Blockchain in National Defence

The ability of the Indian Armed Forces to prevail in the highly contested environment of 2040 will be dictated by its ability to defend cyber-enabled systems, and the data within them, from compromise and manipulation. Yet contemporary cyber defense is faltering, and incremental improvements seem unlikely to overcome an exponentially growing cyber threat. Thus, an entirely new model for cyber defense strategy is needed. Blockchains are a new information technology that inverts the cyber security paradigm. First, blockchain networks are trustless; they assume compromise of the network by both insiders and outsiders. Second, blockchains are transparently secure; they do not rely on failure-prone secrets, but rather on a cryptographic data structure that makes tampering both exceptionally difficult and immediately obvious. Finally, blockchains networks are fault tolerant; they align the efforts of honest nodes to reject those that are dishonest. As a result, blockchain networks not only reduce the probability of compromise, but also impose significantly greater costs on an adversary to achieve it. The Indian Armed Forces should research and develop blockchain technology and leverage it for national defense.