NEW DELHI: The Indian Army has operationalised a dedicated Information Warfare Organisation and is now expanding its psychological and cyber units down to the Corps level after lessons from Operation Sindoor.
Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi, speaking at the Ran Sanwad tri-services dialogue in Bengaluru on Thursday, formally revealed that the organisation comprises a Psychological Defence Division and a Command Cyber Operations Wing.
“The Psychological Defence Division under a Brigadier is playing a very, very pivotal role,” Gen Dwivedi said. He added that the Command Cyber Operations Wing would, “in a later time frame, also go down to the Corps headquarters.”
This means that the Army’s 14 Corps-level formations will have their own info-warfare capabilities.
The general was candid that this is the beginning of a longer journey. “We have just made the beginning. This is phase one. Based on this, we will move on to phase two and phase three,” he said. The phased rollout mirrors the Army’s recognition that information warfare is not a monolithic challenge. Domestic operations carry a different character from what expeditionary forces face when deployed in unfamiliar territory.
“When the expeditionary forces go, they have a different concept because they are going to an alien area. They don’t even know the culture of that area,” Gen Dwivedi said, underlining the layered complexity of perception management in foreign operational environments.
One of the key operational decisions during Operation Sindoor, he said, was to shut down all Army social media handles, leaving only the official ADG Strategic Communication (ADG Public Information) channel active.
“We closed on all the Twitter handles and all the social media handles other than the ADG Strat Comm. So there was a single source of truth, which went from the soldier to the topman to everybody looking to get the information,” the chief said. The centralisation, the Army assessed, prevented adversaries from exploiting a fragmented information environment.
The Army is also expanding its communication footprint, including on Instagram, to create a clear and authoritative information pipeline for personnel. “Every soldier who is there will also know which is the single source of truth which he has to look into,” Gen Dwivedi said.
The challenge of information warfare has been flagged earlier as well. Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan had first publicly disclosed last May that roughly 15 percent of operational effort during Operation Sindoor went into countering hostile disinformation, cautioning that misinformation is persistent rather than episodic and demands measured, non-reactive responses.
India’s first publicly available Joint Doctrine for Special Forces operations, released in August last year, also explicitly called on SF units to conduct offensive and defensive information campaigns and counter propaganda as an operational imperative.
Beyond info warfare, Gen Dwivedi offered a frank assessment of lessons absorbed in drone operations during last year’s hostilities with Pakistan, particularly the challenge of Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) in a heavily jammed environment.
"When the drones were flying, IFF was difficult; the jamming was also very effective. We didn’t know for whom. It’s a lesson which we have drawn, and we have to move forward from that,” he said.
The Army is now scaling up drone capabilities across arms and pushing them down to the tactical level, while working to resolve coordination gaps and integrate artificial intelligence into decision-making.