Rear Admiral Raja Menon's recent article in this newspaper ('Military jargon cripples serious thinking', June 4) is sharp and necessary. He warns that fashionable terms such as "multidomain operations", "hybrid", "grey zone" and "cognitive warfare" can become substitutes for clear thought. Much of what they describe, he argues, is not new. States have always used deception, propaganda, covert action, diplomacy and military force in combination.
That criticism is important because new language can easily become a substitute for clear thinking. The strategic community must not mistake vocabulary for insight. However, the opposite mistake is equally dangerous. We cannot dismiss new concepts merely because some of the practices they describe are old.
The Post-Truth Parallel and Nuclear Vocabulary
In 2016, Oxford named "post-truth" as its word of the year. The word did not mean that truth had disappeared or that lying was new. It captured a condition in which objective facts had become less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Social media algorithms were amplifying outrage over reason, while institutions that once filtered information had lost authority. A new word became useful not because human behaviour had changed, but because the information environment had.
War had faced such moments before. The advent of nuclear weapons created a new vocabulary. Terms like deterrence, mutually assured destruction, counterforce and counterstrike had to be built from scratch. Nobody called it jargon. It was an honest response to a new strategic condition.
Four Pillars of the Old Grammar Have Cracked
The old grammar of war rested on four pillars. First, sovereign states and their militaries were the principal actors. Second, physical force was the primary instrument of victory. Third, war and peace are distinct conditions. Fourth, battlefields are geographical spaces on a map. Each pillar has cracked.
The State remains central, but its relative monopoly over strategic effect has weakened. The actors shaping today's conflicts include third-party satellite operators, such as SpaceX, that are tilting the intelligence balance between two foreign adversaries. International digital platforms decide which version of events the world sees. Private firms like NSO Group sell surveillance tools once reserved for intelligence agencies, and ideological groups like WikiLeaks can achieve effects that once required State power. None of these appears in any order of battle.
Kinetic force remains indispensable, but strategic disruption no longer always requires the traditional physical attack. The Stuxnet virus, which damaged Iran's nuclear centrifuges at Natanz, offered an early glimpse of this capability. The Colonial Pipeline cyberattack in 2021 showed that a criminal ransomware group could massively disrupt fuel supplies across the American East Coast, producing consequences once associated with physical interdiction.
The line between war and peace has blurred. We now inhabit a condition of continuous coercive competition below the threshold of open armed conflict. There is daily probing of critical networks by foreign intelligence agencies. There is a ceaseless flood of divisive content on social media, keeping societies polarised. Attribution becomes difficult, and traditional models of deterrence break down.
The battlefield has not ceased to be physical, but it has acquired a new geography. This geography is the algorithmic substrate comprising the platforms, data pipelines, networks and AI systems through which wars are now fought, narrated and judged. An attack launched from a server in one continent can paralyse the infrastructure of another. A narrative seeded on a platform in one country can inflame a city halfway around the globe. Malware hidden in a software update can turn a trusted commercial product into a distributed weapon system.
The Emerging Algorithmic Order
This is the context in which a new "Algorithmic Order" is emerging. This Order can be best understood as a layered structure of power.
At the base sits the physical and logical infrastructure of daily digital life. Fibre-optic cables carry 95 per cent of the world's intercontinental data. Advanced semiconductor foundries, overwhelmingly concentrated in Taiwan, produce the chips without which modern life cannot function. Cloud systems operated by a handful of American firms host the computing power on which governments across the world now run.
Above this physical layer sit the invisible protocols governing how data moves, the operating systems dictating how software behaves, the identity systems determining who is recognised, and the payment rails through which money travels. Control at this level is quiet but potentially absolute. The ability to exclude selected banks from SWIFT, or deny access to critical AI systems, is coercion more precise and faster than a naval blockade.
Higher still sit the platforms most people actually encounter. They mediate what the world sees, reads and believes. Google search ranks, curates and contextualises information. A change in ranking logic can elevate one interpretation of a crisis and bury another.
Social media platforms engineered to capture attention can also erode social cohesion and capacity for collective thought. Populations are sorted into algorithmically curated silos, each fed a different version of reality calibrated to existing biases and emotional triggers. Competing narratives emerge, common ground shrinks and society becomes a fragmented landscape of mutual suspicion. It is at this social and cognitive level that the "Algorithmic Order" delivers its most consequential effect.
A New Grammar for a New Reality
This, then, is the new grammar. It asks us to understand conflict not only through armies, borders, firepower and territory, but also through systems, dependencies, platforms and perception. In this grammar, the ability to deny access, shape attention, manipulate trust, interrupt data flows and weaken a society's capacity for collective judgment can be as consequential as the ability to destroy.
The battle for the mind is not new, but narrative control on platforms outside national jurisdiction demands fresh thinking. Social cohesion always mattered, but its deliberate degradation at scale through algorithmic manipulation is a new vulnerability. Technology has always underpinned military capability, but its diffusion into every aspect of modern life has created dependencies and chokepoints that the older vocabulary does not adequately address.
Rear Admiral Menon correctly points out that any new concept must sharpen judgment. The new grammar does not ask us to discard the old vocabulary. It asks us to recognise that the conditions under which that vocabulary operated have fundamentally changed. If we do not name those conditions, we will neither see them nor prepare for them. That is not a case for jargon. It is a case for clarity.
