India Requires Capabilities For Tackling The Grey Zone Warfare Says The Army Chief
According to a report published in The Times Of India, General Manoj Pandey has told on Wednesday that, India right now requires the capabilities for negating or mitigating the grey zone warfare which is pursued by Pakistan and China. It shall keep them on the back foot and prevent them from causing disturbances in India, often. General Pandey has also underlined the criticality of strategic defense instruments to eliminate full-blown wars.
The legacy challenges of unsettled borders keep India engaged. It is vital to understand that infirmities across border management shall lead to wider conflicts. This is the reason why the first primary thing that comes across is to have strategic deterrence instruments. It has become very essential going by the present state, said General Pandey during a conference.
Even though General Pandey refrained from elaborating any further on this point during the conference, it was understood that the reference was to the sheer utility of India’s nuclear weapons in deterring Pakistan and China. At a very hectic pace, China has been building the border infrastructure development. They have even not reduced the troops from the LOC.
The job of Grey zone warfare is to exploit the space of operations between war and peace. It is done to change the coherence of the adversary or the status quo. This is something that China has mastered over the years through its salami-slicing and other tactics.
Applying Grey zone aggression has become a very important preferred strategy in conflict prosecution. Its scope has got enhanced by technological advancements. Without naming anyone General Pandey has said that he would like to emphasize that India’s adversary pursuits have gone against them across the grey zone.
These entail every aspect within the gambit of security. This is why it is not exclusive only across the military domain. He said that India needs capabilities for mitigating and negating such attacks and also to keep the adversaries in the reactive mode, perpetually.
The IAF chief a few days back also said that India requires upgrading both defensive and offensive space capabilities to safeguard its assets. Talking at length about the lessons which have been learned from the current Russia and Ukraine war, the army chief has told that self-sufficiency in vital defense technologies and investments in Research and Development are inescapable according to the needs of the present times.
The Indian defense industry is rising to its challenges and the payoffs have started to fructify. For the design and development category, fourteen projects amounting to more than sixty-one crores are being pursued. Currently, seventeen projects have been taken up with the premiere institutions like IITs in sensors, robotics, smart munitions, lightweight armor, high-powered lasers, low-light imaging, habitats for high-altitude areas, a range extension of artillery shells, and UAV jamming.
Under the Make-II project category, prototype development has been funded by the industry, and forty-five projects costing about twenty-eight thousand crores are in the process. The army is also leveraging upon the vibrant startup ecosystem with forty-two projects in Indian Defense and Excellence category. Nine projects under them which cost around three hundred crores have already begun.
