… cyber weapons will be used individually and blended simultaneously with conventional kinetic weapons as force multipliers … for both attacker and defender, it is difficult to predict; cyber weapons often achieve things other than their intended purpose … strategic calculation for attackers thus becomes considerably more complex ... over-reliance by strategists and scholars on such imprecise terminology has significant risks for misinterpretation and premature prescription ...

The Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF) invited Dr Ajay Kumar, Defence Secretary, Govt. of India for a public discourse on 'India's Defence Reforms'. The talk was organised under the aegis of Vimarsha, a platform offered by the VIF to enable eminent persons, academicians, media personnel et al to engage directly with policy thinkers over a wide range of contemporary and historical issues.

Under the Vimarsha series of lectures organized by the VIF on 07 April 2021,General Bipin Rawat, PVSM, UYSM, AVSM, YSM, SM, VSM, ADC, Chief of Defence Staff spoke on 'Shaping the Armed Forces to meet likely Current and Future Challenges'. It was followed with an equally exhaustive Q&A session. The CDS covered a wide spectrum in his talk, covering the issues of evolving nature of threats to India’s security, complexities in modern warfare, hybrid wars, implications of China’s rise, Pakistan’s proxy war against India, India’s military preparedness and the role of military diplomacy.

… it would be important for the Indian government to assess how China could ‘weaponize’ its control over trans-boundary waters and potentially ‘choke’ the Indian economy … there are different opinions about the impact of the proposed dams on the quantity of water flow in the Brahmaputra. A gigantic hydropower project will undoubtedly have some effects ... There is also one school of thought which believes that the negative impact may not be huge.