On 15 June 2020, in a brutal, savage skirmish,the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) used fists, rocks, rods, baton, spikes, knuckle-dusters, nail-studded clubs and wooden clubs wrapped in barbed wire at a post at Galwan on the Indian side of Line of Actual Control(LAC) in Ladakh sector at an altitude of 4,250 meters. India lost a Commanding Officer of an infantry battalion and 19 other ranks. China did not divulge its casualty figures. There is a famous saying that no two nuclear-powered ...Read more >

Marshal NV Ograkov, Chief of Staff of the Soviet Army in late 1970s-early 1980s gave out the theory of Military Technical Revolution (MTR). In the wake of overwhelming victory of coalition forces in Operation Desert Storm, net assessment specialists like Andrew Marshal came out with the term Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) which basically evolved from earlier term MTR used by Soviet Military ...Read more >

Since the last days of the Soviet Union Armenia and Azerbaijan, the two states have been locked in an intractable conflict over the disputed region of NagornoKarabakh. Nagorno-Karabakh, is an autonomous province of the former Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, a self-declared country whose independence is not internationally recognised. Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding regions have seen periodic outbursts of violence in recent years, but the current war is the most ...Read more >

China and India are heirs to the two oldest civilisations of the world. Both emerged in their present form after World War II. India became independent in 1947 and the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949. They share one of the world’s longest borders, about 3488 kms, across the Himalayas. Both are nuclear weapon states. China’s missiles can reach anywhere in the world. India’s latest Agni series missiles can reach Beijing comfortably. On border issues there have ...Read more >

The Straits of Malacca is the shortest sea route between Persian Gulf suppliers of oil and key Asian markets. It links major economies such as Middle East, China, Japan, South Korea, etc. Being the 500 nautical mile funneled waterway, the Strait is only 1.5 nautical miles (2.8 km) wide at its narrowest point─ the Phillips Channel in the Singapore Strait. The Strait is not deep enough to accommodate some of the largest ships, mostly oil tankers, but it is significant as through the ...Read more >

The professional military body differentiates between an objective nature and a subjective character of war by drawing upon Clausewitz. Nature of war describes what war is and character of war describes how it is actually fought. Nature of war is violent, interactive between opposing wills and fundamentally political. War’s character is influenced by technology, law, ethics, culture, methods of social, political, and military organization and other factors that change across time and ...Read more >

It has been a double whammy. As the nation is reeling under the effects of COVID-19 pandemic, India has to fight another menace: locust invasion. Massive swarms of desert locusts have devoured crops across seven states of western and central India including Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab. The locust population might grow 400 times larger by end June 2020 and spread to new areas without action. It would be disrupting food supply, ...Read more >

The most significant event was the introduction of the information (IT) Act as early as 2000 and the promulgation of the National Cyber Security Policy by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in 2013.The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) was established in 2004 and continues to act. ...Read more >

The Trump Administration released the ‘National Cyber Strategy’ on 20 September 2018. Around the same time, the ‘Defense Department Cyber Strategy 2018’ was also published. In the United States (U.S.), every government after taking over, announces some important policies and or strategy documents. The present administration has already released the ‘National Security Strategy’, the ‘National Defense Strategy’ and the ‘Nuclear Posture Review’. The National Cyber Strategy ...Read more >

The exponential growth and rapid adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) with its associated economics and social opportunities have benefitted billions of people around the world. The Internet has become the backbone of modern businesses, critical services and infrastructure, social networks and the global economy ...Read more >

Immediately after the first gulf war in the early 1990’s the theories of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) and Information Warfare were being studied all over the world as a new kind of warfare. During that time, a course on Information Warfare was conducted at the National Defense University of USA. The course participants were from senior officers of the armed forces, representatives of Department of Defence and Department of State and policy makers from the government. Rand ...Read more >

Considered to be the most serious kinetic attack on oil facilities in the Gulf since the first Gulf War of 1991, on September 14, 2019 the oil facilities in Saudi Arabia was attacked. The attack struck Abqaiq’s large Aramco oil processing facility considered the largest of its kind in the world run by the Saudi state oil company Aramco and another site at the Khurais oil field. With remarkable precision, the aerial strikes hit more than a dozen oil installations in Khurais and ...Read more >

The media is agog with the report of a cyber attack in India’s largest civil nuclear facility - the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) in Tamil Nadu. Cyberspace provides a new opportunity for determined adversaries to wreak havoc at nuclear facilities possibly without ever setting foot inside the nuclear plant. If the network that runs the machines and software controlling the nuclear reactor are compromised, cyber attacks on nuclear power plants could have physical effects. This can ...Read more >

The study of devices that perceive their environment and define a course of action that will maximize its chance of achieving a given goal. A subset of artificial intelligence, in which machines learn how to complete a certain task without being explicitly programmed to do ...Read more >

In 2004 I went to deliver a talk and chair a session on Cyber War at College of Defence Management, Secunderabad. After the session one of the participant officers of Higher Defence Management Course who was doing his dissertation on a relevant topic engaged me in a discussion that North Korea has no internet connection and how do they do business. My answer that in today’s world no country can afford to have complete disconnect seemed not to satisfy him. Of course Sony happened ...Read more >