‘We won Op Sindoor’ by integrating different systems: Why India’s military systems need to ‘talk’ to each other | Exclusive | Today’s news

India’s ability to integrate various military systems during Operation Sindoor offered a key lesson for future warfare – weapons, sensors and platforms from different manufacturers must be able to communicate and operate seamlessly, Dr Jaijit Bhattacharya, technology policy expert, told LiveMint.

“We won Operation Sindoor because we were perhaps the only army in the world that was able to integrate various military systems together,” Bhattacharya told LiveMint on the sidelines of the Defense Tech Summit organized by the Center for Emerging Technologies at USI.

Bhattacharya, president of the Center for Digital Economy Policy Research (C-DEP), said India’s growing reliance on networked systems, data and artificial intelligence makes open architecture and interoperability increasingly important for the armed forces.

According to Bhattacharya, the challenge is to ensure that interoperability is built into defense systems from the design stage, rather than being created by the military during operations.

Bhattacharya said modern militaries cannot afford to rely on closed technology ecosystems that limit the integration of systems from different manufacturers.

“We need to have open systems and open architecture. You can’t give me a closed system like Apple and say you can only integrate my systems and my missiles. That’s not acceptable,” he said.

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This issue is particularly relevant as the Indian armed forces operate a wide variety of platforms and weapons sourced from many domestic and foreign manufacturers.

Bhattacharya said India’s experience during Operation Sindoor showed that the military can overcome these technological hurdles, but warned that such integration should not depend on solutions.

“But we did it in spite of the military systems providers, not because they facilitated it,” he said.

Why military technology must adapt

Bhattacharya said militaries cannot assume that technologies that prove effective in one conflict will retain the same advantage in another.

“The number one lesson from every single operation is that the moment the operation is over, everything that you used to win the battle and the war becomes obsolete more or less immediately. Every battle is different,” he said.

“If the data is poisoned, it limits my brain in the war.

As warfare becomes increasingly data-centric, Bhattacharya said protecting the integrity of military data is becoming as important as collecting it.

“One of the key pillars of warfare is data-centric warfare. If the data is poisoned, it limits my brain to wage war,” he said.

He compared military communication and data networks to the nervous system of a biological organism.

“In the biological world, you’ll see that the most venomous snakes are the ones with neurotoxins. If you compromise the communication system, the nervous systems, then that’s the most lethal impact.”

Software backdoors could create new risks on the battlefield

Bhattacharya also identified vulnerabilities in the software powering modern military equipment.

“In those billions of lines of code written, you’re going to have an order that says ‘if I want to get into this as a manufacturer, I should be able to get in through this backdoor’ … so the technologies become critical,” he said.

Cheap drones, expensive missiles

The proliferation of cheap drones has created another challenge for militaries: avoiding a situation where a low-cost unmanned platform requires a much more expensive weapon to destroy.

Bhattacharya said India’s response demonstrated the importance of tailoring countermeasures to the type of threat.

“The beauty of what the military has done is to create a response that is unprecedented and use different kinds of weapons for different kinds of drones. We don’t want to spend millions of dollars on missiles against small, cheap drones,” he said.

Intelligence transcends 360 degrees

Bhattacharya said military intelligence is also evolving as technology expands the sources and dimensions of information available to the armed forces.

“Information gathering is 360 degrees and with Adint it goes beyond 360°,” he said.

On AI, Bhattacharya said India cannot build an AI army by simply adapting technologies developed elsewhere.

“If you don’t have an industrial complex, you can’t build an army on it,” he said. “We don’t have these systems in AI. An AI army would require more than just algorithms,” he added.

Neuro-symbolic artificial intelligence could provide a handrail

Bhattacharya also discussed the need for safeguards when AI is deployed in sensitive military applications.

“You either distill the open source models that are out there and then you put a guardrail on top of that — basically it’s called neuro-symbolic AI. The neuro part is what you distill, and the symbolic part is what you code around it so that there’s no wrong action that the AI ​​does,” he said.