Air Marshal Ramesh Rai (retd)

Cyber technology has made its impact in battle space, much as the technology of flight had a century ago, and evolved as a new domain. Cyber is now well acclaimed and established as the fifth domain of war and we can safely postulate that any future conflict will have a large component of cyber warfare. Whether cyber would bring about a paradigm shift or change the fundamental character of war will depend on how its doctrine and operational concepts get developed and integrated with the war fighting concepts of other domains.

Conceptually, each domain develops and prepares to operate independently and collectively to bear its prowess when called upon to do so and it is certain that the cyber domain would follow a similar contour.

Broadly speaking, cyber warfare is the use of technology to penetrate another nation’s/ enemy’s computers or networks for the purpose of causing damage or disruption (The Drew Papers- Air Power lessons for an air force cyber-power targeting theory by Lt Col. Steven J Anderson, USAF). Since a wide range of social, economic, political and military functionalities depend on computers, networks, internet, electronic technologies and the electro-magnetic spectrum i.e. the cyberspace, it is preordained that cyber warfare will be used to exploit this dependency to meet political and military objectives.

Computers and networks are embedded in every system of a nation, enabling administration, banking, business, industry, logistics, electric grids, communications, air traffic control, air space management, smart cities and much more. It is the vulnerability of this very actuality that the enemy will exploit through cyber warfare which a nation would have to guard against. The threat is real and a cyber-attack on a government’s IT network could bring an entire nation to its feet.

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In April 2018, the small independent Caribbean nation of St Maarten faced a total public shutdown for an entire day when its IT network was hacked for the third time over a year (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/how-organizations-should-prepare-for-cyber-attacks-noam-erez/    https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/71236/hacking/sint-maarten-cyber-attack.html). Closer home, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited confirmed a cyber-attack on the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant in Tamil Nadu, in September this year. The nuclear power plant’s administrative network was breached in the attack though it did not cause any critical damage (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/11/04/an-indian-nuclear-power-plant-suffered-cyberattack-heres-what-you-need-know/). These examples highlight the extent and severity of a cyber-attack. It is imminent that cyber forces could operate around the globe and with a much wider connotation than the battlespace of the militaries, and would need to be addressed at the national level.

Cyber Space and Armed Forces

Since the armed forces will also be in the ambit of cyber space, the military element of cyber warfare will have to be culled out from within the national framework. Armed forces would have to protect not only their platforms, weapons, information, networks and capabilities but also conduct offensive cyber operations in respective domains. In the future, cyber space is likely to pervade every conventional war-fighting domain more and more as our armed forces get increasingly dependent on computers, netw