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Editor’s Note
This article examines how modern insurgent and extremist organisations are rapidly leveraging commercially available technologies to enhance recruitment, communication, logistics and operational effectiveness. As communication networks expand and social cohesion weakens across societies, these developments have direct implications for counter-insurgency strategies worldwide. The analysis highlights why governments and security planners must reassess information-space dominance, social resilience and ideological counter-narratives as core elements of future security policy.
The impact of technology on warfare has led modern militaries to adopt technologies to enhance capabilities. Such efforts are global, sweeping large nations with powerful forces that are perceptive of their own vulnerabilities in the new architecture of the battlespace. Simultaneously with regular forces, non-state actors, insurgent groups, and radical Islamists are adopting an identical path to enhance their lethality and capacities by utilising the technologies that the free world has built. The changes evident in insurgent operations need to be studied to enable counter-insurgency doctrines to be suitably reframed. Some of the more critical issues are discussed in more detail.
Spreading the Narrative
The most significant gain that insurgencies have achieved is the phenomenal enhancement of global communication networks. The ability to reach out to their core support bases and justify the legitimacy of their cause has become far easier. Insurgencies depend heavily on logistics support from elements of the local populace. Regular communication directed at the populace in the area of interest helps strengthen existing links between the populace and terrorist groups. In the days ahead, with communication access increasing, terror groups could find it easier to reach out to the fence-sitters and pull them across the fine line to be reoriented as sympathisers. The answer to battling the narrative lies in dominating the information space, continuous monitoring, and immediate responses to insurgent messaging.
With most insurgencies drawing strength from ideologies and intolerance, the increasing dilution of social cohesion across multiple countries and societies provides the cracks and crevices for insurgents to penetrate more widely. It needs to be fought by governments as a priority area. The battle starts in educational facilities at the base level and in religious shrines, where tolerance needs to be inculcated as a value.
Coercion as Means of Generating Support
The fear of terror groups releasing violence is a strong tool for enforcing submission to the terrorists’ dictates. The use of violence, followed by threats of further such actions, is enough to cause a loss of morale among the populace. Live dissemination of terrorist attacks by use of the internet and visual media only enhances the effect. The ‘breaking news’ concept magnifies the amplitude of the impact. With improvements in communication, such attempts will be a greater focus for terror groups.
Recruitment by Terror Groups
The availability of communication channels has already proven to be a significant asset for terrorist groups in recruitment. The ISIS practised it with great dexterity in Syria.
Today, most terrorist groups prefer educated recruits who can harness technology to enhance the group’s potency. Examples of drawing educated youth include Al Qaida using four trained commercial pilots to stage the 9/ 11 Twin Towers attack. More recently, in the car explosion in New Delhi on 10 November 2025 that led to 15 deaths, a whole group of doctors from a hospital were involved in planning and execution.
Training, Indoctrination and Radicalisation
Germane to organisational efficiency are the morale of its rank and file and the competence levels of its personnel. With the personnel of these terror groups stationed in different locations, often across continents, physically proximate instructor-student training models are not feasible. The deficiency is being addressed through the World Wide Web (www). And the web will be used more in the days ahead.
Equipment and Logistics Support for the Cadre
Some primary methods of arming an insurgent cadre are through weapons smuggled, infiltrated across the border, and those obtained by raiding local security forces’ armouries. All such methodologies are risk-prone operations and entail the possibility of losing a few cadres, the most critical resource. Supply of weapons and ammunition from across the borders of targeted nations is being and will in future be increasingly undertaken by drones. Such utilisation of drones is easier in the case of proxy wars amongst inimical states with geographical contiguity. Drones dropping drugs and weapons are often being detected in the Punjab province of India, which borders Pakistan.
Recce, Surveillance and Intelligence Gathering
Insurgent movements bank on a network of overground workers for information gathering. The availability of drones now provides another option. In addition to drones, nations sponsoring terrorist movements can utilise their aerial platforms and space-based assets to gather information about targeted security forces or value objectives, and communicate these to the terror groups for staging attacks.
Unmanned Aerials Systems (UAS)
The UN Security Council Counter Terrorism Committee identifies the use of UAS, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and drones as a key terrorist threat. These have been used substantially by such groups as the Islamic State, Hamas, Houthis and more. The drones are available off the shelf and require little training to operate.
Drones can be helpful for a wide range of activities, including recce, surveillance, intelligence gathering, kamikaze attacks, post-strike damage assessment, and logistics. They can also be used for dropping leaflets as a part of Psychological Warfare and radicalisation initiatives. Multi-lingual translation capabilities enabled by Artificial Intelligence tools allow the message to reach a wider audience.
Use of Robots
Terror groups can utilise robots for a variety of tasks. One such use is during long marches to cross difficult terrain; a typical example is the snow-clad mountainous areas along the Line of Control between India and Pakistan. They obviously have to carry heavy loads, including weapons, ammunition, rations, communication equipment, and personal items. Obviously, robots capable of carrying loads can be of immense value. They can be used for other purposes, such as reconnaissance, surveillance, and a host of other tasks.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
In an article on Artificial Intelligence, the Journal of Innovation and Knowledge, in its Sep–Oct 2025 issue, states that “Deepfakes—emerging from advanced AI and deep learning—endanger cybersecurity, social trust, and personal rights while generating multiple ethical and legal issues.” Organisations like ISIS have extensively used AI. AI can be used for deep fakes and used to manipulate and compromise both critical appointees and the rank-and-file employee with access to sensitive information on national security by suggesting their involvement in pornography, sexual misdemeanours and a host of other activities that would mar their image. AI is useful for Psychological operations, intelligence gathering and a host of other functions.
Summation
When creatively integrated into operational planning, technology can disproportionately enhance an organisation’s capabilities. Terrorist organisations are recruiting intelligent young men into their ranks to be able to draw the best advantages that technology offers. The possibility of disproportionate casualties of innocent civilians does not constrain them. In fact, the bigger the bang, the better it suits their objectives.
Denial of technology to terror groups may often not be feasible; however, winning the information war, making considerable investments in information gathering and sharing among nations, and sieving intelligence from an ocean of information using AI tools and modern technology are just a few of the essential steps by the free world.
Brig SK Chatterji (Retd)
Editor, Bharatshakti.in
