Keyboard warriors in India-Pakistan war inspired by disinformation to kill Drona?

The most memorable piece of deception in the history of warfare is the Trojan Horse. An enduring myth, an apocryphal story that has survived centuries, of the use of disinformation during battle. 

Closer home, from the Mahabharata, stories abound. The most remembered is the one about Drona, Krishna, and Yudhishthira, centred around Ashwatthama, the names of Drona’s son, as well as a battle elephant. Krishna got Bhima to claim that he had killed Ashwatthama, letting Drona believe it was his son, leaving him demoralised and vulnerable, despite Yudhishthira (who was known to never lie) softly saying ‘the elephant’. A vulnerable and dejected Drona was then killed. In the same epic is the story of how Bhishma was deceived by a transgender Shikhandi and killed. 

War treatises and texts are replete with tactics and strategies about the use of disinformation, propaganda and deception to fox the enemy. Half-truths and illusions are created to misdirect adversaries in a thought-out and executed manner. 

In the Arthashastra, probably one of the oldest texts on military craft, Kautilya presents a combination of misinformation and diplomacy as a force multiplier. He recommends that battle planners not be shy of using structured falsehoods to create confusion and lower the morale and confidence of the enemy, even off the battlefield and even before the war begins. 

Sun Tzu, in his much-quoted Art of War, says very clearly: all warfare is based on deception. His books is full of pithy lines, many of them paraphrased. Like ‘appear weak when strong and strong when weak’. And one of his most famous ones, again paraphrased: to win without fighting is the highest of skills (something that China, where he was from, appears to have taken to heart successfully).

The Italian Machiavelli, though not in the same category as Kautilya and Sun Tzu, also viewed the use of misdirection and misinformation as a fully legitimate tool of warcraft, without any moral overhang. The term Machiavellian itself came to mean cunning and manipulative, especially in political manoeuvring.    

Outside of theory, there are hundreds of real examples of this from actual wars. So real is both the threat and value of disinformation, it is part of the studies in military training. A US Army War College study published in 2022 says that during the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact countries led by the then-USSR launched more than 10,000 disinformation campaigns between 1945 (after WWII ended) to 1989 (when the USSR broke up). The paper breaks down disinformation into 4 ‘Ds’ – dismiss, distort, dismay, distract. While this is in the context of Russia, it holds good for any battle situation. 

It also notes that in today’s situation, the use of technology and AI to create deepfakes, false information and straight-up lies has increased in algebraic proportions. Combined with information overload, propaganda and fake news have become a potent tool for warfare. 

Keyboard warriors inspired by past triumphs of disinformation

Exactly this off-field conflict just played out in the India-Pakistan flare-up. The conflict, the most severe after Kargil in 1999, has just played itself out to an uneasy disengagement. One of the biggest differences between the two is social media, non-existent during Kargil and omnipresent now. Keyboards on either side of the border have seen far more action than the actual armed forces on the battlefield.

The mainstream media did not 'disappoint' either.

Wild claims, counter-claims, denials, silence, all mixed with some carefully planted misdirections, have been used throughout this short conflict. Did they change the course of the battle? Maybe not. But it did give all armchair generals a feeling that they too contributed to their country’s ‘win’. And in that, both sides, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes not, got used as weapons of a new war but in an ancient strategy.