Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: Security analyst Feroz Hassan Khan, a retired army brigadier, and professor at the Naval Postgraduate School of Monterey in California, has said that the technological innovations have added new complexities to classic deterrence that evolved in the twentieth century in the midst of the cold war with the centrality of atomic deterrence.

“Today, the landscape has changed and relevancy of the old approach is questioned as emerging security challenges that range from cyber to economic threats,” he said during his lecture on the sustaining strategic modernisation in the 21st century warfare held at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI).

Feroz Hassan who has in depth knowledge of global, regional and domestic security dynamics, pointed out that the dynamics of modern warfare were changing rapidly. Hence, acquiring new technologies, thorough calculation and analysis was imperative to evaluate the cost and balance effectively, he suggested.

He said that the security dynamics during the cold war era were quite perceptible when everyone had clarity on many accounts including “who was your enemy and what kind of deterrence you needed to respond the threat.” However, he said that the warfare today had become an increasingly complex phenomenon for nations around the world.

He said that as it was the case of other nations and Pakistan also needed to evolve its deterrent strategies and emerging challenges to strategic modernized techniques that could also be referred to as a cross-domain deterrence. He said that Pakistan was in a constant state of war and dynamics of new kinds of war have made the traditional and atomic deterrence approaches irrelevant.

Feroz Hassan was of the view that the deterrent strategies in the second nuclear age has special significance for Pakistan considering the multitude of security related challenges it was facing and hence to find optimal balance between technological maturations and an effective strategy. He said that these strategies must include different dimensions of the threats.

Summing up the discussion, SDPI Executive Director Dr Abid Qaiyum Suleri said that in this changing security landscape, it was important to keep the accumulative national strength intact to respond to internal and external security threats. He said that dimensions of today’s discussion and thoughtful lecture delivered by Feroz Hassan Khan would lead towards a national discourse on such issues of high importance at a national level.

Earlier, Dr Safdar Sohail from the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) also expressed his views related to the theme of the lecture and said that the need of hour for Pakistan as a nation today was to know the enemy. “We were emerging as a highly fragmented society and only a national communication policy could help us getting out of this chaos, to reduce intolerance and to create a resilient society on the face of emerging challenges,” he said.