MODERNISING INDIAN MECHANISED COMBAT VEHICLES

With an eye on meeting India's border challenges, veteran tanker RAJ MEHTA does a comprehensive and much-desired scan of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian mechanised war, where the battlefield is being dictated by drones far more than other battlefield force multipliers. He analyses how these lessons apply to Indian realities and the country's ongoing modernisation efforts before suggesting some urgent doctrinal changes

- RAJ MEHTA

Not commonly known in public perception, it wasn't the Americans but, rather, Soviet thinkers, leading among them, Dr Vladimir Lefebvre in the 1960s and Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov in the 1970s, who initiated the theoretical constructs that formed the basis of the Military Technological Revolution (MTR).

Along with this, they also developed advanced systematic approaches to Information Warfare (IW) such as Precision Guided Munitions, automated systems, space control, and robotics; all of these developments emphasising dominance through advanced information and weapons technologies.

MTR included concepts such as Reconnaissance-Strike Complex (RSC), envisaging networks that integrated sensors, communication and PGMs as precursors to Network Centric Warfare. This was the RMA that led to the spectacular US-led Coalition victory in the 1991 Gulf War - an RMA led by 'software, hardware and wetware (people)'. By 1996, the US had expanded this to a 'system of systems' which 'identified, tracked and destroyed targets in the tactical, theatre or global setting'.

RMAs, by broad definition, are 'periods of discontinuous change that render obsolete existing means of conducting war'. Today, drone-based Al technology, autonomous systems, hypersonic missiles, space systems, and stealth technologies seem poised to create another 'discontinuous change' in the conduct of war.

Should this be taken as a thread of the 1970s MTR or a new RMA altogether? The consensus appears to term this drone-led warfighting as a new RMA. While this debate can occupy theorists, what is real is its impact on mechanised war and its enabling environment, with the Russo-Ukrainian war as its best battleground, far more than the Gaza war.