The Indian Army used information warfare during Operation Sindoor. Its effort was recently acknowledged by the government. This unit of the army, formally called the Additional Directorate General of Strategic Communications since 2020, started as a publicity cell in 1985, and was known by other names between 1994 and 2004.
By many accounts, while India demonstrated its military capability in the conflict over May 7-10, it lost the perception battle to Pakistan, a smaller adversary, at least initially. Chinese-assisted information warfare that Pakistan used showed better results for that country among the international news audience.
India is infusing frontier technology in defence but needs to consolidate its policy on unconventional combat to catch up with advanced military powers, especially its larger adversary China, interviews with defence analysts suggest.
Modern warfare is less well-defined and permeates domains such as cyber, cognitive, communication, information, drones, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). The basic idea of war is old. Only the means to wage it are evolving. “It is becoming increasingly clear that the armed forces must have an information plan before a conflict,” said retired Lieutenant General Dushyant Singh, director-general, Centre for Land Warfare Studies, a New Delhi-based think tank.
“We are witnessing the intensity and the disruptive nature of change,” Lt Gen Singh said, adding that China used “millions of bots” in its pro-Pakistan cyber campaign aimed at India earlier this summer. “We are moving towards an era of interstate actors where international boundaries have become irrelevant,” he said.
The world has witnessed cyber operations of offensive and defensive nature since the birth of the internet in 1983 (official date).
“The scale, sophistication, and complexity of cyber operations have grown, aided by advances in AI,” said Lora Saalman, associate senior fellow, Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).
The integration of private actors in government-led cyber operations and questions over the private sector’s role as a combatant have captured media attention more recently. “But these trends are decades old,” Saalman said.
This year’s massive public-data exposure in the US is a major example of cyber warfare.
The hacking operation “Salt Typhoon was more than a one-off intelligence success for China”, the Foreign Affairs magazine wrote in August, warning that the US was failing to secure a vast digital home front and the physical assets that depend on it.
Lt Gen Singh said next-generation technology is no longer a support system; it is the battlefield, and India should harness AI soon.
Indian Army personnel inspect an armed drone during exercise Drone Prahar (Photo: Indian Army)
Working the spectrum
Speaking in New Delhi at a recent seminar on enhancing battlefield communication through AI-driven spectrum management, Major General (Maj Gen) S C Maan, additional director-general, Army Design Bureau, said India was developing a mostly remotely operated system that would seek to cover large swaths of the country’s borders. The system is expected to consider extreme weather along the Line of Control with Pakistan, water bodies along the Line of Actual Control with China, and dense jungles in northeastern India, bordering Bangladesh and Myanmar. The private sector is investing in the project.
An officer from the army’s signal corps said radio spectrum is a highly contested space (up to 3,000 gigahertz) where thousands of frequencies and “military emitters” (important in electronic warfare) are present, which is why India should create a customised cognitive radio — a wireless system to optimise spectrum usage — that will function through the country’s diverse terrain conditions.
According to a scientist who works on military projects, using signal jammers in real time is tough, because microseconds matter (20,000 hops per second – average rate at which transmission changes). “A lot of data has to be closed in real time.”
The state-run Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) is “tailoring” a system that can be placed in software-defined radios (SDRs) of the armed forces in the future, the scientist said.“The country can’t expose its communications to the outside world, so indigenous solutions are necessary,” said another expert who works in the defence industry.
Last year, the government announced it would spend ~10,300 crore on AI programmes until 2029. It is unclear how much of the money will go to the military. Some 75 AI-related projects have been initiated by the armed forces and the country’s defence organisations.
Retired Lt Gen D S Hooda wrote in a 2023 Delhi Policy Group paper that the Indian military should set up a directorate of AI.
India has begun to deploy AI strategically across several defence domains, according to accounting firm KPMG. An “intrusion-detection system” that uses AI-powered video analytics to autonomously detect human movement along sensitive border stretches, significantly enhancing around-the-clock surveillance with minimal human intervention, has been developed by public-private companies, it said in a report.
AI is being integrated into such areas as command, control, communication, computer, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The Indian Navy is leveraging AI to manage maritime information and create domain awareness by integrating satellite data, ship movement patterns, and open-source intelligence. But the country has a significant AI-capability gap with other major military powers, the Blueprint’s reporting and research showed.
The Arcv Mule—an agile, durable, all-weather ground robot for defence applications (Photo: Aero Arc)
AI advances elsewhere
China has invested much more in AI and fielded enabled systems. But India has lately used AI-enabled unmanned systems “to combat border incursions, terrorist activities, illegal immigration, drug trafficking, and natural disasters” while engaging in anti-aircraft, anti-submarine, and other forms of conventional warfare.
India’s AI-enabled systems seem to target border and terrorism-related aims while China’s AI-related aims are much broader and cover both domestic and international security, said Saalman, the Sipri expert who studies the military application of AI in China and India.
How is AI applied to the Indian military or the different branches of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China?
India and China emphasise indigenisation to reduce dependence on supply chains, and, in China’s case, to address the increasing restrictions on its access to critical AI components from overseas.
“Made in China and an expanded version of Make in India dominate both models (AI application),” Saalman said, adding that China remained more adept at military-civil fusion, and had been able to leverage an expanding network of “national champions” of industry. “China also presents greater wherewithal and transparency than India in terms of military applications of a number of AI-enabled platforms, particularly in the space and nuclear arenas,” she said.
In India, AI investments still largely target public-sector companies. Even so, while India’s civil-military and public-private sector partnerships have lagged China’s military-civil fusion, India has increased AI-enabled projects and platforms focused on monitoring and in the defence of its land, air, and maritime borders.
Saalman’s studies have found that in Russia, as in China, weapon systems such as AI-enabled hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs) — which engage in manoeuvring, precision, and speed — are strategically significant. Other examples of AI-enabled systems are: The Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missile, with a range of 2,000 km, which, given its tendency to avoid air defence and missile defence, likely has a degree of AI and is possibly carried by the long-range Tu-22M3 Backfire bomber that also has AI inclusion; the Tsirkon ship-launched hypersonic cruise missile, with a range of 1,000 km; and the Poseidon intercontinental nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed underwater vehicle.
In the US, AI agents reportedly pilot the XQ-58A Valkyrie, which has flown in formation with the nuclear-capable F-15E Strike Eagle; and the possible AI-piloted General Dynamics X-62 variable stability in-flight simulator test aircraft that is derived from the F-16D Fighting Falcon (the variable provides a test bed to integrate AI into kinetic systems).
From a nuclear standpoint, this is significant as the X-62 is a bespoke F-16 fighter jet originally used to test what would become the precursor to the F-22 Raptor’s thrust-vectoring capability, both of which are technically nuclear-capable platforms, Saalman said.
In 2019, the Chinese government released its 10th white paper on national defence since 1998, and the first comprehensive document after Xi Jinping became the country’s President in 2013. The white paper said a then-prevailing trend was to develop long-range precision, intelligent, stealth or unmanned weaponry and equipment.
“The US is engaging in technological and institutional innovation in pursuit of absolute military superiority. Russia is advancing its “New Look’ military reform. Meanwhile, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and India are rebalancing and optimising the structure of their military forces,” an English translation of the paper said.
The PLA has since taken steps to build on technology for what it calls “intelligentised warfare”. According to a report by the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies, a New Delhi-based think tank affiliated to the Ministry of Defence, the PLA has made “huge progress in building the capability to conduct algorithmic warfare through synchronised long-range precise strikes across multiple domains”.
PLA-affiliated institutions have developed two unmanned intelligent technologies, including a drone swarm system capable of self-repair, and an augmented reality (AR) interaction system that allows individual infantry soldiers to control multiple unmanned aircraft and vehicles. These systems will enable drone reconnaissance and drone attacks, enhancing troops’ situational awareness on the battlefield, a study of trends in the Chinese military, by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), an Indian think tank, found.
“In July 2023, the PLA was reported to be developing ‘neuro-strike weapons’ designed to disrupt the brain functions of military personnel and civilians, and influence government leaders or entire populations by using non-kinetic technology,” the ORF study said.
A PLA unit is reportedly working to develop unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that would replace humans in complex overseas missions in the future. But developing robots to perfectly mimic humans might take more than firm political will.
According to a research paper on AI and future warfare, published by Chatham House in 2017, every autonomous system that interacts in a dynamic environment must construct a world model and continually update it. This means that the world must be perceived (or sensed through cameras, microphones, and/or tactile sensors) and then reconstructed in such a way that the computer “brain” has an effective and updated model of the world it is in before it can make decisions.
“The fidelity of the world model and the timeliness of its updates are the keys to an effective autonomous system,” the paper said.
A drone being tested during a military exercise (Photo: Indian Army)
Drone encounter
Retired Air Chief Marshal V R Chaudhari said two primary categories of weapon systems will boost combat readiness of the Indian Air Force (IAF) in the future: Missiles beyond visual range (BVR) to tackle air-to-ground and air-to-air threats, and attritable (able to undergo attrition) drones intended for high-risk missions.
“The development of the indigenous Astra family of BVR missiles is progressing but needs to reach maturity, with longer-range variants brought into operation,” the former IAF chief said. In the battlefield of the near future, swarms of such drones will enable “smart combat mass” — agile, survivable and networked with different levels of AI inclusion and autonomous capabilities. These can be rapidly concentrated to achieve numerical and tactical advantage, without the prohibitive costs of relying solely on a small number of expensive manned systems.
Among expensive options will be the loyal wingman drones, also referred to as collaborative combat aircraft (CCA). These aircraft will be AI-enabled but could also be optionally controlled by a manned aircraft that remains behind the frontline.
Equipped with onboard AI, the CCA drones will be capable of navigating, evading or engaging threats, and making tactical decisions autonomously. During operations, they will function with varying degrees of autonomy, with access to a human.
Other than real-time data sharing, the CCAs will be integrated into a broader combat cloud and support swarm logic and formation flying. These capabilities will be crucial for coordinated attacks, jamming, surveillance, and defensive manoeuvres alongside manned aircraft and other assets.
In a communication-denied environment — where hostile electronic warfare systems or jammers are heavily deployed — the CCAs could also be assigned “fire-and-forget” roles for deep-strike missions.
At least eight other countries are pursuing loyal wingman programmes, including the US, China, and Russia. The Indian state-run Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) is developing a system that envisions pairing manned and unmanned combat aircraft, with a manned fighter jet acting as the “mothership” for a suite of assets, including swarming UAVs, loitering munitions (LMs), a high-altitude pseudo-satellite, and an unmanned combat aerial vehicle that will function as a loyal wingman.
Other than HAL, the National Aerospace Laboratories, the DRDO and private drone maker NewSpace Research and Technologies are involved in the combat air-teaming system (CATS) project. In January, HAL did the first engine ground test of the CATS Warrior, its full-scale demonstrator.
The CATS Warrior full-scale demonstrator, which underwent its first engine ground test in January (Photo: HAL)
But the successful deployment of such systems — through a tactic known as collaborative engagement — relies on each system being linked via a secure datalink that can communicate across frequencies and protocols, that doesn’t depend on an intermediary platform on land or at sea, and is fully in Indian control.
To enable this, most platforms of the army, the navy and the air force will need to be equipped with an indigenously developed SDR (Software-Defined Radio) system, which allows secure, reconfigurable and interoperable communication, said retired Air Vice Marshal Anil Golani, director-general, Centre for Air Power Studies, another New Delhi-based think tank. So far, within the IAF, an initiative called the Operational Data Link has not yielded any results.
“We need to complete the project and scale it up to its fully envisioned capacity without delay. The evolving nature of air warfare means that the IAF’s need for such a system is perhaps even more urgent than that of the other services,” Air Vice Marshal Golani said.
The IAF operates diverse platforms —combat, support, intelligence and surveillance — which are capable of network-centric warfare. These platforms are supported in such operations by airborne early warning and control (AEWC) aircraft, although not in the numbers the IAF considers adequate. But future wars will demand greater connectivity.
An Indian Army Arjun main battle tank operates alongside a Rudra attack helicopter during a military exercise (Photo: Indian Army)
“An SDR enables real-time encryption and is resistant to jamming,” Air Vice Marshal Golani said, adding that the IAF’s communications were sought to be interrupted during India’s airstrike against terrorist infrastructure in Balakot, Pakistan, in 2019.
The drone market in India — currently estimated to be $650 million — is expected to double by 2029-30.
In June, a seminar in New Delhi brought together people from the military and industry to discuss the application of new technology, with emphasis on the user’s perspective. A part of it was counter-drone systems. Group Captain G Sreenivas Prasad said that detecting small drones is a major challenge today.
Modern drones, autonomous and tethered, are difficult to detect as they can hop frequencies, have high-gain force (wireless antenna), and use less noisy rotors. The radar-absorbent material can reduce the detection ranges further.
The average range of 5-10 km (usually, but not always), within which a drone is detected, depends on the size of the remote-controlled aircraft (RCA), and the strength of the radio frequency signal. In urban areas, detection is more difficult, also due to the absence of a clear line of sight, and the presence of communication devices.
Even with measures such as air-time tracking, geofencing, and unified threat management, identification of small drones in large numbers is tough. “AI is the only thing that can be explored in many ways” to build strong counter-drone technology, the IAF officer said.
‘Smart’ shells
Kamikaze drones, or LMs, were developed in the 1980s, initially to target air defence and surface-to-air missiles.
LMs have emerged as hot weapons in recent conflicts in different parts of the world. They are flexible and precise, which makes them both easy to operate, and effective in battle. Their ability to move over an area, identify and engage targets, limit collateral damage, and provide real-time intelligence make them valuable tools for the armed forces.
Group Captain (Gp Cap) N K Chaubey, also from the IAF, described the LM as “a happy mix of an unmanned aerial system and a missile”. Over time, LMs have assumed roles for various missions in different ranges — short, medium, and long — and for operations such as anti-personnel, anti-bunker, and anti-armoury, as well as the destruction of hostile air-based missile bases, and other critical infrastructure.
An aerial view of the ideaForge Switch UAV, an all-terrain drone used by the Indian armed forces for surveillance and reconnaissance missions (Photo: Ideaforge)
The success rate of their deployment in recent conflicts has been more than 80 per cent, Gp Cap Chaubey said at the June seminar. There should be a policy on the sale of LMs in the country, he added. “We should develop a system which is radar-cued, and we should be able to engage the drones of LMs or unmanned aerial systems without requiring human intervention,” Gp Cap Chaubey said.
The capability of drones has to be better than what the country currently has, given the development and possession of similar weapons in India’s neighbourhood, he said, adding that indigenous capability and a
secure datalink were must-haves “to avoid enemy interference”.
According to retired Major General Anil Oberoi, president, SMPP Ltd, while the Russia-Ukraine war is more than three years old, two short, intense conflicts have occurred recently: India-Pakistan in May and Iran-Israel in June.The political and military objectives of short-and-intense conflicts are achieved through precision technology related to ammunition, as seen during Operation Sindoor, Maj Gen Oberoi said, adding that such ammunition could navigate a distance of even less than 1 metre.
“We could absolutely, with pinpointed accuracy, strike our targets,” he said. His company makes 155-millimetre shells, a common-size projectile in modern warfare. Precision proved useful in the past, too. According to him, only 9 per cent of the ammunition used during the Gulf War (1990-91) was precision ammunition. But the target-destruction rate was 76 per cent.
Precision projectiles use inertial navigation and laser guidance (to illuminate the target area, generally towards the end of its flight). The other kinds of guidance include infrared or heat sensors, which home in on the target (in attack mode), electro-optical and terminal.
He said the Russian-made Krasnopol, a laser-guided artillery shell, was used by India during the Kargil war (1999), but wasn’t “very effective”, and that the second version was better for high altitudes. China has its own version of the Russian shell after acquiring the technology.
Maj Gen Oberoi urged the military people present in the audience at the same seminar to “increase” the demand for “sophisticated” shells.“Just imagine, one precision ammunition costs about $0.2 million, whereas a ‘dumb ammunition’ (conventional) costs just about $2,000. That is the difference in the cost of this ammunition. And if you have to make it, there is a lot of research and development work to do,” he said.
Abhishek Jain of Zeus Numerix gave a presentation on the private company’s 81-millimetre mortar precision munition, claiming that the ejector racks and bombs were designed to fit into any drone. “That’s the logic, because in war, scalability would be required, which means you should be even able to take an agriculture drone, weaponise it, and start hitting the enemy,” Jain said.
He said such systems could be made in India but the approach would have to change. “The problem is that whenever we use maths in most of our companies, it’s for finance. It’s not for technology. The moment we start using our maths for technology, and it’s complicated maths — not like finance where you can do it on Excel — we require a supercomputer,” Jain said, adding that investing in technology would lead to profit.
Forty supercomputing systems, with a total capacity of more than 64 petaflops (PF), are expected to be built in India under the National Supercomputer Mission (since 2015) in the coming years. So far, 37 systems (40 PF) have been installed, according to government data.
An Indian Air Force (IAF) Israeli-origin Phalcon airborne warning and control system (AWACS) aircraft (Photo: IAF)
The US has 175 supercomputing systems and China some 167 (the last publicly known count). Jain also pitched the idea of a “UAV weaponised kit”. “What happens if a full-scale war breaks out tomorrow and we don’t have so many drones?”
He said producing a large number of drones at very short notice could be difficult. Jain’s solution: Turn agriculture drones into killer ones. Last year, an article on the rampant and wanton use of drones across the world by both state and nonstate actors pointed to legal and ethical issues.
“The use of violence during conflict may be determined by the instincts of machines incapable of navigating the moral ambiguities of war and making ethical decisions. It is impossible to predict how the law will keep up with or stop such technological advances, but the current legal framework certainly lacks clarity and foresight,” Kristian Humble, an associate professor of international law at the University of Greenwich, wrote in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs.
 "Old war, new plan: Experts urge policy consolidation on unconventional combat")
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