The Raksha Mantri highlighted that traditional notions of war are being reshaped by emerging technologies and evolving strategic partnerships, necessitating an 'Adaptive Defense' strategy to address the new challenges.
About ‘Adaptive Defence’
- Definition: It’s a strategic approach where a nation’s military and defence mechanisms continuously evolve to counter emerging threats effectively.
- Principle of ‘Adaptive Defence’: It involves cultivating a proactive mindset to anticipate threats, adapt, innovate and thrive in the face of unpredictable circumstances.
- Capabilities needed for ‘Adaptive Defense’: Situational awareness, flexibility at strategic and tactical levels, resilience, agility, and integration with the futuristic technologies.
- Significance: Secure the future beyond just protecting borders; Designed to address both traditional (e.g., armed aggression) and non-traditional security challenges (e.g., Drug trafficking), counter the menace of information warfare against national security, etc.
Emerging Technologies: The Driver of Future Warfare
- Information warfare (IW): It relies upon networked information systems where an operation conducted in order to gain an information advantage over the opponent. E.g., Cyberwarfare.
- Lethal Autonomous weapon systems (LAWS): Weapons system once activated can engage targets without further human interference.
- Lasers & Electromagnetic railguns: For space-based attacks on satellites.
- Synthetic biology: Crimes like, illegal gene-editing, cyber-bio crime, bio-malware, bio-hacking, etc.
