Rhetoric Vs Reality

Gp Capt. A.K. Sachdev (retd)

On April 12, as part of thes 7^th National Leadership Conclave of All India Management Association (AIMA), New Delhi, the Chief of Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal VR Chaudhari spoke on the subject ‘The Future of Air Warfare Securing the Sky and Beyond’. Using a prepared text for his talk, he touched upon several issues germane to the Indian Air Force’s (IAF’s) application to air warfare and to its peacetime roles. He then fielded questions from a hybrid audience.

Referring to the outbreak of Covid-19 as a ‘black swan’ event, he spoke of its catastrophic effect all across the world and also made us dependent on internet and social media platforms. He said that the traditional image of a combatant is a soldier, airman or sailor but future wars would also be fought by student on his computer, a diplomat making foreign policy, a banker, or a politician. He called this comprehensive national power which is the sum total of diplomatic, information, military and economic power of a country and stressed that this comprehensive national power needs to be brought to bear on an adversarial country for victory.

He spoke of the four traditional physical domains of war i.e. land, sea, air and space having been supplemented by cyber and information domains over the past two decades, changing the conduct of war hybrid and multi-domain. This transformation has meant a reorientation of strategies and tactics and rebuilding of traditional war-fighting machineries in deference to this emerging paradigm.

He cautioned that, in the next war, the enemy may not be recognisable as a country or an organisation and we may not readily discover the perpetrators of distributed denial of services attacks which could be in the form of economic strangulation, diplomatic isolation, military stand-offs and information blackouts. Moreover, these attacks could precede any kinetic military action erupts. The hybrid nature of war would be spread across all domains and cover conventional and non-conventional, kinetic and no-kinetic and lethal and non-lethal operations—all under a nuclear overhang. The weapons used would vary from computer viruses to hypersonic missiles. Thus, we need to develop capabilities across the full spectrum of conflict for multi-time, multi-domain operations with our doctrines, equipment, training and tactics given the flexibility to adapt to these new challenges.

CAS Air Chief Marshal VR Chaudhari d