New Delhi: Setting the strategic tone for the final day of the FutureCrime Summit 2026 at Bharat Mandapam, military strategists, national intelligence veterans, and cybersecurity leaders convened on Friday morning for a crucial inaugural panel. Titled “The New Theatre of Conflict: Cyber Warfare, Geopolitical Rivalries and National Security,” the high-level session examined how the convergence of digital espionage, non-kinetic grey-zone warfare, and state-sponsored cyber operations has fundamentally redefined national sovereignty and defense doctrine.
Multidomain Warfare Dynamics and Strategic Keynote Opening
Opening the keynote deliberations, Dr. Alok Vijayant, Former Director of Cyber Security Operations for the Government of India and Founder of SciRoIT Technologies, presented an analytical framework linking global conflict zones to land-based mineral wealth and resources. He asserted that modern warfare spans a continuum—from conventional kinetic zones to grey-zone friction below threshold conflict, up to fully blended hybrid warfare. To address this, Dr. Vijayant introduced the “7C Multidomain Warfare Model,” emphasizing that future defense requires converged, connected, coordinated, cognitive, cross-domain, continuous, and comprehensive integration across whole-of-government and whole-of-society operations. He further outlined a strategic 9-cell global cyber diplomacy framework alongside an operational readiness checklist covering leadership, integrated systems, protected infrastructure, and technological innovation.
The shift from isolated network security controls to integrated multidomain warfare models represents a fundamental requirement for modern national defense. By synthesizing cognitive operations, electronic warfare, and cross-domain continuous intelligence, defense architectures maintain operational readiness across the entire spectrum of conflict.
Tactical Insights Across Electronic Warfare, Intelligence, and Clausewitzian Grey-Zone Conflicts
Air Vice Marshal (Dr.) Devesh Vatsa VSM, Advisor at DSCI (NASSCOM), detailed the tactical realities of modern battlefields, warning that cyber warfare can no longer be evaluated as a standalone technical domain. He emphasized that the lethal tactical pairing of cyber operations and electronic warfare creates a continuous, silent, and non-kinetic battleground with severe operational impact. This lethal convergence forces national defense establishments to evaluate whether current technological investments and acquisition cycles are evolving at a pace sufficient to counter high-velocity electronic threats.
Mr. Rajiv Jain, Former Director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), provided a foundational statecraft perspective, tracing the evolution of international law from the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which established classical territorial boundaries and state sovereignty. He explained that borderless cyber threats directly challenge these traditional jurisdictional limits, creating friction when multinational technology firms resist state regulatory mandates designed to enforce geopolitical borders. Mr. Jain emphasized the need to balance statutory freedom of expression against the government’s primary duty to defend the right to life, calling for a unified national cyber community connecting government agencies, private industry, academia, and citizens under national security imperatives.
Maj. Gen. (Dr.) Sandeep Sharma (Retd.), Senior Fellow at CLAWS and ERF RRU, Ex-Commander of the Army Cyber Group, and Former Scientist H, GoI, applied Clausewitzian strategic theory to analyze grey-zone warfare. He defined cyber espionage, corporate intellectual property theft, digital infrastructure sabotage, and cognitive information manipulation as the functional core of modern non-kinetic conflict. Drawing on successful international models—such as Israel’s military intelligence ecosystems (Unit 8200) where operational cyber defense directly fuels commercial technological innovation—he outlined a strategic roadmap to translate defense experience into national technological self-reliance and cyber resilience.
