Bengaluru, April 9 Army Chief General Upendra Dwivedi on Thursday said Operation Sindoor demonstrated India's progress towards "domain jointness" and termed the military offensive carried out inside Pakistani territory a "defining case study" of the operational significance of integration.
In May last year, India had launched a military response targeting terror launchpads in Pakistan following the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack that killed 26 Indian tourists.
"Operation Sindoor was India's most powerful tool in achieving domain jointness. But we need to achieve domain integration and fusion," General Dwivedi said.
He was addressing the "Ran Samvad" forum on "Land Forces visualisation of Multi Domain Operation (MDO)," here.
The army chief also highlighted the creation of an information warfare organisation and a psychological defence division following Operation Sindoor.
He said, "15 per cent of our efforts were focused on managing the disinformation campaign."
He cautioned, however, that key challenges remain, particularly in synchronising operations across strategic, operational, and tactical levels, and addressing the growing prevalence of hybrid or grey-zone warfare.
"These operations typically fall below the conventional military threshold, with the goal of exploiting the adversary's vulnerability," he said, adding that non-kinetic operations are increasingly taking precedence.
"Operation Sindoor was India's most powerful tool in achieving domain jointness. But we need to achieve domain integration and fusion," he said.
The Chief of Army Staff said his visualisation of MDO is not of six domains operating in parallel but all of them "in constant dynamic interaction where the focus shifts and the leadership changes".
The Army chief stressed that modern warfare is no longer confined to geographical boundaries or single-service dominance, but is instead defined by continuous interaction across domains, stakeholders, and levels of conflict.
"We are currently engaged in a dispersed, undeclared, multi-theatre, multi-domain war. The question is not whether domains interact, but how the interface is orchestrated across the battle space," he said.
General Dwivedi drew a distinction between the land domain and land forces, explaining that while the former refers to the operational space, the latter represents the actors, comprising all six domains—land, air, maritime, cyber, space, and cognitive—operating in a shared environment.
He underlined that these domains are no longer siloed but function through dynamic synergy.
Elaborating on the evolving battlefield, General Dwivedi noted that MDO has transformed warfighting into a layered, three-dimensional construct.
"In MDO, the battlefield is no longer a line on a map. It's a 3D – with cyber effects shaping the cognitive space, space assets cueing targets, and electronic warfare contesting every frequency simultaneously," he said.
He emphasised that commanders must develop cross-domain situational awareness from the tactical to strategic level.
Highlighting the operational significance of integration, General Dwivedi referred to Operation Sindoor as a "defining case study".
"It was a ground intelligence network coupled with cyber and EW (electronic warfare) inputs that enabled the joint army-air force targeting, while the navy's repositioning simultaneously shaped the strategic calculus. No single domain decided the operation," General Dwivedi added.
He described such mutually enabling actions as the essence of MDO.
The Army Chief observed that while domains like cyber, space, and cognitive operations benefit from centralised control, land warfare continues to rely on decentralised execution, creating a complex and adaptive system that must be aligned through central intent and technological integration.
On capability development, he said the Indian Army is transitioning steadily from concept to execution under a structured transformation roadmap.
He pointed to dedicated MDO war-gaming exercises since 2024 and the joint doctrine issued in August 2025 as milestones that have provided a unified operational framework across the three services for the first time.
General Dwivedi detailed several structural reforms underway, including the operationalisation of integrated battle groups, Rudra brigades, drone units, electronic warfare formations, and cyber operations nodes.
He further underscored the importance of the "three Is" —integration, informatisation, and intelligentisation—driven by technology but anchored in human decision-making.
"The human must remain in the loop, exercising judgment," he asserted.
The Army Chief emphasised the need for leadership transformation in the digital age.
"Commanders must evolve into techno-commanders, to build a force that does not know where one domain ends and another begins," he said.
Outlining the future roadmap, he identified "six Ds" shaping the MDO environment—dispersion, democratisation, and diffusion among them—leading to imperatives such as diversification of assets, delegation of command, and distributed response.
He called for a shift from "domain silos to domain fusion", describing a six-stage progression from domain purity to complete integration.