Securing the Nation: Unconventional Threats

THE ROLE OF INFORMATION WARFARE

Any form of unconventional threats often looks for gaps in the system. The
bandwidth of such a threat ranges from Intelligence embedded Cyber-attack to a
Biological warfare agent like the Corona Virus, and add to this the element of
Psychological warfare it becomes a deadly cocktail for even a nuclear superpower to
handle. Such is the prowess of this form of warfare that humanity can be forced into
hibernation for years together and may be eventual submission.
A disgruntled person, a vulnerable communication protocol between key positions
of power, unrest amongst the population, people with compromised credentials & suspect
integrity and leaders with allegiance to contrary ideologies or greed for power, all are ideal
targets for penetration.
While India is the most vibrant of all the democracies in the world, it is also the
most chaotic. Indian scriptures talk of balancing chaos and order, while Western
mythologies depict the two locked in a zero-sum battle in which order must triumph.
That is a reality which holds its truth even today. Even in Chaos there is an order
where everyone is included. Unfortunately, in this fight against the pandemic the
reality that we cannot refuse is that people have been left to fend for themselves
and excluded. This chaos was therefore without any order.
The adversaries consider existence of chaos as a weakness and make
persistent efforts to penetrate and dismantle our system. The last two millennium
has proved that our civilization is robust enough to withstand any onslaught despite
losing military and political control. Today India is a militarily strong power when it
comes to conventional means and is an enigma in the unconventional domain for
its adversaries. The enemies have therefore resorted to emerging technologies
to innovate and perforate that invincible shield of our Nation.
The last two years have seen an onslaught of connected events trying to
destabilize our nation economically, militarily, diplomatically and politically. Our
greatest foolishness shall be to see these events in isolation, instead of a coordinated
multi-frontal attack. The moment we see it in isolation, the response matrix to each of
the challenges shall be significantly different than if we were to take a holistic perspective.
Footnote: Since the possibility of COVID being a Biological Weapon can be debated despite the overwhelming evidences available
in the public domain, it would be beyond the scope of this topic to deliberate any further on that aspect.

1|Securing the Nation: Unconventional Threats

 If it was not for the awareness amongst the masses, the political masters of the
day would never have felt compelled to order the Balakot airstrikes. The extent of death
devastation and financial damage the country has suffered silently due to this pandemic,
together with the whole world is manifold as compared to the series of terrorist strikes
seen in a whole decade. A clear awareness as to how the pandemic originated therefore
would have mandated a different strategy and course of action.
The following are the pre requisites to effectively deal with an unconventional
threat.
(a) Assess the nature, scale and reach of the attack.
(b) Identification of the enemy & the group of countries associated with it.
(c) Ability of the enemy to sustain the attack and the extent of time if so.
(d) Real time damage assessment & prediction future enemy maneuvers.
(e) Ability to quantify & deploy resources to contain and diffuse the attack.
The COVID pandemic has confirmed to us the possibility of staging a Bio warfare
with such ease that most of the population easily believe the cause to be natural. Such
lack of awareness, lets the perpetrators scot-free, emboldening them to plan for further
attacks. It is therefore paramount that the cause should be made public of at the first
available opportunity, so that the adversary is deterred. As awareness takes center
stage in the fight against unconventional threat, Information warfare becomes the
important aspect of the response.
Since awareness is such a key parameter in determining the course of response,
the mechanism to gather and confirm the information therefore becomes the focal point.
In a connected world every piece of information is mostly available. With technologies like
Bigdata analytics, it is possible in reasonable time frame to foresee the enemy plans
shaping up even before it hits us irrespective of the form of attack. Eventuality modelling
for any potential disaster situation has to be therefore an essential part of our everyday
routine.
Awareness during an unconventional threat is essential through all the stages of
the pandemic. An unconventional attack mostly subverts and stresses the infrastructure
it targets. The COVID pandemic has subverted the entire health infrastructure worldwide.
A proper digital platform could have acted as a shield and have absorbed the impact
before the physical infrastructure got exposed. This could definitely have prevented the
collapse of the machinery as a whole at the least.

2|Securing the Nation: Unconventional Threats

 One of the basic mistakes that has been committed in fighting this war is, despite
being declared as a war, it is being fought by multiple agencies as small battles in their
respective domains and regions. Consequently, resource management is abysmal by any
standards and it has led to more shortage sending the population into a wide frenzy. While
it is very important to name the fight as a War, it is of greater importance to fight it
as a War.
India has committed multiple such mistakes on the Information warfare front. Early
Jan 20, the indications and enormity of the pandemic was very evident in the public
domain, yet even the developed countries chose to overlook the impending catastrophe.
While the political and medical response for the pandemic was remarkably handled well
by India, the country messed up on the information warfare front to put in place a
converged platform to aid and optimize the healthcare infrastructure. The country had
time from Feb 20 to April 21 to put such a system in place.
Platforms like Aarogya setu were not adequately designed to address the
right problem matrix. Consequently, in the midst of the second wave the country was
caught on the wrong foot on multiple counts. The lack of adequate information to the
masses have added to the chaos and has effectively contributed in accelerating the
spread of the pandemic. Not only did the country as a whole let its guards off pre maturely,
we collectively refused to envision the lull before the storm. The lessons are there to be
learnt and the realization still dawning upon us, as to how the right decisions, choices and
strategies could have made us put up a better show.
Fighting this war by manual planning or conventional methods cannot yield any
results whatsoever. Systems in silos add more to the chaos than deliver meaningful
results. It is therefore vital that a comprehensive enterprise grade solution which can
receive, purify and transform information from multiple solution frameworks be made
available as a pre requisite at the earliest. Such a system shall empower the decision
makers with a bird’s eye view over the complete area of responsibility (AoR) which can
result in swifter and practical problem response matrix. The planning would then be not
on speculative or presumptive data but rather on actuals.
An unconventional warfare always creates a higher coefficient of “Fog of
War”. The only method for the fog to be decluttered, is by generating Realtime
Intelligence on the adversary coupled with the assessment of damage caused by the
attack. The damage shall always indicate the source and origin of the threat while the
intelligence machinery shall give vital insights into the reactions of the adversary. In short
it is a closed loop with one system feeding into the other and generating new set of
possible outcomes.

3|Securing the Nation: Unconventional Threats

 To effectively deal with the COVID pandemic or any other unconventional threat,
the following aspects mandatorily needs to be in place
(a) Fight the Unconventional threat under one single agency with a
unified command and control who shall be accountable to the most powerful
body the CCS (Cabinet Committee on Security).
(b) NDMA should be led by a Senior Military officer rather than a
Bureaucrat, considering the lack of experience in matters of Strategy, Wartime
planning, & Agile Execution. We have to remember that the best people to ward
of any threat of such scale and reach is always the armed forces.
(c) Risk forecasting and Risk mitigation strategies for all known events
must be ready at all times for execution during a regime of attack. Every War
should be fought with a War plan, with sufficient scope to be flexible as per the
demands of time.
(d) The Organisational structure should be powered by a converged
digital platform which shall process multi-disciplinary information, so as to create
a unified synthetic picture of the exact state of operations in real-time. An
Indigenous AI enabled RIDS platform is an ideal solution framework for this
requirement.
The country has moved earth and heavens to fight the pandemic. The efforts and
intentions though are noble are proving to be lesser by half, irrespective of the quanta of
resources and effort that is thrown in. Lack of synergy at all levels is evident. Added to
this is the opportunistic politics, acting as a friction to the prevalent fog of war. The
National health Authority undertaking the Digital Health Mission needs an
immediate overhaul with experts who are conversant with the subject. These small
measures can significantly change the course this war.

(S Sudhakaran)
Wing Commander (V)
CEO, QuGates

4|Securing the Nation: Unconventional Threats