Excerpt: The Last War by Pravin Sawhney
In the event of another war between India and China, the latter will wrest Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh from India. At the same time, Pakistan will take the Siachen glacier. And the Kashmir resolution will top the items at the post-war negotiating table. Nuclear weapons, which were a major cause of fear all these decades, will have no role to play. The war will be over within 10 days, with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) demonstrating its prowess in disruptive technologies and imaginative war concepts in the first 72 hours.
The Indian military leadership believes that the war will be a skirmish or salami slicing operation fought at the tactical level. Therefore, India has placed undue importance on infrastructure building, which is meant to cater to the threat from the PLA’s excellent border management1 at the tactical level — this is a distraction from priorities essential to meet the enemy’s juggernaut. The PLA’s border management threat began with India’s 1998 nuclear tests when China’s intrusions and transgressions on the LAC increased. This threat was enhanced to forces-in-being or troops in situ requiring little or no preparatory time for assault after the 2017 Doklam crisis. The present threat is a combination of the PLA’s informatized (information domination and its denial to the enemy by systems destruction warfare) and intelligentized war (combat operations conducted with intelligent weapons using intelligent platforms with artificial intelligence as its core, and with technical support by intelligent networks, cloud, big data, and Internet of Military Things [IoMT]) preparedness where border infrastructure meant to facilitate Indian troops and weapon platforms movement to the LAC for tactical war will not help meet the Chinese military challenge.
According to American-Chinese scholar Yun Sun, ‘[I]n the event that a conflict is unavoidable, China could mobilize to an overwhelming capacity to achieve a decisive victory on the battlefield — which is why the Sino-Indian border war of 1962 was constantly mentioned during the Doklam standoff.’ The PLA’s decisive operational level campaign — in line with its Active Defence doctrine of combat on enemy soil — will involve two war theatres: the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims — it calls it Zangnan and considers it a part of Xizang (Tibet) — and Ladakh – Kashmir where the PLA will launch combined operations with Pakistan’s military against India.
The PLA will likely be ready to go to war with India by early 2024. But China is known to beat timeline assessments. For example, according to the US’s 2021 Pentagon report on China, “the People’s Republic of China likely intends to have at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, exceeding the pace and size the Department of Defence projected in 2020”. Moreover, following its 2015 military reforms that were completed in 2020 (they were to be done in five years), the PLA has geared up with its force structure, force posture, and force command for peace and war. This includes its Western Theatre Command (WTC) whose sole job is to fight the war with India.
Is war inevitable once the PLA is ready with its new age war capability?
No. Whether or not a war takes place will depend on how China assesses the geopolitical landscape at that time. What is certain is that the PLA will permanently maintain pressure on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with its grey zone operations below the war threshold, thereby ensuring that the Indian Army is unable to reduce its forces substantially in the foreseeable future. These grey zone operations will rise and ebb depending on Chinese ties with India at the given time, irrespective of a mutually agreed peaceful LAC. An additional complication has been added by a new boundary law enunciated by China which became effective from 1 January 2022. By stating this law, China has framed the territorial problem as an issue of its sovereignty, which will be defended at all costs. Beijing, therefore, will never give up its claim on Arunachal Pradesh. To reiterate this, China has given 15 places in Arunachal Pradesh Mandarin names, which is in addition to the six names it gave in April 2017, weeks before the Doklam crisis. This has put paid to any hope that the LAC, with some give and take, will become a mutually acceptable international border.
Moreover, grey zone operations conducted in peacetime will acquire a new meaning: while the PLA will be free to undertake them, any tactical action by the Indian Army on the LAC will lead to an escalation since it will be seen as an assault on Chinese sovereignty. For example, in August 2020, the Indian Army, in a daring tactical operation, occupied Kailash range in south Pangong Tso in Ladakh which overlooked the PLA’s garrison. In a quid pro quo move, the two sides agreed to disengage troops: the PLA from the north, and the Indian Army from the south of Pangong. Given this precedent, and the fact that the PLA’s border guards, unlike the Indian Army, are unlikely to physically hold the LAC, the possibility exists — according to army officials who make light of Chinese boundary law — of occupying Chinese territory by tactical operation. This window of opportunity has been closed.
Besides, since China is expected to go for the decisive war as the last resort, it will, until then, explore all possibilities to reset relations with India on its terms. It will also meticulously analyse the long-term global and regional trends including its ties with the US, the situation in the western Pacific Ocean especially the Taiwan Strait, the East China Sea and South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the integration of the Indian military into the US’s Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) strategy, the progress on the Quadrilateral (Quad) dialogue, the Australia, United Kingdom, and United States (AUKUS) nuclear powered submarine deal, Asia Pacific NATO and the fallout of the war on these. Only when it concludes that war is unavoidable would it unleash a lightning campaign, as sudden as its 2020 Ladakh operation.
The PLA’s conventional war will exhibit 10 distinctive characteristics.
One, the PLA will exercise total war control by dominating the primary battlespace comprising cyberspace, electromagnetic space, and outer space domains. It will, therefore, exert control over war aims, war concepts, speed, tempo, intensity, and outcome. This involves seizing the initiative, paralysing the enemy, dominating the escalation ladder, and laying grounds for war termination on one’s own terms.
Two, consequent to total war control, the PLA will combat simultaneously at strategic and operational levels of war, bypassing the tactical level of war, which is the strength of the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force (IAF). Moreover, the war will be unleashed suddenly without warning, crisis, and pre-war periods. The PLA’s strategic level, called the war zone, will include the whole-of-nation, while the operational level will be the combat zone across the two war theatres mentioned above. It will be the PLA’s war zone and combat zone operations versus the Indian military’s tactical operations. This requires explanation.
All wars are fought on three levels: tactical, operational, and strategic. The lowest level is tactical and involves battles with force on-force engagements, focused on attrition. Given this, bean-counting of assets on both sides assumes significance. The second level is operational, where the outcome of the series of battles is determined. This level is influenced by the highest level — the strategic level —which, for an optimal outcome, needs total synergy between the political and military leadership. The latter helps in maintenance of credible nuclear deterrence, and closing the loop quickly on political objectives, conventional war aims to meet the objectives, procurement of strategic and operation sustenance (ammunition, spares, and war materiel), and training for war. A strong strategic level gives wider options in planning and execution with fulsome initiative at the operational level.
Traditionally, war outcome is determined at the operational or campaign level in terms of war aims achieved, territory occupied, destruction or attrition of enemy combat power, and prisoners of war. Taking war to strategic level usually involves use of nuclear weapons for countervalue (on cities and society) and counterforce (on enemy nuclear weapons and military) targeting, which, except for the big bombs dropped by the US on Japan during World War II, has never been done.
Undeniably, combat at strategic level will have maximum impact on political leadership leading to its early cognitive defeat or capitulation. The PLA’s cyberwar, operating at the strategic level with countervalue and counterforce software weapons, would do exactly that. Unlike the use of nukes, which would kill and maim millions of civilians, cyberwar will not kill people but will bring life to a grinding halt. Cyberattacks have definite roles in peacetime, crisis, pre-war, and war.
The war zone will witness coordinated employment of cyber, outer space, and psychological operations. The PLA will disable or destroy Indian space assets by non-kinetic and kinetic means. Since Chinese submarine cable ships are already in the region, they will snoop, disrupt, or destroy submarine cables which deliver the internet to India.
Meanwhile, the entire combat zone — the rear and front of the battlespace, for instance, the whole of the state of Arunachal Pradesh — will be assaulted with accurate, coordinated, and intense firepower salvos with ballistic, hypersonic cruise missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles and AI-enabled swarms of subsonic and supersonic cruise missiles, and long-range precision munitions at the forefront with minimal collateral damage. The PLA has the largest inventory of missiles in the world.
Three, the PLA and Indian military will combat at different tempo and speed of war. The PLA’s tempo of war will be determined by the speed of light through cyberspace, and conventional surface-to-surface missiles with the ability to hit targets thousands of kilometres away at speeds of over Mach 20. One Mach, which is the speed of sound, is 1,235 km per hour, and the speed of light, which is in nanoseconds, is 6 300,000 km per second. In addition to the traditional missiles, bombs, and munitions, the PLA will place a premium on electronic warfare, cyber warfare, and directed energy weapons operating at the speed of light. The Indian military’s pace of war, on the other hand, will be determined by its fastest platforms. The conventional BrahMos cruise missile has a maximum speed of Mach 3. The IAF’s frontline Rafale aircraft’s speed is 2,450 kmph, and the Indian Army soldiers’ speed will be less than 5 km per hour in high altitude.
Four, the PLA’s massive sensors network on land, air, and in outer space will provide real-time situational awareness of the combat zone, operational logistics lifeline, and high value targets in the hinterland. There will be no place to hide from the PLA’s accurate multi-domain firepower.
Five, the PLA will dominate the information war, popularly referred to as grey zone operations, comprising ways to defeat a nation without direct military confrontation. Working under the PLA’s Political Work Department, it involves political, legal, economic, propaganda warfare, and the famous Chinese ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ or aggressive diplomacy meant to weaken the enemy’s resolve to fight. This is in line with Chinese strategic culture of winning without fighting.
For the Indian Army, information war comprises cyber war, electronic war, and psychological war, which it hopes to develop and apply across the entire spectrum of conflict including ‘no war no peace’ or counterterror operations.
Six, once the interoperability developed between the PLA and Pakistan military since 2012 translates into combined operations, there will be many operational surprises for the Indian military. Especially with the war in the Ladakh theatre extending across Ladakh and Gilgit–Baltistan to Siachen, Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK), and the Kashmir Valley.
Seven, the PLA will fight a totally or partially robotized war with human–machine collaboration. Instead of ‘human in the loop’, it will be ‘human on the loop’ (human controlled autonomy) or ‘human out of the loop’ (total autonomy). The loop refers to the sensor to shooter cycle.
Eight, the PLA will be bold, aggressive, and experimental in its war conducted at an accelerated pace by AI against the Indian military. With the enemy’s capabilities and war theatres known, there will be little fog or uncertainty or surprises in war for the PLA. It would, therefore, freely employ its unmanned systems, killer robots, and the Internet of Military Things (IoMT), which demonstrate the ultimate integration of unmanned ‘Things’ like guns, tanks, fighters, and so on in robotic war.
Nine, while the PLA will deliver intense and massive salvos of guided munitions and missiles, the Indian military will be conservative in its rates of firepower for two reasons: it would have to cater for two fronts (against China and Pakistan), and its entire specialized ammunition is imported. A PLA officer once told me ‘without a developed military industrial complex, any country can forget about military success’.
And 10, the Indian Army will face a paradoxical situation with its trained and acclimatized manpower. While more manpower would be an asset in peacetime to prevent the PLA’s intrusions on the LAC as part of its grey zone operations, in war, more manpower would lead to more body bags of Indian soldiers.
It will be an unmatched war, with the Indian military fighting with the 1980s Air-Land battle concept in the three physical domains of land, air, and sea versus the PLA’s campaign comprising three wars: information, informatized, and intelligentized, in the seven domains of air, land, sea (preferably undersea), outer space, cyber, electromagnetic spectrum, and near space or hypersonic (between 20 km and 100 km altitude beyond which outer space begins). The PLA’s seven war domains can be categorized under four battlespaces: physical, virtual, information, and cognition. For example, the physical battlespace will comprise land, air, sea, outer space, and near space domains. The virtual battlespace will include cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum. The information battlespace will have wired and wireless networks through which data passes. And the cognition battlespace — where information war will be unleashed — will involve a mind war, which will entail assaulting the enemy’s judgement. The PLA will emphasize cognitive confrontation and an early cognitive defeat of the enemy. Hence, the Indian military’s single physical battlespace will be pitted against the PLA’s four battlespaces.
In operational or campaign terms, the PLA’s seven war domains can also be divided into primary battlespace and secondary battlespace comprising land, air, sea, and near space. Without competitive capabilities in the primary battlespace, the war will be lost in the secondary battlespace.
…The Indian Army might be smug in the belief that without PLA boots on the ground — human soldiers fighting for capture of physical territory — the war will not be won. Without doubt, the Indian soldier will fight valiantly. But what if the enemy facing him comprises unmanned machines and humanoid robots with no blood to spill?
For example, the PLA could assault thousands of Indian soldiers holding the forward edge and operational depth of the combat zone with its version of slaughter bots. These have AI-based facial recognition (the Chinese are world leaders in this capability called Computer Vision) and a nose-shaped explosive meant to hit and penetrate the human face. These could be released in the thousands by the PLA. Thus, instead of the traditional Indian Army slogan of ‘one bullet, one enemy’, it will be ‘one slaughter bot, one enemy’ with no PLA human soldier needing to be in close combat. The PLA has successfully demonstrated its capability of releasing swarms of hundreds of mini suicide drones from an army truck and helicopters in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR); these could be converted into slaughter bots. Thus, boots on the ground are no longer essential for the PLA.
The cognitive dilemma of the Indian Army will be compounded since the PLA will fight by bringing all domain capabilities across the entire combat zone. This could be done in two ways: as mission set IoMT comprising the PLA’s multi-domain capabilities. Or, by employing capabilities to wage independent wars, namely, cyber war, invisible war (for the electromagnetic spectrum), missile war, light (directed energy weapons) war, drone war, and political war (information warfare).
Building capabilities and going to war are different issues. Senior Colonel Xu Weidi of the PLA’s National Defence University told me during my August 2012 visit to Beijing that, ‘Since capability cannot be hidden, intentions should not be disclosed.’ China did precisely that after the 2017 Doklam crisis. It built capabilities, but never disclosed its deep disappointment with the Modi government until it concluded that 2020 Ladakh had become unavoidable.
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In the event of another war between India and China, the latter will wrest Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh from India. At the same time, Pakistan will take the Siachen glacier. And the Kashmir resolution will top the items at the post-war negotiating table. Nuclear weapons, which were a major cause of fear all these decades, will have no role to play. The war will be over within 10 days, with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) demonstrating its prowess in disruptive technologies and imaginative war concepts in the first 72 hours.
The Indian military leadership believes that the war will be a skirmish or salami slicing operation fought at the tactical level. Therefore, India has placed undue importance on infrastructure building, which is meant to cater to the threat from the PLA’s excellent border management1 at the tactical level — this is a distraction from priorities essential to meet the enemy’s juggernaut. The PLA’s border management threat began with India’s 1998 nuclear tests when China’s intrusions and transgressions on the LAC increased. This threat was enhanced to forces-in-being or troops in situ requiring little or no preparatory time for assault after the 2017 Doklam crisis. The present threat is a combination of the PLA’s informatized (information domination and its denial to the enemy by systems destruction warfare) and intelligentized war (combat operations conducted with intelligent weapons using intelligent platforms with artificial intelligence as its core, and with technical support by intelligent networks, cloud, big data, and Internet of Military Things [IoMT]) preparedness where border infrastructure meant to facilitate Indian troops and weapon platforms movement to the LAC for tactical war will not help meet the Chinese military challenge.
According to American-Chinese scholar Yun Sun, ‘[I]n the event that a conflict is unavoidable, China could mobilize to an overwhelming capacity to achieve a decisive victory on the battlefield — which is why the Sino-Indian border war of 1962 was constantly mentioned during the Doklam standoff.’ The PLA’s decisive operational level campaign — in line with its Active Defence doctrine of combat on enemy soil — will involve two war theatres: the entire state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims — it calls it Zangnan and considers it a part of Xizang (Tibet) — and Ladakh – Kashmir where the PLA will launch combined operations with Pakistan’s military against India.
The PLA will likely be ready to go to war with India by early 2024. But China is known to beat timeline assessments. For example, according to the US’s 2021 Pentagon report on China, “the People’s Republic of China likely intends to have at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, exceeding the pace and size the Department of Defence projected in 2020”. Moreover, following its 2015 military reforms that were completed in 2020 (they were to be done in five years), the PLA has geared up with its force structure, force posture, and force command for peace and war. This includes its Western Theatre Command (WTC) whose sole job is to fight the war with India.
Is war inevitable once the PLA is ready with its new age war capability?
No. Whether or not a war takes place will depend on how China assesses the geopolitical landscape at that time. What is certain is that the PLA will permanently maintain pressure on the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with its grey zone operations below the war threshold, thereby ensuring that the Indian Army is unable to reduce its forces substantially in the foreseeable future. These grey zone operations will rise and ebb depending on Chinese ties with India at the given time, irrespective of a mutually agreed peaceful LAC. An additional complication has been added by a new boundary law enunciated by China which became effective from 1 January 2022. By stating this law, China has framed the territorial problem as an issue of its sovereignty, which will be defended at all costs. Beijing, therefore, will never give up its claim on Arunachal Pradesh. To reiterate this, China has given 15 places in Arunachal Pradesh Mandarin names, which is in addition to the six names it gave in April 2017, weeks before the Doklam crisis. This has put paid to any hope that the LAC, with some give and take, will become a mutually acceptable international border.
Moreover, grey zone operations conducted in peacetime will acquire a new meaning: while the PLA will be free to undertake them, any tactical action by the Indian Army on the LAC will lead to an escalation since it will be seen as an assault on Chinese sovereignty. For example, in August 2020, the Indian Army, in a daring tactical operation, occupied Kailash range in south Pangong Tso in Ladakh which overlooked the PLA’s garrison. In a quid pro quo move, the two sides agreed to disengage troops: the PLA from the north, and the Indian Army from the south of Pangong. Given this precedent, and the fact that the PLA’s border guards, unlike the Indian Army, are unlikely to physically hold the LAC, the possibility exists — according to army officials who make light of Chinese boundary law — of occupying Chinese territory by tactical operation. This window of opportunity has been closed.
Besides, since China is expected to go for the decisive war as the last resort, it will, until then, explore all possibilities to reset relations with India on its terms. It will also meticulously analyse the long-term global and regional trends including its ties with the US, the situation in the western Pacific Ocean especially the Taiwan Strait, the East China Sea and South China Sea, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the integration of the Indian military into the US’s Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) strategy, the progress on the Quadrilateral (Quad) dialogue, the Australia, United Kingdom, and United States (AUKUS) nuclear powered submarine deal, Asia Pacific NATO and the fallout of the war on these. Only when it concludes that war is unavoidable would it unleash a lightning campaign, as sudden as its 2020 Ladakh operation.
The PLA’s conventional war will exhibit 10 distinctive characteristics.
One, the PLA will exercise total war control by dominating the primary battlespace comprising cyberspace, electromagnetic space, and outer space domains. It will, therefore, exert control over war aims, war concepts, speed, tempo, intensity, and outcome. This involves seizing the initiative, paralysing the enemy, dominating the escalation ladder, and laying grounds for war termination on one’s own terms.
Two, consequent to total war control, the PLA will combat simultaneously at strategic and operational levels of war, bypassing the tactical level of war, which is the strength of the Indian Army and the Indian Air Force (IAF). Moreover, the war will be unleashed suddenly without warning, crisis, and pre-war periods. The PLA’s strategic level, called the war zone, will include the whole-of-nation, while the operational level will be the combat zone across the two war theatres mentioned above. It will be the PLA’s war zone and combat zone operations versus the Indian military’s tactical operations. This requires explanation.
All wars are fought on three levels: tactical, operational, and strategic. The lowest level is tactical and involves battles with force on-force engagements, focused on attrition. Given this, bean-counting of assets on both sides assumes significance. The second level is operational, where the outcome of the series of battles is determined. This level is influenced by the highest level — the strategic level —which, for an optimal outcome, needs total synergy between the political and military leadership. The latter helps in maintenance of credible nuclear deterrence, and closing the loop quickly on political objectives, conventional war aims to meet the objectives, procurement of strategic and operation sustenance (ammunition, spares, and war materiel), and training for war. A strong strategic level gives wider options in planning and execution with fulsome initiative at the operational level.
Traditionally, war outcome is determined at the operational or campaign level in terms of war aims achieved, territory occupied, destruction or attrition of enemy combat power, and prisoners of war. Taking war to strategic level usually involves use of nuclear weapons for countervalue (on cities and society) and counterforce (on enemy nuclear weapons and military) targeting, which, except for the big bombs dropped by the US on Japan during World War II, has never been done.
Undeniably, combat at strategic level will have maximum impact on political leadership leading to its early cognitive defeat or capitulation. The PLA’s cyberwar, operating at the strategic level with countervalue and counterforce software weapons, would do exactly that. Unlike the use of nukes, which would kill and maim millions of civilians, cyberwar will not kill people but will bring life to a grinding halt. Cyberattacks have definite roles in peacetime, crisis, pre-war, and war.
The war zone will witness coordinated employment of cyber, outer space, and psychological operations. The PLA will disable or destroy Indian space assets by non-kinetic and kinetic means. Since Chinese submarine cable ships are already in the region, they will snoop, disrupt, or destroy submarine cables which deliver the internet to India.
Meanwhile, the entire combat zone — the rear and front of the battlespace, for instance, the whole of the state of Arunachal Pradesh — will be assaulted with accurate, coordinated, and intense firepower salvos with ballistic, hypersonic cruise missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles and AI-enabled swarms of subsonic and supersonic cruise missiles, and long-range precision munitions at the forefront with minimal collateral damage. The PLA has the largest inventory of missiles in the world.
Three, the PLA and Indian military will combat at different tempo and speed of war. The PLA’s tempo of war will be determined by the speed of light through cyberspace, and conventional surface-to-surface missiles with the ability to hit targets thousands of kilometres away at speeds of over Mach 20. One Mach, which is the speed of sound, is 1,235 km per hour, and the speed of light, which is in nanoseconds, is 6 300,000 km per second. In addition to the traditional missiles, bombs, and munitions, the PLA will place a premium on electronic warfare, cyber warfare, and directed energy weapons operating at the speed of light. The Indian military’s pace of war, on the other hand, will be determined by its fastest platforms. The conventional BrahMos cruise missile has a maximum speed of Mach 3. The IAF’s frontline Rafale aircraft’s speed is 2,450 kmph, and the Indian Army soldiers’ speed will be less than 5 km per hour in high altitude.
Four, the PLA’s massive sensors network on land, air, and in outer space will provide real-time situational awareness of the combat zone, operational logistics lifeline, and high value targets in the hinterland. There will be no place to hide from the PLA’s accurate multi-domain firepower.
Five, the PLA will dominate the information war, popularly referred to as grey zone operations, comprising ways to defeat a nation without direct military confrontation. Working under the PLA’s Political Work Department, it involves political, legal, economic, propaganda warfare, and the famous Chinese ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ or aggressive diplomacy meant to weaken the enemy’s resolve to fight. This is in line with Chinese strategic culture of winning without fighting.
For the Indian Army, information war comprises cyber war, electronic war, and psychological war, which it hopes to develop and apply across the entire spectrum of conflict including ‘no war no peace’ or counterterror operations.
Six, once the interoperability developed between the PLA and Pakistan military since 2012 translates into combined operations, there will be many operational surprises for the Indian military. Especially with the war in the Ladakh theatre extending across Ladakh and Gilgit–Baltistan to Siachen, Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK), and the Kashmir Valley.
Seven, the PLA will fight a totally or partially robotized war with human–machine collaboration. Instead of ‘human in the loop’, it will be ‘human on the loop’ (human controlled autonomy) or ‘human out of the loop’ (total autonomy). The loop refers to the sensor to shooter cycle.
Eight, the PLA will be bold, aggressive, and experimental in its war conducted at an accelerated pace by AI against the Indian military. With the enemy’s capabilities and war theatres known, there will be little fog or uncertainty or surprises in war for the PLA. It would, therefore, freely employ its unmanned systems, killer robots, and the Internet of Military Things (IoMT), which demonstrate the ultimate integration of unmanned ‘Things’ like guns, tanks, fighters, and so on in robotic war.
Nine, while the PLA will deliver intense and massive salvos of guided munitions and missiles, the Indian military will be conservative in its rates of firepower for two reasons: it would have to cater for two fronts (against China and Pakistan), and its entire specialized ammunition is imported. A PLA officer once told me ‘without a developed military industrial complex, any country can forget about military success’.
And 10, the Indian Army will face a paradoxical situation with its trained and acclimatized manpower. While more manpower would be an asset in peacetime to prevent the PLA’s intrusions on the LAC as part of its grey zone operations, in war, more manpower would lead to more body bags of Indian soldiers.
It will be an unmatched war, with the Indian military fighting with the 1980s Air-Land battle concept in the three physical domains of land, air, and sea versus the PLA’s campaign comprising three wars: information, informatized, and intelligentized, in the seven domains of air, land, sea (preferably undersea), outer space, cyber, electromagnetic spectrum, and near space or hypersonic (between 20 km and 100 km altitude beyond which outer space begins). The PLA’s seven war domains can be categorized under four battlespaces: physical, virtual, information, and cognition. For example, the physical battlespace will comprise land, air, sea, outer space, and near space domains. The virtual battlespace will include cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum. The information battlespace will have wired and wireless networks through which data passes. And the cognition battlespace — where information war will be unleashed — will involve a mind war, which will entail assaulting the enemy’s judgement. The PLA will emphasize cognitive confrontation and an early cognitive defeat of the enemy. Hence, the Indian military’s single physical battlespace will be pitted against the PLA’s four battlespaces.
In operational or campaign terms, the PLA’s seven war domains can also be divided into primary battlespace and secondary battlespace comprising land, air, sea, and near space. Without competitive capabilities in the primary battlespace, the war will be lost in the secondary battlespace.
…The Indian Army might be smug in the belief that without PLA boots on the ground — human soldiers fighting for capture of physical territory — the war will not be won. Without doubt, the Indian soldier will fight valiantly. But what if the enemy facing him comprises unmanned machines and humanoid robots with no blood to spill?
For example, the PLA could assault thousands of Indian soldiers holding the forward edge and operational depth of the combat zone with its version of slaughter bots. These have AI-based facial recognition (the Chinese are world leaders in this capability called Computer Vision) and a nose-shaped explosive meant to hit and penetrate the human face. These could be released in the thousands by the PLA. Thus, instead of the traditional Indian Army slogan of ‘one bullet, one enemy’, it will be ‘one slaughter bot, one enemy’ with no PLA human soldier needing to be in close combat. The PLA has successfully demonstrated its capability of releasing swarms of hundreds of mini suicide drones from an army truck and helicopters in Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR); these could be converted into slaughter bots. Thus, boots on the ground are no longer essential for the PLA.
The cognitive dilemma of the Indian Army will be compounded since the PLA will fight by bringing all domain capabilities across the entire combat zone. This could be done in two ways: as mission set IoMT comprising the PLA’s multi-domain capabilities. Or, by employing capabilities to wage independent wars, namely, cyber war, invisible war (for the electromagnetic spectrum), missile war, light (directed energy weapons) war, drone war, and political war (information warfare).
Building capabilities and going to war are different issues. Senior Colonel Xu Weidi of the PLA’s National Defence University told me during my August 2012 visit to Beijing that, ‘Since capability cannot be hidden, intentions should not be disclosed.’ China did precisely that after the 2017 Doklam crisis. It built capabilities, but never disclosed its deep disappointment with the Modi government until it concluded that 2020 Ladakh had become unavoidable.
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