Army inducts first lot of desi anti-drone systems for China border deployment

The Army has now inducted an initial lot of seven new indigenous integrated drone detection and interdiction systems (IDD&IS) for deployment along the northern borders with China even as DRDO is working on more powerful directed energy weapon (DEW) systems in the shape of high-energy lasers and high-powered microwaves.

The vehicle-based IDD&IS, which provide for both soft kills of hostile drones through jamming and hard kills through lasers, has a detection range of 5 to 8 km. While the soft kill can jam the drones at ranges from 2 to 5 km, the effective hard kill range is over 800 meters.

Produced by DRDO and Bharat Electronics, these IDD&ISs are Mark-1 variants inducted by the Army Air Defence (AAD). They will add to the existing counter-drone systems. There will, of course, be advanced IDD&IS versions with longer interception ranges an officer said.

The systems provide an integrated capability to detect low radar cross-section drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and enable their destruction through integrated application of soft and hard kills, he added.

With the cost-effective operational utility of drones and swarm drones being reinforced by the Armenia-Azerbaijan, Russia-Ukraine and other conflicts, the armed forces are going in for induction of a wide array of UAVs from both domestic as well as foreign sources.  There is an equal emphasis on inducting different kinds of effective counter-drone systems. They range from jamming, spoofing and blinding systems to disrupt the satellite or video command-and-control links of drones to laser-based DEWs.

The armed forces have already inked several contracts for them, and more are in the pipeline.

India, of course, has lagged far behind other countries in developing drones as well as counter-drone systems. After DRDO developed anti-drone systems with 2-kilowatt to 10-kilowatt lasers, the armed forces have ordered 23 such systems for around Rs 400 crore.

DRDO is now working on DEWs with power levels of nearly 30-50 kilowatt as per a roadmap laid down with short, medium and long-term goals. “The aim is to develop DEWs with higher power levels in the next three to five years with envisaged operational ranges of tens of kms a source said.

India certainly needs a mission-mode national programme on DEWs, given the continuing four-year-old military confrontation with China in eastern Ladakh.