INDIA’S CYBER WARFARE STRATEGY IN NEXT DECADE - M.K. SHARMA

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War INTRODUCTION The world is witnessing a remarkable shift in the locus of global power with the relative decline of the United States of America and the dramatic rise of China. [...] India became nuclear weapon capable in 1974 with the Pokhran-I test, however, the draft doctrine of credible minimum deterrence came into being only in August 1999.8 In the absence of a strategy for the employment of a new type of weapon, we run the risk of accidental wars as was seen in the case of the nuclear weapons era. [...] PECULIARITIES OF CYBER DOMAIN In the domain of kinetic war, one examines the vulnerabilities of the adversary’s plans and military hardware, including tanks, airplanes, ships, missiles and other types of vulnerabilities such as the turning radius of a fighter aircraft or the acoustic blind spot of a submarine. [...] To understand the development and deployment of cyber weapons, and create the choice between cyber offence and defence, some lessons from the case analyses of the first public demonstration of a cyber weapon, the ‘Stuxnet’, would serve a good purpose. [...] CYBER DETERRENCE: IS IT WORTH IT? Learning from the previous wars and extrapolating this knowledge to the realm of cyber space, cyber deterrence seems to be the natural good idea like missile deterrence and nuclear deterrence proved to be effective strategy in the past.48 But, the peculiarity of cyber attacks is that they are enabled not through the generation of force but by the exploitation of t.