DRONE TECH: INDIA'S JOHNNY COME-LATELY MOMENT

Instead of ruing the missed opportunities of the past, India should instead, take advantage of a late start and focus on critically needed anti-drone technologies using collaboration, besides an innovative model of public-private partnership including encouraging entrepreneurship development in this sphere. We should start now, asserts MAJ GEN RS MEHTA

- MAJ GEN RS MEHTA

Recent Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) or drone developments have taken the military world by storm. The respected London-based Economist has cited Azerbaijan's highly effective use of drones in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and Turkey's use of drones in the Syrian Civil War as indicating the future of warfare. It noted Azerbaijani tactics and Turkey's use of drones as indicating a new, more affordable type of airpower. It also noted that the ability of drones to record their kills enabled an effective propaganda campaign.

The multiple swarm attacks on the Russian Khmeimim Air Base in Syria throughout January-November 2018 were significantly being termed as the world’s “first” (more later) drone attack. The 2019 Abqaiq-Khurais and 2020 Baghdad International Airport attack all justify the assessment by the Economist that a major Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has occurred which cannot be set aside without severe degradation of a country’s military capability and ability to the conduct of its warfighting.

Author Stefan Borg in a recent article writes that for their advocates, the relatively cheaper UAVs promise precision in targeting, thus allowing wars to be waged with virtually no risks to the lives of one’s own forces and with far fewer civilian casualties than hitherto. To their critics, UAVs dissolve the Clausewitzian understanding of war as a struggle between wills into pure killing. While the use of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) - also called armed UAVs- dates back to the US intervention in Afghanistan in 2001, unarmed UAVs have been in use for military purposes since the 1930s. Today, 90 countries use UAVs; up from 17 countries in 2000. In time to come, all countries will possess UAVs in various configurations.