Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | Could Drones, Missiles Alone Fight Wars Today, Tomorrow?

The Indian side has not yet specified how many Pakistani drones have been destroyed. It is also not clear how the Indian Air Force tackled J-35s. The Indian side has admitted that India has lost planes. The number has not been specified, nor which of the fighters, especially the French Rafales, which had been inducted in this decade.

The question is whether India has been tracking the acquisition of arms by Pakistan, including the drones from Turkey, and if so, what was the assessment of India’s military establishment of the role of drones in a war scenario. The use of drones as an attacking weapon had come to light when Russia used drones imported from Iran in the war with Ukraine. The United States and the European Union had taken up cudgels with Iran for the military exports to Russia and threatened it with further sanctions. Iran had clarified that it has sold the drones to Russia much before the war had begun. It indicates the drones have been pressed into military offensive for quite some time.

There has not been much talk of Turkey making and exporting military drones. Experts argue, and rightly so, that there is nothing new about the use of drones for military purposes. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a drone in a manner of speaking. The development of drones can be traced back to UAVs, but the development of drones has a trajectory of its own. Drones have started off as a civilian curiosity with a potential to be used in various modes. One of them was aerial photography, especially of crowds. Then it was suggested that as a way to deliver goods to customers from shops to homes instead of using delivery boys. There have been reports in the Indian media that drones have been inducted into the Indian Army for transportation purposes.

The debate is on in India, among the military folk, as to the nature of 21st century warfare. The late Gen. Bipin Rawat, India’s first Chief of Defence Staff, had his own views. He thought that with the extensive use of missiles, the role of bombers and fighter planes could be reduced. However, traditional IAF officers, especially those who have now retired, felt that no Air Force worth its name could do without fighter planes. Sometime recently, the present Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Anil Chauhan, said that it was not possible to fight wars with imported weapon systems, and that it was “not possible to fight today’s wars with yesterday’s weapons”, and that as a matter of fact one should be “fighting today’s wars with tomorrow’s weapons”. It is a logical view of war and national security.

That is why the absence of a debate in India on use of drones in today’s warfare seems to be odd. The use of drones as a weapon of attack had first come to light in the Ukraine war. There is a discussion that the drones are indeed cheap to produce and the technology is simple. This is perhaps the reason that Iran and Turkey are engaged in producing military drones. Military planners in India must be considering the drone option, and they may not want to talk about it.

According to Indian media reports, meanwhile, Pakistan has been using drones as a means of smuggling drugs into India, and the police in Punjab has confiscated many of those drone droppings. It does not seem to have attracted significant public attention. It is quite strange that Pakistan’s smuggling forays into India across the border in Punjab should not have made it to the news arena in a prominent way.

The drones are then a major example of a dual-use technology, where it can function as a means in the civilian field, including aerial photography, and as an offensive weapon in the battlefield. This can lead to futurist fantasies of robotics taking over the means of waging wars, and where the armed forces will become redundant. Of course, the prime motive that lies behind wars will not be complete without harming people, killing them, maiming them, destroying homes, factories, schools, hospitals, farms, bridges. The war of disinformation through cyber-attacks is the beginning of computer wars. The idea of extending mechanised wars, which began in an elementary fashion with the introduction of tanks and planes in the First World War in the early part of the last century, will likely move into the arena of fighting wars through machines. The end idea, however, would be to kill human beings because it is humans who are fighting and they would not be content with bombing out the enemy’s machines.

What is of importance at the moment is the fact that the Indian military’s thinking is moving rather slowly, and India’s political and diplomatic leadership is also moving in conventional grooves. The decision to suspend the Indus Water Treaty with Pakistan in the wake of the April 22 Pahalgam terrorist attack smacks of old-fashioned thinking. Surgical strikes on terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan through the use of missiles is good, but may not be too effective in targeting terrorists.

The Indian military’s top brass has made it clear that the loss of a few planes is no big deal, and that it is the success of the mission that is of importance. It is the right point of view too. But losses and setbacks should be scrutinised, and defence experts must be doing it. The use of attack drones by Pakistan, however ineffective, must have drawn the attention of the experts as well. There is, however, the need to reckon with drones as vehicles of carrying bombs to target terrorist bases across the border because the drones are now part of Pakistan’s war machinery. From all accounts now available to the public, India has successfully shot down and jammed the drones. It will not be impossible to envisage radar-eluding drones carrying heavy bombs over medium-range distances.