New Delhi:
Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director General David Howell Petraeus on Friday said that there needs to be a "very, very rapid new concept" of warfare, when asked about an advice for the Indian security forces. Speaking at the NDTV World Summit 2026, General Petraeus, who served for over 37 years in the US military, called the "two-front" threat from China and Pakistan the "biggest challenge" for India.
"You get the general new concept of warfare and then you have to obviously make it specific to a particular possible theatre of war, the same way the United States does," he said in a conversation with NDTV's Editor-in-Chief and CEO Rahul Kanwal, Senior Managing Editor Vishnu Som and Managing Editor Shiv Aroor.
"What we see in Ukraine has to then be adapted to the sustainment of deterrence in the Western Pacific. It has to be adapted for the Middle East, depending on whether it's a ground theatre, an air theatre, or a theatre at 18,000 feet. All of this would have to be adapted to the specific circumstances," he said.
General Petraeus, however, said they know that what they have done in the past is not going to succeed in the future, adding that the enemy is also "adapting rapidly".
"Now, Ukraine is making adaptations. So the awareness that is being seen there should inform us as well. It's about, again, a whole new concept of warfare," he said.
General Petraeus, who served as the Director of the CIA from September 2011 to November 2012, also said that the large language models (LLMs) will be at the level of a great Nobel laureate in terms of brain power in addition to being deadly.
"At some point we can have multiple agents working for us, so as a commander, let's say, these would be staff officers now who never sleep, never eat and never have to take a break. They are Nobel laureates in terms of brainpower and they will no longer just be monitoring, reporting and searching the world for me as my current LLM does," he said.
"You could have autonomous systems gathering your air defence picture. Air and ballistic missile defense will be a mix of radars, acoustic sensors, all that, all magically helped by AI to fuse because it's all data at the end of the day. Fuse into a high-fidelity air picture," he added.
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