(COLOMBO, LANKAPUVATH) – Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe in his keynote address to the ‘Colombo Defence Seminar – 2018’ inaugural Sessions on Thursday (30) morning at BMICH touched several aspects of security threat perceptions and underlined the need to foster working relations and good rapport to meet with future security challenges at both local, regional and international levels.
“Security, as always, is paramount to all nation states and cannot come second to any other need. Hence these new issues must be recognized as national security threats. A number of civilian institutions will be required to work with the defence establishment. New mechanisms both civil and military need to be created. States need to cooperate by sharing intelligence, training and knowledge where relevant.”
Role of national militaries will eventually expand from safeguarding national security to building effective international security communities in order to furnish the rising demand of security for global supply chains and overseas interests, where it is foreseeable a close integration of political, economic and military communities for optimum results, the Prime Minister added.
On a different but a more realistic perspective the nature of warfare is shifting from physical to online, owing to the increased use of computers electromagnetic spectrum and artificial intelligence in commercial, economic military and all other cutting-edge activities, the Prime Minister added.
Technology Driven new Media including Social Media is another source of non-traditional threat. New Media including social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other websites on the Internet are also becoming global disruptive forces. We have seen the potential of this new media to destabilize nations and affect serious change in the case of countries, like Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt etc, the Prime Minister pointed out.
