The Sri Lankan military is set to hold an exhibition and symposium on cyber warfare later this month, as the commander of the army warned of improving technology in order to fight “future enemies”.

“Future enemies are not visible and the Army may have to fight against this invisible enemy,” said Lieutenant General Mahesh Senanayake. “We need to improve our cyber space capabilities to match with the advancements, being made by foreign nations, elsewhere.”

“In that context, this Exhibition and the Symposium is a timely project, useful not only to the Army but to the whole country in general since we all have to be aware of this aspect of cyber technology which would enable transmission of vital information to the enemy and also to the own troops,” he added.

“This must be used to our advantage as the need for intelligence gathering is changing all the time. Cyber space has been used to exert hard power via kinetic power through soft power models and the Army is interested in finding ways out against these threats… Extraction of information from the enemy as well as transmission of the same to the own troops is therefore a must in future warfare.”

The commander went on to state,

“Cyber operations are done through battle of mind and such propagation is hard to encounter”.

The Sri Lankan military has increasingly begun to focus on cyber warfare with the army admitting recently that it was “monitoring” social media.