‘Not just military's job': Army Chief urges citizens, scientists to join nation's defence

Indian Express

15 hours ago

Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi on Saturday said India's future security would rest on a 'whole-of-nation' approach, where soldiers, scientists, industry, academia, and citizens work in unison.
Speaking at IIT Madras for the inauguration of the Indian Army Research Cell, he described how technology, civil preparedness, and public participation were as vital as military action.
He also spoke about Operation Sindoor — the precision strikes launched in May inside Pakistan and PoK in response to the Pahalgam terror attack.
Dwivedi's address drew heavily on his service's internal post-action assessments, which have focused on both technology integration and narrative management. 'Victory is in the mind,' he said. He pointed to Pakistan's success in convincing its domestic population that it had prevailed — aided, he suggested, by symbolic acts such as the promotion of its army chief to field marshal. India's answer was a deliberate, coordinated information campaign.
'If you ask a Pakistani whether you lost or won, he'd say, my chief has become field marshal, we must have won only,' Dwivedi said, adding, 'The first messaging we did was, 'Justice done.' That hit the maximum, I am told, in the world today in terms of the number of hits.'
The Army paired that message with visible briefings, including press conferences by two women officers — one from the Army, another from the Air Force. Even the operation's logo, now widely circulated online, was designed in-house by a Lieutenant Colonel and a non-commissioned officer.
Dwivedi framed modern defence as a shared responsibility, and highlighted initiatives from community bunkers along the border to advanced drones built with Indian institutes.
Drawing attention to all modern war fronts, he noted how some nations have insulated their civilian life from the visible effects of war. Citing Moscow during the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict, he said that despite the scale of fighting, 'you don't realise that the war is on' when you are in the Russian capital.
Elaborating on the importance of shielding the population from panic and disruption, even in times of heightened military operations — Dwivedi said Operation Sindoor was fought like a game of chess, not in the open-field conventions of 20th-century warfare, but in the 'grey zone,' where operations are calibrated to fall just short of full-scale war while still inflicting strategic damage.
'We did not know what is the next move the enemy is going to take and what are we going to do. This is something we called the grey zone… Somewhere, we were giving him a checkmate and somewhere we were kind of going in for the kill at the risk of even losing our own — but that's what life is all about,' he said.
By April 25, Northern Command had planned and executed strikes on seven of nine identified targets — hitting what Dwivedi called 'the heartland' for the first time, destroying terror training infrastructure and killing large numbers of militants. Two additional targets, located deeper in Pakistan, were struck with Indian Air Force assets because of the extended ranges required. Early on May 7, aerial attacks eliminated over 100 fighters at camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. 'This was the first time we hit the heartland and of course our target was the nursery and the masters.'
The operation, he said, was anchored in three factors: a rare clarity of political will, integrated tri-service planning, and the rapid fusion of intelligence with technology. 'All three chiefs were very clear that something had to be done,' Dwivedi said. 'A free hand was given — you decide what is to be done. That kind of confidence, political direction, and political clarity we saw for the first time.'
The Army Chief framed Operation Sindoor not merely as retaliation but as a demonstration of India's evolving capability to operate in multi-domain conflict — land, air, cyber, and space — with tight integration between agencies and services. For the first time, he said, a single operational name was used by the Army, Navy, and Air Force, replacing the earlier practice of separate codenames.
He said when he was briefed about the operation's name, he thought it was Operation Sindu — the Indus River. 'I said excellent sir, Indus Water Treaty has just been frozen by you. Then I am told, it is not Sindu but Operation Sindoor. Just see this one name has connected the whole nation together,' he said, adding that every time a woman applies Sindoor, 'she will always remember the soldier.'
Narrative shaping, he said, is no longer secondary to battlefield success; it is part of the operation's architecture from the outset. 'It is about influencing the domestic population, the adversary's population, and the neutral population,' he said, describing a 'narrative management system' that tracked social sentiment, countered disinformation, and used trusted voices to reinforce the official account.
Much of the speech was devoted to the technological backbone of Operation Sindoor. India's forces, Dwivedi said, are moving from 'muddy trenches to the internet of military things,' where data, sensors, and autonomous systems shape battlefield decisions in real time.
On the intelligence side, the Army sought to unify its picture with the Navy and Air Force, layering surveillance data into a common operational view. The operation employed a mix of manned platforms, commercial satellite imagery, and 'pseudo-satellites' — high-altitude platforms capable of loitering over target areas — to track activity before and during the strikes. Tethered drones were used to overcome jamming, maintaining persistent eyes over critical zones.
Social media and open-source data also played a role. Dwivedi alluded to 'good Samaritans' in India's global diaspora who helped gather relevant imagery and signals. Light-mapping analysis, which tracks night-time illumination patterns, was used to detect changes in activity.
The campaign also tested India's capacity for 'federated' versus centralised data flows — balancing the resilience of distributed systems with the efficiency of unified command networks. A secure communications platform, developed with IIT Madras and known as Sambhav, allowed real-time coordination but also revealed the dangers of overloading channels during crises.
In the air and on the ground, he said, the operation underscored the accelerating drone-counter-drone cycle. Indian units employed modified commercial drones, some adapted in partnership with the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), for both reconnaissance and strike missions. Counter-drone systems, including soft-kill jammers and hard-kill interceptors, were integrated into the defensive plan. 'Drone and counter-drone is a ratcheting effect,' Dwivedi said. 'Both have to keep overcoming each other's strength.'
Precision-guided munitions, converted from 'dumb' bombs, were a major factor in the operation's cost-effectiveness. Extended-range artillery and rocket systems were employed with circular error probabilities as low as two meters, according to the Army Chief. The doctrine, he argued, is shifting from attrition to precision: 'When the precision has increased, the cost does not make a difference — the impact does.'
Talking about the civilian dimension of the border conflict, he said that India's population density near the Line of Control is lower than on the Pakistani side — a fact he suggested acts as a deterrent against large-scale attacks on civilian areas. Still, he said, the Army invests in civil defence exercises, construction of community bunkers, and coordination with the National Cadet Corps and local authorities to ensure awareness and readiness.
The general's broader message was that future wars will require the 'whole-of-nation' approach — not just military forces, but academia, industry, government research agencies, and even citizen volunteers. He cited the Army's creation of a Technology Committee with 16 clusters, partnerships with IITs and the Indian Institute of Science, and an internship programme to draw engineers into military projects.
Dwivedi urged faculty and students of IIT-Madras to contribute to priority areas including advanced composites, microelectronics, secure communications, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and synthetic biology.