Stitching a shield

Operation Sindoor marked India’s largest cross-border missile and drone operation against Pakistan in May last year. This was dubbed as the first “drone war” between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.

Pakistan reportedly used several drones like Burraq unmanned combat aerial vehicle, Shahpar-II, Uqab tactical unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and Chinese CH-4 and Wing Loong drones. It also used Zagros and indigenous kamikaze drones along with electronic decoy UAVs.

India, in turn, fired Israeli Heron and Harpy loitering drones for breaching Pakistani airspace. While most of the drones from Pakistan were intercepted, the conflict highlighted a fundamental asymmetry: Drones costing only a few thousand dollars were forcing the activation of systems designed for threats several orders of magnitude higher.

Clearly, India needed an effective counter-drone architecture. “This conflict has allowed Indian ministries, users, and policymakers to analyse gaps. We need to fine-tune our policy structures to stimulate indigenous research and innovation,” Group Captain R K Narang (retired), senior fellow at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA), said.

“Pakistan does not want a conventional war. It prefers low-cost options like missiles, drones, and artillery. This conflict reinforced that reality.”

Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan had also highlighted the need for a holistic counter-unmanned aircraft system(C-UAS). for the armed forces during his keynote at a seminar at the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies in March 2025. The CDS also called for doctrinal clarity, the need for a common vocabulary and grammar regarding drones during the seminar.

For decades, India’s air defence architecture planning has relied on traditional platforms like the S-400 and other air defences and radars. Drones disrupt that. 

They blur the distinction between airspace violations and nuisance intrusions, requiring cost-effective solutions to blunt them. Unlike aircraft or ballistic missiles, drones can fly low, exploit terrain masking, and can overwhelm air defences with swarm attacks.

Their small radar cross-sections make detection difficult, while their low cost enables strategies to exhaust defences rather than defeat them.

Even a small swarm of drones made of cheap UAVs can overwhelm big air defences. 

During Operation True Promise, launched by Iran in April 2024, Iran used inexpensive Shahed-136 “suicide” drones to target military facilities, including the Nevatim and Ramon airbases in Israel.

In the Ukraine war, both Ukrainian and Russian forces have relied heavily on cheap first-person view (FPV) drones, often costing a few hundred dollars, to destroy tanks, artillery, radar systems, and even air defence launchers worth millions.

Swarm-style attacks using multiple FPVs have become common, while loitering munitions have been used to hunt air defence radars and command posts.

In India, the drone threat is not confined to wartime scenarios: Cheap drones and quadcopters are often used to smuggle drugs, weapons, and contraband from Pakistan, particularly in border states like Punjab and Rajasthan.

An effective counter-drone system is a mix of a wide range of solutions, which vary from camera systems, advanced radars, sensors, net guns, and cyber jamming systems.

These systems are effectively used in convergence to detect, track, identify, and neutralise unauthorised or hostile drones. These systems are used to protect not just military installations but also civilian infrastructure like airports, hospitals, and train depots.

India is in the phase of turning architectural vision for C-UAS into practice. A key component of the shift is the role of private players that are developing different layers of an indigenous counter-drone system.

India’s current posture has moved beyond a purely developmental phase and now reflects a hybrid capability, where mature soft-kill systems are already operational, and hard-kill solutions are beginning to enter service, albeit in limited numbers.

On the soft-kill side, India has built a reasonably mature and widely deployed ecosystem. Radio-frequency (RF) detection, RF jamming, global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) spoofing, and cyber takeover systems are already in use with the army, navy, air force, Border Security Force (BSF), National Security Guard, and other agencies. These systems are routinely employed for VVIP security, sensitive installations, and border management.

India is still developing hard-kill counter-drone capabilities. The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has successfully tested the Mk-II(A), a laser-directed energy weapon capable of physically damaging or destroying drones at a range of 2 to 5 kilometres (km).

Among private firms in the defence industry, Indrajaal, a Hyderabad-based tech subsidiary of Grene Robotics, is one of the most visible players on the ground. It has bagged contracts worth around ₹100 crore from the Ministry of Defence to deploy multi-layered autonomous anti-drone systems for the army and navy.

These systems claim to integrate artificial intelligence (AI)-driven detection with cyber takeover, soft-denial, soft-kill, and hard-kill mechanisms into a single platform and are intended to “detect, track, and neutralise threats seamlessly without blind spots or delays”, according to company statements.

They will be positioned at strategic installations, including naval ports and other critical border assets. Indrajaal’s work builds on earlier deployments of its AI-powered “Indrajaal Infra” suite, which was reported to have been operational at a naval port during the May skirmishes.

“The naval orders we received are based on systems that were already deployed and fielded at naval ports during Operation Sindoor in May,” Kiran Raju, founder of Indrajaal, said. “These systems have been live and operational for the last seven to eight months, running 24×7 with no downtime.”

One of the firm’s breakthrough systems is the Indrajaal Ranger, India’s first mobile AI-powered anti-drone patrol vehicle, specifically designed to detect and neutralise aerial threats while in motion.

It is mounted on a 4x4 Toyota Hilux platform and designed to protect targets like moving convoys and patrols. “The Ranger is primarily designed for border security and urban security. We have also been requested to build a similar mobile patrol system for the Army,” Raju said.

“Globally, the best-case mitigation rate is around 97 per cent. That remaining percentage is why multilayer systems, soft kill, cyber takeover, interception zones, are essential.”

At the same time, the DRDO is preparing to roll out its D4 (Drone Detect, Deter, Destroy) counter-drone system for wider deployment. 

D4 uses a combination of radar, detectors, and sensors with AI-aided threat classification. It can employ jamming and laser-based neutralisation mechanisms, and is already in use by multiple agencies and is being delivered to the Indian Army as well.

Another indigenous platform gaining attention is the Bhargavastra, a low-cost, kinetic counter-drone system developed with modular micro-rocket and guided micro-missile layers that claim it can neutralise swarms within seconds.

It is India’s first indigenous micro-missile counter-drone system capable of firing 64 such missiles in a single salvo, neutralising hostile drone swarms within seconds. Developed by private companies such as Solar Defence and Aerospace Ltd (Nagpur) in collaboration with Economic Explosives Ltd, it was successfully tested by the army. This system is designed to complement soft-kill measures with hard-kill engagement for high-density threat scenarios.

Additional layers of India’s counter-UAS architecture include the SAKSHAM C-UAS grid, a command-and-control framework developed by the state-run Bharat Electronics Ltd, which integrates radar, electro-optical, and other sensors to provide real-time detection and mitigation of hostile drones. This modular, scalable system is being procured rapidly by the army to enhance battlefield situational awareness and automation in responses.

Armoury Shield is another company that has bagged contracts worth ₹200 crore to supply 40 units of its flagship Surge handheld anti-drone systems to the Indian Army.

“We have not yet delivered our systems in active combat zones, but they have been tested extensively under realistic field conditions. The challenge is to ensure these systems can talk to each other and to existing defence networks,” Amardeep Singh, founder of Armoury Shield, said.

Alongside these, other players such as Paras Defence and Space have secured orders for advanced anti-drone jammers and systems under the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative.

The integration of domestic lasers into air defence is another emerging layer. DRDO and public sector Bharat Electronics Ltd are deploying laser-based anti-drone systems with effective hard-kill ranges up to 2 km, integrating radar, electro-optical, and infrared sensors to address hostile UAVs with precision.

Despite these advancements, India’s current counter-drone architecture is fragmented. India currently operates multiple counter-drone systems across categories, but there is an absence of a fully networked, integrated architecture for these systems.

Different applications require diverse solutions. Border Security Force (BSF) aims to catch contraband drones intact, whereas the army prioritises neutralisation to prevent threats from reaching sensitive targets.

“The system may claim the drone threat has been neutralised, but in reality there is often no way to know what actually happened. If it turns back, you don’t know whether it was jammed, spoofed, or simply disengaged.” a BSF officer deployed in border areas told Blueprint on the condition of anonymity.

“Unless you can pull out the drone’s software and navigation data, you don’t get answers. Otherwise, it’s just assumptions,” he added.

This uncertainty points to a deeper operational problem: attribution. In low-altitude drone engagements, especially along contested borders, neutralisation is not always visually confirmed. A drone that turns back may have been jammed, spoofed, cyber-compromised, or simply programmed to abort under certain conditions. Without physical recovery, intent and causality remain ambiguous.

Indrajaal, on its part, says its SkyOS system builds what it describes as a multi-layer engagement log, correlating radar tracks, radio-frequency behaviour, GNSS telemetry patterns, and effector command outputs before, during, and after an interception. According to the company, mitigation is classified only when sensor data links a countermeasure, such as jamming or cyber takeover, to a measurable change in the drone’s flight behaviour.

Company officials say every engagement generates time-stamped logs that capture signal interrogation results, protocol behaviour analysis, and post-intervention flight trajectories. These records, they argue, allow after-action audits and reduce reliance on single-sensor claims.

“A ‘successful jamming’ event is verified when RF communications from the controller are lost simultaneously with increased command signal noise and the drone’s flight profile indicates loss of control,” Raju said.

Attribution becomes more complex when multiple counter-drone systems operate in the same airspace. Indrajaal says its systems assign unique identifiers to each engagement and use time-correlation across radar, RF, electro-optical and GNSS data streams to determine which action caused the decisive behavioural shift.

However, it is still unclear if these system logs are adequate to satisfy the demands of operational users. Clean attribution may be challenging in a highly crowded electronic warfare environment due to overlapping signals and simultaneous actions.

Furthermore, even very successful logging systems might stay isolated in the absence of a national framework to guarantee that mitigation is defined, recorded, and audited consistently across services.

Therefore, the issue is more institutional than just a technical one. In order for what one system confirms as a true neutralisation to be recognised as legitimate evidence across agencies, rather than merely an internal assertion, it entails developing a common standard of verification for hostile drone elimination.

In a 2022 paper for the IDSA titled “Countering the drone threat in India”, Akshat Upadhyay argued that India’s responses to UASs remain largely ad hoc and reactive.

He noted that C-UAS measures have often been driven by specific incidents rather than being anchored in a joint doctrine, pointing to gaps in inter-service coordination. Even indigenous innovation risks producing isolated solutions rather than a resilient, networked shield.

The study noted the absence of a joint counter-drone framework across services that highlighted operational gaps and exposure to swarm-based and attrition-style drone attacks, and a continued dependence on legacy air-defence systems that were never designed to deal with small, low-cost UAVs.

Testing infrastructure is another bottleneck. “Counter-drone systems require large, dedicated testing corridors where systems can be continuously developed, tested, and refined,” Singh said.

“This is not something startups can create on their own. Dedicated ranges where industry and the military can repeatedly test and iterate would significantly accelerate capability development.”

Integration remains a problem for C-UAS, as detection, tracking, and neutralisation systems are often procured and operated in silos by different services and agencies.

This fragmentation increased reaction time and raised the risk of missed or misclassified targets, especially in low-altitude, cluttered environments.

Private players, for their part, argued that innovation alone cannot substitute for architectural direction. Several firms developing C-UAS technologies said the absence of common standards and integration frameworks limits the scalability of indigenous solutions, even when the underlying technology is mature.

Apart from hardware, experts stressed that a national-level unification grid is essential. India still lacks a comprehensive civil-military unmanned traffic management (UTM) system, which is critical for identifying hostile drones without physical monitoring.

“A delivery drone from Amazon or Swiggy could be taken down by an isolated system because there is no way to distinguish friendly from hostile drones,” Raju said.

“If drones were cars, counter-drone infrastructure would be the roads, traffic police, and rules. Without that ecosystem, the drone industry cannot thrive.”

Similarly, the military requires its own UTM framework to distinguish friendly from hostile drones during operations. “These are critical to avoid confusion, accidental engagement, and exploitation by adversaries,” Narang said.

Scalability is another issue for most counter-drone technologies. Most of these technologies are very expensive to procure and maintain, while target drones are cheap, which creates a cost asymmetry that can be exploited by the enemy to deplete defences, particularly in attrition-based scenarios.

Rules of engagement for most C-UAS actions in peacetime are also undefined, and thresholds for soft-kill and hard-kill responses are unclear.

Meanwhile, China has developed advanced AI-driven drone swarm technology capable of allowing a single operator to command over 200 autonomous fixed-wing drones for coordinated surveillance and strike missions.

Developed by the People’s Liberation Army’s National University of Defense Technology, this drone swarm utilises intelligent algorithms for decentralised decision-making and can fly in formation, and conduct reconnaissance or strikes without direct, continuous human input for each unit.

In a chilling video released by the Chinese state television, a single soldier is shown managing a swarm of 200 drones. The programme also showed a Chinese Swarm I land vehicle, which it said can simultaneously launch 48 fixed-wing drones as loitering weapons.

It is in the face of this growing threat that the need for drone architecture in India becomes more important than ever.

“India has proved it can counter drones without exhausting high-value defences. The challenge now is to build an architecture that can scale and adapt because the next drone war will not be episodic,” Narang said.

The challenge for India in the area is no longer about developing technology — India already has many sensors, jammers, lasers, and kinetic interceptors. Rather, it is how these technologies are going to interact with each other, who is going to control escalation, and how these are going to be calibrated in peacetime and in war.

Mission Sudarshan Chakra is a step in the right direction that could determine how ready India is for the next drone war.