Blood, Sweat & Tears

Pravin Sawhney

The tragedy of the Indian defence leadership is that every time they want to sound in sync with the emerging technologies, they expose their complete ignorance. The most recent example of this has been the creation of quantum laboratory at the Military College of Telecommunication Engineering (MCTE) in Mhow, which the chief of army staff, Gen. M.M. Naravane visited in December 2021.

Following his visit, the government issued a press release which stated that the quantum lab also has Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cyberwar centres since the army has identified quantum technologies, AI, and cyber as key emerging technologies for war. This is nothing but throwing random words in the hope that they will sound impressive. The truth is that these technologies fall in the civil/ commercial domain and the army should have nothing to do with their incubation. It should only be concerned about their application in concert with the commercial enterprises. It should instead have focused on military specific technologies. Interestingly, the National Security Council Secretariat (NSCS) which advises the National Security Advisor has supported the MCTE in building the quantum lab.

Emerging or disruptive technologies fall in three categories: commercial technologies, military specific technologies, and futuristic or wild card technologies. To put things into perspective, AI, which is at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution on the commercial side, and will also change the character of war, is a general purpose and dual-use technology that vastly enables other technologies like cyber, sensors, data analytics, cloud computing, autonomy, genomics, and synthetic biology to name a few. These emerging technologies and AI are best incubated on the commercial side since they require an expansive and expensive AI ecosystem comprising hardware, software, data, regulatory norms, talent, government and private companies’ finances in research and development, money from venture capitalists, and market (domestic and foreign) for products.

Military specific technologies include hypersonic missiles, Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD), and directed energy weapons (laser and microwave weapons), while the wild card ones are quantum technologies (quantum computing, communications, and sensing), brain computer interface, and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The wild card technologies are not likely to be operationalised anytime soon, but when they do, they will bring a paradigm shift in warfare, so much that instead of the character of war, the nature of war would change too.

Prime Minister Modi launched iDEX at DefExpo 2018

The nature of war is what war is—violence and loss of life—, and the character of war is how it is to be fought. In the recorded history of warfare, the nature of war has remained constant and is a key factor in determination of victory or defeat. Now consider a situation when there are no humans on the battlefield, only unmanned systems and intelligent robots fighting one anoth