Virtual World, Real Threats

Lt Gen. Atanu Pattanaik (retd)

In the first week of April 2023, a trove of Pentagon documents dumped onto multiple social media had some embarrassing repercussions. The leak complicated relations between the US and its allies making it plain that the CIA was not only spying on Russia but also on its own allies and top political and military leadership of Ukraine. There were documents that also revealed internal discussions among top South Korean officials about US pressure on Seoul to help supply weapons to Ukraine and its policy of not doing so.

Interestingly, it also sowed fissures with close ally Israel as it revealed intercepts of senior leaders of Israel’s famous foreign spy agency, the Mossad, advocating that Mossad’s officials and Israel’s citizens should protest against judicial reforms proposed by Israel’s new government.

The leak also revealed that the CIA was using intercepted communication to spy on discussions inside the Russian defence ministry. The extensive penetration into the Russian miliary planning organisations enabled the US to forewarn Ukraine about Moscow’s future plans. Of course, since these are old intercepts, they necessarily do not impact current and future Russian military operations in Ukraine. But they definitely sowed seeds of misgivings and a sense of betrayal among the US allies to the advantage of Moscow.

The incident illustrates the extent to which cyber warfare is capable of upending well strategised military operations, obliterate the advantages of massed weapon systems and combat arrays and also create divisions among allies to the benefit of one party or the other. It also emphasises the need to field cyber hardened hardware in critical communication systems within the domain of the military as well as vital civilian infrastructure like electricity grids, railways and airport controls systems, banking and finance networks etc. This is precisely the challenge of Grey Zone warfare, especially in view of the fact that more than 60 per cent of the world’s population (5.03 billion people) uses the internet. It’s our source of instant information, entertainment, news and social interaction and therefore disruptive capabilities in this domain have a sweeping and disproportionate impact.

Grey Zone warfare

Grey Zone warfare is always below the conventional threshold and can be visualised in the realms of deniability, ambiguity, uncertainty and veracity. Cyber domain in such an arena of warfare presents major threats with unknown dimensions and far-reaching consequences. The enemy is mostly unknown and even if indicators are there, they cannot be held accountable because of the current legal framework of the prevalent world order. The repercussions of such a threat manifesting can be both kinetic and non-kinetic, thus making it a dangerous preposition. The response mechanism thus has to be potent to counter Grey Zone warfare