ISLAMABAD – Days after a retired Indian general praised Pakistan Army’smedia wing for employing “outstanding strategy” in the domain of hybridwarfare, a prominent cyber-intelligence specialist has now warned the Indiagovernment of the threat the ISPR poses.
“If there is a Pakistani inter-services directorate as lethal as theInter-Services Intelligence (ISI), it is, undoubtedly, the Inter-ServicesPublic Relations (ISPR),” Pukhraj Singh wrote in his latest article for *ThePrint*link.
In his opinion, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi was too latein spotting the danger after Facebook took down pages mending the publicopinion ahead of the Indian general elections.
Just like Lt-Gen (retd) Syed Ata Hussain acknowledged the superiority ofPakistani military’s media wing over its Indian counterpart, Singh alsohailed the ISPR’s information warfare strategies, especially in theshowdown after Pulwama incident.
Last week, Lt-Gen (retd) Hussain had remarked during a speech that the ISPRoutclassed the Indian army in information war. “I want to give full marksto the ISPR for the information strategy it has played out,” he was quotedas saying during his address at the International Institute of StrategicStudies in the UK on Thursday.
According to Singh, Pakistani Army has conducted a series of wargames —Azm-e-Nau, meant to counter India’s ‘Cold Start’ doctrine. “Withmany successful iterations over the years, these exercises simulatedmassive mobilisations augmented by net-centric warfare, stopping short atthe tactical nuclear weapons threshold,” he wrote.
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“Interestingly, the said wargames treated the ISPR as the crucial pivot ofconflict escalation and de-escalation. It was meant to undertakeinformation operations, military deception and strategic communications –benignly dubbed as perception management in military parlance.
“This was a couple of years prior to ‘hybrid war’ becoming all the rage inthe media circles, manifesting itself as the wildly successful Russianplaybook against Georgia, Ukraine, and the US elections.
From leveraging non-uniformed militias to undertaking disruptive cyberoperations that seeded widescale paranoia and confusion, the Russiansreintroduced the cognitive dimension to this emerging format of war.”
