The making of India’s drone military-industrial complex

Smart use of the drones could deter a much superior conventional army.

By Laxman Kumar Behera 

Operation Sindoor, launched by India in the early hours of May 7 to avenge the Pahalgam terror attack, was not just a demonstration of the Indian resolve to redraw red lines on cross-border terrorism; it heralded a new age of warfare in the Indian subcontinent. As part of its military action on May 07, India fired precision weapons, including loitering munitions, to decimate nine terror sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir. What subsequently followed was, however, a full-blown out drone warfare, where both sides deployed a swathe of drones to saturate each other’s skies. The impact was felt in both countries with blackouts and closure of airspace.

For sure, drone warfare that India and Pakistan were engaged in is not new to the modern-day warfare. Its brutal manifestation has been seen elsewhere in recent years, especially in conflicts in Israel-Gaza and Russia-Ukraine. What has made drones attractive to the militaries across the world are its low cost, its usefulness for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and for attack deep inside the enemy territory without having to put humans in the cockpit.

Smart use of the drones could deter a much superior conventional army, as is amply evident in the Russia-Ukraine war; Ukraine has fielded a vast number of drones to inflict heavy casualty on the numerically superior Russian army and successfully hold Moscow’s military advancement.

China-Turkey aspect in India’s drone calculus

While both India and Pakistan used drones in the recent conflict, from the Indian perspective what is of prime concern is not Pakistan’s existing drone inventory but their principal sources: Turkey and China, both of which are inimical to India’s geopolitical interests, are much advanced in drone technology.

Pakistan’s attack with 300-400 drones on 36 Indian locations in the intervening night of May 8-9 were primarily Turkish Asisguard  Songar drones which are designed for surveillance and are armed with machine guns. Pakistan has also acquired Turkish made Bayraktar UAVs which played a decisive role in the Azerbaijan’s victory in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war against Armenia.

China, Pakistan’s all-weather friend, is a major drone manufacture, controlling nearly 80 per cent of the world’s drone market. In the defence segment, it boasts of a host of armed UAVs, some of which—such as Wing Loong-II and CH-4—are widely exported to the customers across the Middle East and Africa and South Asia. Pakistan has already acquired CH-4 UAV.

Going forward, Pakistan will undoubtedly redouble its drone acquisition from Turkey, China and elsewhere to use them against India in both peace and conflict time. India is also expected to factor in its own experience from the conflict with Pakistan in its future arms acquisition strategy.

India’s domestic drone ecosystem is vibrant

Unlike Pakistan, India has distinct advantages to strategies its drone acquisition policy. While Pakistan can rely on two principal external sources—Turkey and China— for its drones, India could leverage its existing partnership with a much wider network of global drone manufacturers to acquire new technologies. It has already contracted 31 MQ-9B armed UAVs from the US and several types of drones from Israel—Heron, Searcher, Harpy and Harop.

For India, a major advantage going forward is its vibrant domestic industry that could be leveraged to meet much of the drones need in the future. Thanks to the enabling government policies such Drone Rules 2021, and schemes like iDEX, several Indian companies—such as Tata Advanced Systems, Adani Defence & Aerospace, ideaForge,  Raphe mPhibr and Garuda Aerospace, to name just a few— are already in the fray and supply a range of drone and counter-drone solutions. One of the weapons used by India to target Pakistan terror network on May 7 was the Sky Striker loitering munition, manufactured by the Bangalore-based joint venture between Alpha Design and Elbit Systems of Israel.

India’s drone ecosystem needs scale

The concern for India’s defence policy makers is not the lack of domestic players but the scale and technology. Unlike the major conventional systems like fighter and tanks, drones are deployed in vast numbers in the battle field, with Ukraine alone deploying thousands of drones at any given point of time to counter the Russian military. To produce at such a scale, Indian industry, especially the startups, needs the government support to quickly expand the industrial infrastructure.

The industrial expansion needs to go hand in hand with continuous infusion of technology to improve autonomy, stealth, resilience, range and payload capacity. Schemes like the iDEX of the Department of Defence Production and the Technology Development Fund (TDF) of the DRDO could be leveraged to develop new technologies. At the same time, the acquisition policy of the armed forces needs to be streamlined to acquire the developed products in a matter of months instead of years that is currently the case.

DRDO’s counter-drone system

One key technology that the Indian military would need in greater number and quality in future is counter drone system. India has already made some progress in this field. The DRDO-developed D4 (Drone Detect, Deter and Destroy) system played a key role in neutralizing the barrage of incoming drones from Pakistan. DRDO has also recently successfully demonstrated a ‘game changing’ vehicle mounted Laser Directed Weapon that could detect drones and fire laser beam to destroy.

Fine-tuning the technology for greater range and deploying it quickly would go a long way in strengthening India’s capacity to wage the next drone war, should the newly drawn red lines marked though the Operation Sindoor fail.