Obituaries for standing armies have been written many times before the inflection of Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems (LAWS) as technology’s newest challenge to mankind reignites the debate. The perception fight has been on the necessity for a large standing army in times of peace or whenever we are able to establish a friendly neighbourhood through deft diplomacy, alliances or by virtue of absolute economic supremacy.

Need for an Army?

There have been ethical and moral high-principled debates about evils of a standing army which eats up enormous resources of the state when, in fact, more needy projects in healthcare, infrastructure or say, education badly need them. Then there is braggadocio grandstanding of delusional leaders. After India got Independence, the first commander-in-chief of the Indian armed forces General Robert Lockhart had presented a paper to Nehru which had a plan for the Indian Army. Nehru’s reply was shocking. He said, “We don’t need defence plan. Our policy is non-violence. You can scrap the army. The police are good enough to meet our security needs.” In September 1947 he directed to reduce the strength of army from 2,80,000 to 1,50,000. In the fiscal year of 1950-51, over 50,000 army personnel were sent home. And there followed the shock of a humiliating defeat in 1962.

But the euphoria of peace after long fought bitter wars or independence after bloodletting revolutions or plain peaceful satyagraha, as perhaps was the case with India, can cloud judgments. Armies are viewed as plain resource guzzling dinosaurs or looked at with suspicion of intent. After disparate English colonies came together to declare independence from Britain and form the United States of America, one of its founding fathers, James Madison had said, “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.” Interestingly, an US State Department website reads thus, “Wrenching memories of the Old World lingered in the 13 original English colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America, giving rise to deep opposition to the maintenance of a standing army in time of peace. All too often the standing armies of Europe were regarded as, at best, a rationale for imposing high taxes, and, at worst, a means to control the civilian population and extort its wealth.” Paradoxically, the US today maintains one of largest and most expensive war machines in the world.

Ethics and Morality Abound

The debates hinged on ethical, moral or doctrinal principles thus far. Advent of technologies such as LAWS, drones, robots, hyper missiles and cyber capabilities take the debate to a new plain altogether. The convergence of AI, drones and robotics leading to the fielding of LAWS raise serious questions about the nature of future warfare as such and the larger question of utility of standing armies as we know them. LAWS are keeping many awake around the world, including the UN. These machines, robots and drones, seen in sci-fi movies like ‘The terminator’ have now been tested and possibly some used in actual combat, raising serious ethical dilemmas. The development is far more seismic than all other technological inventions the humankind had known so far in the sphere of warfare. The Convention of Certain Weapon Systems (CCW) has framework of rules that bans or restricts use of weapons that cause indiscriminate suffering and damage, such as incendiary explosives, blinding lasers and booby traps that don’t distinguish between fighters and civilians. The convention has no provisions for killer robots though.

Admittedly, the CCW provisions were not effective in achieving the purpose for which they were framed even before the LAWS emerged in the horizon. Umpteen drone strikes across a wide swathe of territory in the middle-east by the US have caused heavy civilian casualties in the past two decades. Despite the fact that they are ultimately controlled and operated by real people though from locations thousands of miles away, thousands of innocent lives have been lost due to a number of reasons including crew fatigue and reliance on half-baked intelligence.

In the not-too-distant future, the soldier may be seen as a liability in the battlefront and best replaced with machines like the LAWS

The US drone strike on August 29, 2021 as it scrambled to complete its hurried and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan by August 31, 2021 is a case in point. It killed three adults, including a man who worked for a US aid group, and seven children. The strike came days after IS-K, the group’s Afghanistan branch said they were behind a devastating bomb attack outside Kabul airport on August 26 where thousands of Afghans had gathered to try to flee the country, killing at least 170 people including 13 US service personnel. The US drone strike was meant to retrieve some prestige and was to be seen as seizing the initiative back after being forced to do a most disorderly withdrawal. Instead, it exposed all the underlying reasons why US failed to secure Afghanistan despite having the world’s most powerful and expensive combat assets. If the people who man these control stations far removed from the scene and who choose targets and decide whether to shoot can make such ghastly errors, what about systems that eliminates the intervention of the human altogether relying solely on sensors, software and machine processes?

Changing the Face of Battlefields

Technology is altering the nature of warfighting with breath-taking speed as the innovation cycle shortens and capacity to process data becomes even more faster and bigger with blockchain and AI. With inexpensive, combat-ready drones proliferating on battlefields all over the world, in the not-too-distant future unsuspecting soldiers might get killed just by getting out of their positions for a moment to go to the bathroom. When Azerbaijan took over the skies in its fight with Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in September-November 2020, winning the air war with commercial Turkish and kamikaze drones, one thing started to become clear to strategists, it’s becoming easier to hunt and kill troops than ever before—and to do so on the cheap. In the waning days of the conflict, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev even touted a laundry list of Armenian equipment purportedly destroyed or captured, including nearly 250 tanks, 50 infantry fighting vehicles, and four Russian-made S-300 missile defence systems, as well as 198 trucks and 17 self-propelled artillery units. In mid-October, Aliyev credited Turkish drones with helping his military to destroy more than $1 billion worth of Armenian equipment. Moderating for the bluff and bluster that may have been part of propaganda and perception management, the shenanigans raise the possibility that in the not-too-distant future, the soldier may be seen as a liability in the battlefront and best replaced with machines like the LAWS.

Technology Adaption by Indian Army

The threat to India’s security and stability as a nation and to its enduring philosophy ingrained since the Vedic times are real and present. The Indian Armed Forces continue to face grave challenges both from China as well as Pakistan. In order to squarely meet those challenges, the Armed Forces continues to modernise and induct sophisticated weapon systems and sensors albeit with focus on indigenisation with an eye on achieving a reasonable degree of strategic independence. Rafale MMRCA aircrafts and S-400 missile defence systems have added the much-needed heft to our skies. As is the trend discussed, the Indian Army has focussed on precision guided munitions, missiles, rocket systems and drones. It is planning to buy Medium Range Precision Kill Systems (MRPKS) so that it can destroy enemy targets with minimum collateral damage. They are unmanned combat vehicles (UCAV) that can provide a breakthrough against dynamic and well protected static targets by real-time acquisition and precision strike. MRPKS once launched can loiter in the air and provide real-time imagery to the operator on the ground. In September 2021, the Army has also inked a contract to acquire 120 payload-capable ‘Skystriker’ drones made by Elbit Systems of Israel.

However, with increasing automation, AI, robotics, drones, sensors and stand-off delivery systems, sooner or later, the Army will have to grapple with the debate on its manpower. Or even the basic organisational structures as we know them. This is a doctrinal challenge. The COAS General M.M. Naravane recently explained how disruptive technologies are now driving doctrinal cycles like never before. “It may not be inaccurate, therefore, to infer that technology itself is steadily emerging as a core combat capability,” he pointed out. He was referring to the Indian Army showcasing swarm drone offensive striking multiple targets during the Army Day Parade in 2021. It is reassuring that we have assiduously taken note of the Armenia Azerbaijan conflict appropriately. As the COAS said “Large platforms which were once the mainstay of 20th century battlefield: the main battle tanks, fighter aircraft and large surface combatants, have been rendered relatively less significant in the face of emerging battlefield challenges in newer domains”.

Conclusion

One sobering thought on military technology though, is necessary to be noted. For all the advent of technology and stand-off systems and cyber weapons, the real-life situations of a hand-to-hand combat as seen in the Galwan Valley in June 2020 taking scores of lives of soldiers of both sides or the victory march of a medieval looking Taliban into Kabul in August 2021 throwing out the mighty hi-tech warfighting machinery of the sole superpower the US after 20 years, or the ongoing massing of tens of thousands of Russian troops on the Ukrainian borders tell a different tale. The armies continue to stand guard at the frontiers, while the frontiers themselves are said to have become diffused.

There is no putting the clock back as far as technology is concerned. Generations have tried and failed in taming the tide of time. The world has constantly evolved and innovated. New technologies kept altering the way of life, some in very disruptive ways. Yet, the humankind continues to prosper, numerically as well as in terms of wealth and comfort, absorbing the innovations in its stride and with an unsatiated appetite. So, while the advent of long-range hypersonic missiles, directed energy weapons, satellite killers, UCAVs, LAWS, robots and cyber weapons pose varying challenges, the human link will likely remain supreme, as far as we can see. The soldier is here to stay. But as the management Guru Peter Drucker had said succinctly, “The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.”