process of doing. Since cyberspace and EMS (electromagnetic spectrum) are inextricably linked, their synchronization would give tremendous advantage to commanders. There may be targets which are not connected to IP-based networks (internet). For such targets, cyberattacks would need to be done through the EMS. This requires cyber and EW working as a combination.

(Excerpted from The Last War: How AI Will Shape India’s Final Showdown with China by Pravin Sawhney, published by Aleph Book Company, August 2022)

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