NEW DELHI: India today faces a fundamentally different set of security challenges, driven by rapid technological disruption that is reshaping the nature of warfare, Chief of Defence Staff Gen Anil Chauhan said Friday as he linked complex threats to the rise of AI, cyber capabilities, big data and private technology companies. “Technology today is defining strategy and war-winning strategy,” Gen Chauhan said during his lecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s birth anniversary, adding nations were fighting informal, proxy and hybrid wars rather than declared conflicts.The world is witnessing not incremental change but what Gen Chauhan described as “great disruption” – geopolitical, geo-economic and technological – with profound implications for the military. He referred to Operation Sindoor, noting modern military operations increasingly relied on precision, speed and multi-domain integration rather than geography alone. “There was a time when geography defined strategy. Today, technology defines strategy.”He also warned of “cognitive colonialism”, with societies influenced and destabilised through information operations, narrative manipulation and psychological warfare enabled by AI, machine learning and data mining. “Traditional colonialism was led by trading companies. New colonialism (is) by multinational corporations. Cognitive colonialism will be ushered in by large IT and data mining companies,” he said, cautioning such disruptions could engineer social disorder without a single shot being fired.Linking these challenges to Bose’s legacy, Chauhan said India was dismantling colonial mindsets and building a unified national identity rooted in strategic autonomy. He stressed on self-reliance, military preparedness, anticipation of threats and societal resilience being essential to preserve India’s sovereignty in an era where “might is right” and “rules-based global order is under strain”.
