The country is witnessing trailers of future conflicts and is facing “multi-domain” security challenges, Indian Army Chief General MM Naravane said on Thursday, PTI reported.

Naravane made the remarks while addressing a webinar organised by think-tank Centre for Land Warfare Studies on “Contours of Future Wars and Countermeasures”.

The Army chief, without naming China and Pakistan, said that border disputes with nuclear-capable neighbours and state-sponsored proxy wars were stretching the resources of the security apparatus.

“We are witnessing trailers of future conflicts,” Naravane said. “These are being enacted daily on the information battlefield, in the networks and cyberspace. They are also being played along unsettled and active borders.”

The battlefield contours of the future need to be visualised based on these trailers, the Army chief added.

In a veiled reference to China, Naravane said that some countries are challenging the global rules-based order. He added that this has manifested in opportunistic acts to alter the status quo while keeping the threshold below full-scale war.

The developments in Afghanistan have brought to light the use of non-state actors, the Army chief added. “These actors thrive on local conditions, innovatively exploit low-cost options to devastating impact and create conditions that limit the full use of sophisticated capabilities which are available to state,” he said, according to PTI.

Referring to the standoff in east Ladakh in 2020, Naravane said that the developments showed the “diversity of security threats in all domains and this has brought the spotlight towards non-contact and grey zone warfare”.

Indian and Chinese troops had clashed in the Galwan Valley in eastern Ladakh in June 2020. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in the clash. China put the number of casualties on its side at four.

On October 9, Naravane had said that the deployment of Indian soldiers will remain along the Line of Actual Control if the Chinese military continues its “large-scale build-up” along the border in Ladakh, according to India Today.

He had said that the presence of the Chinese Army along the Line of Actual Control could create a situation similar to that at the Line of Control, where troops are constantly present on the Indian and Pakistani sides.