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Editor’s Note
An Indian framework for understanding warfare beyond the kinetic domain is finding resonance in European strategic research, with a NATO-funded Polish study citing its concept of “cognitive paralysis”. The author argues that this is more than academic recognition: it demonstrates that Indian strategic thinking can contribute to debates shaped by the Russia-Ukraine war and emerging hybrid threats. But international citation alone does not create a school of thought. The larger challenge, the author contends, is to build institutions that can test, challenge and refine indigenous strategic concepts over time.
I. Introduction
In July 2026, the Polish Association for National Security published a monograph titled Hybrid Warfare: Threats to Power Grid Infrastructure. Funded by NATO’s Science for Peace and Security Programme, produced by a joint team from Poland, Ukraine, and Finland, and peer-reviewed by two named professors prior to publication, the project emerged directly from the realities of the Russia–Ukraine war—a conflict defined in part by the systematic destruction of Ukraine’s energy system and Europe’s urgent requirement to defend its own critical infrastructure.
Chapter 5 of that monograph, focusing on hybrid threats, cites an Indian paper nine times. The cited paper, Beyond the Kinetic: Deconstructing Warfare in the Socio-Technical-Cognitive Battlespace, had been published six months earlier by a Delhi-based think tank. Its authors were Lt Gen D S Hooda, former Northern Army Commander, and Lt Col Pavithran Rajan, a retired Military Intelligence Corps officer.
Gen V K Singh, Governor of Mizoram and former Chief of the Army Staff, hailed the paper as a landmark for Indian strategic thought. The underlying reason for the General’s observation, however, is far more revealing than the citation itself.
II. Doctrine and Theory Are Different Things
Most writing on military affairs concerns analysis and doctrine. Doctrine tells a security apparatus what to do. It is practical, adapts as circumstances change, and is judged purely by operational efficacy. Theory is far rarer: it tells you what war fundamentally is. It establishes the conceptual categories inside which everyone else subsequently argues.
Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general whose concepts have governed Western strategic thinking for two centuries, wrote theory. He asserted that war is politics carried on by other means—a duel between opposed wills whose execution is degraded by a fog of fear, physical exhaustion, and flawed intelligence that he termed friction. Clausewitz remains foundational to defence establishments across much of the West.
Modern India has produced abundant strategic analysis and doctrine, but comparatively little systematic theorising regarding the intrinsic nature of conflict.
The primary historical exception is Kautilya. While the Arthashastra is conventionally read as a manual of statecraft, its lasting contribution is structural. Kautilyan statecraft explicitly establishes the continuum between coercion, diplomacy, covert action, social subversion, deception, and open violence.
Beyond the Kinetic makes a comparable structural move within the contemporary battlespace. It argues that the distinction between kinetic and non-kinetic action is not merely losing utility, but is thoroughly enmeshed across interconnected operational layers.
Between Kautilya and 2026, the Indian list of strategic theorists remains short. India has produced vital ideas regarding statecraft, non-alignment, regional security, and resistance. In 1945, K. M. Panikkar famously observed that India historically lost its freedom at sea while focusing exclusively on land-based security. Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of Satyagraha posited that force and political legitimacy could be decoupled. Yet, Satyagraha was a theory of socio-political resistance rather than an operational framework for war, requiring an adversary susceptible to moral embarrassment and offering no mechanics for symmetric armed confrontation. A few scholars outside strategic studies, notably Ashish Nandy, examined the psychological mechanics of colonial violence, but their work never integrated into mainstream national security planning.
The result is a thin tradition of explicitly theorising conflict as an integrated phenomenon. It has consisted of one historical masterpiece, a scattering of partial contributions, and a long period dominated by threat analysis and operational doctrine.
Beyond the Kinetic attempts something different: a systematic framework for explaining what modern conflict itself has become. It is not merely an analysis of a specific theatre, a tactical manual, or an adaptation of existing Western military terminology. It attempts to theorise the contemporary battlespace from first principles.
III. The Core Aspects of the STCB Framework
Gen. Hooda and Col. Rajan argue that modern conflict unfolds across three inextricably linked layers:
- The Social Layer: The shared identities, institutional trust, cultural narratives, and societal fault lines that maintain cohesion or induce internal fracture.
- The Technical Layer: The physical and digital architectures—spanning telecommunication grids, satellite networks, cloud platforms, SCADA systems, and automated algorithms—that power both defence forces and modern civilian society.
- The Cognitive Layer: The mechanisms through which populations, operators, commanders, and political leaders perceive information, formulate beliefs, and execute decisions.
What binds these layers is the algorithmic substrate: the foundational software code, data architectures, and platform rules that govern information visibility, flow, and authenticity. From this model, four primary propositions emerge—each pushing against a foundational premise of Clausewitz thought:
- Force Is an Output of Information Systems: Kinetic action no longer occurs in isolation. A missile strike, a border deployment, or a tactical breach is authorised, targeted, timed, and interpreted by software models upstream. Operational outcomes shift from sheer mass and firepower toward algorithmic fidelity, processing velocity, and system resilience. Kinetic strikes serve primarily to confirm advantages established upstream in data.
- Friction Has Shifted from Human to Machine: Clausewitz friction was humane—tired troops, ambiguous orders, and physical exhaustion. Contemporary friction stems from data overload, model bias, algorithmic manipulation, sensor corruption, and degraded network connectivity. The authors absorb Clausewitz’s core intuition while rehousing it in digital infrastructure.
- The Substrate Is Not a Sixth Domain: In conventional military doctrine, land, sea, air, space, and cyber are treated as additive domains. The algorithmic layer is fundamentally different: it is the medium through which all other domains operate. Labelling it a domain is an operational choice; recognising it as a substrate is an architectural claim about the nature of modern warfare.
- Conflict Is No Longer a Pure Duel: Clausewitz defined war as a duel between two opposed wills. In the STCB model, any actor operating on infrastructure they do not own is a tenant subject to the platform owner’s terms. When commercial platform operators restrict services—such as satellite connectivity during active operations—a non-belligerent third party exercises veto power over operational execution, breaking the classical model of a two-sided duel.
IV. Expanding the Horizon: The Internal Security Matrix
While Beyond the Kinetic was framed through a traditional military lens, restricting the Socio-Technical-Cognitive Battlespace to external defence forces leaves a critical gap in national security architecture. In modern grey-zone warfare, adversaries rarely respect the division between external defence and internal security.
By operating below the threshold of open military conflict, hostile actors target a nation’s internal vulnerabilities—its law enforcement machinery, civil stability, and domestic critical infrastructure. Consequently, the STCB model applies directly to India’s Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs), Central Police Organisations (CPOs), and State Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs).
Central Armed Police Forces (CAPFs)
Forces like the Border Security Force (BSF), Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), and Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) operate continuously along the boundary between external defence and domestic law enforcement.
- Border Management & Tech Infiltration: Forces deployed on physical borders encounter hybrid challenges including drone surveillance, encrypted communication channels used by smugglers, and cross-border cyber spoofing. Border security is no longer just a physical patrol; it is an algorithmic problem requiring real-time data fusion.
- Critical Infrastructure Protection: The CISF protects ports, nuclear plants, airports, and power grids. Because modern industrial installations run on automated control systems (SCADA), physical security is linked to technical security. A cyber intrusion or manipulation of physical access control systems targets the technical and social layers simultaneously.
- Counter-Insurgency Operations: In anti-Maoist operations or counter-terrorism deployments, victory depends on real-time intelligence, social trust, and cognitive influence. Disinformation campaigns designed to alienate local populations target the Social and Cognitive layers directly, attempting to paralyse operational decision-making before troops step into the field.
2. Central Police Organisations (CPOs)
Institutions such as the Intelligence Bureau (IB), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and National Investigation Agency (NIA) function as the primary cognitive and analytical engines for domestic statecraft.
- Data Aggregation and Threat Processing: Modern counter-terrorism and intelligence work requires sifting through massive volumes of unstructured data across communications, financial transactions, and social platforms. Intelligence failures rarely stem from a lack of raw data; they occur due to algorithmic noise, analytical overload, and cognitive fatigue.
- Financial & Cyber-Crime Investigation: Advanced threats utilise decentralised networks, dark web communications, and automated financial routing. The investigative process requires technical tools capable of mapping complex digital relationships across borderless platforms.
3. State Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs)
State Police forces represent the primary point of contact between the citizen and the state’s legitimate coercive apparatus. They operate daily inside the Social and Cognitive layers of the battlespace.
- Information Warfare & Public Order: Social media platforms allow local incidents to scale rapidly into major public order challenges through engineered narratives, manipulated videos, and coordinated misinformation. State LEAs often find themselves dealing with cognitive escalation driven by automated platforms before ground teams can respond.
- Smart Policing Infrastructure: Modern law enforcement relies on automated command centres, facial recognition networks, predictive mapping, and centralised crime databases. When state police forces adopt automated decision tools without an understanding of the underlying algorithmic substrate, they risk operational disruption from data corruption or system outages.
V. Operational Dynamics across the Integrated Security Sector
When the STCB framework is applied across the entire national security matrix—combining armed forces, CAPFs, CPOs, and State LEAs—three operational imperatives emerge.
1. The Breakdown of Institutional Silos
Traditional security frameworks separate military defence, internal paramilitary deployment, intelligence gathering, and civil law enforcement. In the STCB model, these divisions are increasingly artificial.
An adversary targeting an electricity grid or telecommunications backbone uses cyber tools (Technical), exploits domestic socio-political divisions (Social), and spreads panic via algorithmic feeds (Cognitive). This vector hits state police, CAPF guards, municipal authorities, intelligence agencies, and military commands simultaneously.
If these entities operate in isolation, they respond to different fragments of the same threat. Without a shared operational picture, decision-making fails at the system level.
2. Cognitive Paralysis as an Internal Threat
In traditional warfare, cognitive paralysis targets military commanders to delay operational responses. In internal security, it targets civil administrative bodies, police forces, and the general public.
Manipulated digital content, automated panic creation during crises, and coordinated attacks on public trust are designed to paralyse state responses. If police leadership and local administrators cannot verify real-time ground truth during engineered unrest, effective response halts—achieving operational disruption without direct kinetic engagement.
3. Fighting on Borrowed Ground across the Homeland
In a follow-up paper titled Fighting on Borrowed Ground, Gen. Hooda and Col. Rajan outline a critical vulnerability: operating on foreign digital infrastructure limits strategic autonomy.
This issue extends beyond military systems into civil administration and internal security:
- State LEAs use mobile devices running foreign operating systems.
- Intelligence networks rely on foreign database tools and proprietary algorithms.
- CAPFs use communication channels that route through foreign-owned cloud hardware.
If a commercial platform owner or foreign government restricts access to cloud platforms, hardware architecture, or communication protocols during a crisis, domestic security agencies are rendered vulnerable. Modernising equipment while relying on foreign digital backbones leaves internal security infrastructure vulnerable to external manipulation.
VI. What the Polish Chapter Did with the Framework
Understanding how the Polish monograph engaged with Beyond the Kinetic helps assess the global reach of the Indian framework.
Of the nine citations in the NATO-funded study, six support the chapter’s analysis of how an attacker induces decision-making failure in an adversary—borrowing the Indian paper’s term, “cognitive paralysis.” Two citations are factual (referencing Starlink’s operational role in Ukraine and the use of facial recognition technology to identify casualties). One citation supports the analysis of how disinformation compounds public panic during infrastructure blackouts.
This represents a clear scholarly application of the paper’s insights. However, the Polish monograph did not adopt the STCB framework as its primary analytical model. The author used “algorithmic hybrid warfare” as the central organising concept, and the acronym STCB does not appear in the text. The Indian paper served as an important supporting reference within a chapter, rather than the primary lens through which the study was structured.
Additionally, the passage referencing Starlink was cited to illustrate connectivity during crisis. The paper’s deeper critique regarding dependency on private platforms—and the claim that modern warfare may no longer function as a traditional Clausewitzian duel—went largely unexamined.
VII. Strategic Significance and Institutional Imperatives
Just as Kautilya integrated diplomacy, intelligence, coercion, and force into a single framework, Beyond the Kinetic connects kinetic actions with non-kinetic processes. It treats physical operations as one output within a continuous socio-technical-cognitive contest. This marks an instance of an Indian theoretical framework addressing contemporary operational dynamics directly, rather than adapting foreign strategic models.
The European citations demonstrate that the framework is legible to international security researchers. However, establishing a theoretical paradigm requires that other researchers build upon, test, and attempt to critique its core premises over time.
Strategic ideas serve as a durable form of international influence. When a framework is adopted abroad, it shapes how foreign security establishments conceptualise, define, and address complex security challenges. This form of strategic influence provides long-term value to national statecraft. Furthermore, international recognition strengthens the rationale for developing an indigenous technological stack—a requirement that applies equally to armed forces, internal security agencies, and civil administration.
The primary bottleneck in Indian strategic thought remains institutional rather than intellectual. Beyond the Kinetic was produced by two authors working largely outside state institutions. India currently lacks a dedicated structural architecture to systematically generate, test, and refine strategic frameworks across its defence and internal security sectors. Strategic authority often tracks organisational rank rather than conceptual innovation.
Moving from a published paper to an established school of thought requires institutions structured to evaluate, test, and challenge new strategic concepts.
Generating strategic theory requires dedicated institutional spaces—such as a Chair of Strategic Theory focused on the socio-technical-cognitive battlespace. Such initiatives should bring together military strategists, CAPF operational planners, police leaders, intelligence analysts, and technology researchers.
The long-term value of the STCB framework will not depend solely on domestic commendation, but on whether researchers and security practitioners are supported in rigorously testing, applying, and refining its premises over the coming decade across both external defence and internal security domains.
Pratap Heblikar
