NEW DELHI: Chief of defence staff General NS Raja Subramani said on Tuesday, “operate faster in various domains than the adversary can respond and create problems for you”.India’s military transformation must move from buying individual platforms to building an integrated, sovereign, data-driven “system of systems”, supported by resilient networks, AI, digital engineering and faster industry-led innovation. It is time for the transformation of India’s armed forces from platform-centric warfare to integrated, data-centric multi-domain operations, he said.At the Defence Tech Summit on ‘Multi-Domain Defence Capability Development and Digital Engineering’, organised by the Centre for Emerging Technologies at USI, Gen Subramani said resilient communications will determine operational effectiveness. He highlighted that space-based assets alone are insufficient. They must communicate with aerial, naval, ground and electronic-warfare assets in near real time, and this requires resilient communications capable of surviving an electronically contested environment, he said.CDS stressed that future capability planning should not begin with what the Army, Navy or Air Force individually wants. It should begin with the effect that needs to be created on the battlefield, he said. Space, air, naval, land, electronic-warfare and other assets must therefore operate as an integrated system, with sensors able to detect a target, share information and enable an appropriate response across domains, he emphasised.According to CDS, India has made considerable progress in building defence networks, but the next phase is about the data flowing over those networks, and the armed forces must break down data silos. One of his observations was that the services must move away from the tendency to “jealously guard” their data. Existing paper-based information should be digitised, and sharing should become the default wherever operationally feasible, he stressed.India needs sovereign and purpose-specific AI models, he said, acknowledging that the country is not yet at the level of the leading frontier AI models. He suggested a pragmatic two-track approach: use and train appropriate open-source models within secure networks, while developing sovereign or purpose-specific language models for sensitive and high-security applications. AI adoption is unavoidable, but command must remain human, he said, adding that no military force can remain competitive without adopting AI, but the ultimate decision must remain with the commander.In a direct message to the industry, CDS said the industry needs to deliver “volume, scale and speed”.Talking about USI, Subramani said, “It’s my proud privilege to be here. I was, as General Pawan Anand mentioned, around a year and a half back when we started this session. I must confess that having associated with the USI has also improved my technological knowledge, strategic knowledge, and geopolitical knowledge. And I must also compliment Admiral SJ Singh and General Pawan Anand for really taking the USI work several notches higher.”
