The question came from a recent “Fireside Chat” by Profs. Bapa Rao and Rajeev Srinivasan, braving 35 deg. Chennai temperatures at IIT Madras. Prof. Rao asserted that it is not a Step Change, but a hugely accelerated Evolution. Rajeev perhaps differs. But is this New Order here to stay? The real question is, should India drop projects on large, heavy weapons and rush to cheap mass-market “Drones”? Or accelerate indigenous R&D, innovation and Atmanirbhar manufacturing? These are dire times to be waffling. 

Drones are old

The term refers to UAVs or UnCrewed Aerial Vehicles – but implies manoeuvring, target identification and autonomy. Yes, Sudarshan Chakra was one. I include Space Drone Swarms- we’ll see why- but exclude ground, water and underwater due to ignorance. The V-1 Flying Bomb of WW2 with autopilot and wings qualified – but far faster, heavier V2s were just ballistic missiles a.k.a. “rocks”. Torpedoes were fired from submarines, ships and planes starting in WW1, with increasing “autonomy”. In the 1960s, Vietnam, Remote Piloted (reconnaissance) Vehicles (RPV) from General Atomics, better known for nuclear reactors, were operated not by the military but by the Intelligence Services. Mass production and swarms are also old. The Mugin UAV company, headquartered in Taiwan but producing in the PRC, has offered a range of drones for many years. Pakistan was a customer for drugs/weapons transport across the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir.  Intel Corporation of the USA showed off 1218 drones choreographed and synchronised simultaneously in the night sky over the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea. 

Fast Computers and Hypersonic Control 

Cruise missiles were initially Doomsday nukes fired from submarines to fly under radar at about 400kmph. With cheaper conventional warheads placed on ships and aircraft, they could turn around street corners and enter ventilator shafts (Baghdad 1991).  These were “Smart” but pre-programmed with an address and “waypoint” navigation, if GPS satellites could not be used. No dodging or autonomy was possible. For about $1M each with quantity discounts. 

Back around 2000, a fierce debate raged on the Internet. India’s Pokhran-2 May 11, 1998 explosions included one with “augmented fission”. Not quite a Hydrogen Bomb – no mushroom cloud - but with Tritium (heavy hydrogen) added to a fission nuke. Proved ability to reach 200 kilotons (kT). Hiroshima/Nagasaki were at 5kT each. Uber-Patriots demanded that India “test an ICBM” with at least 1 Megaton blast. I argued against this national blunder. Forget Sanctions and global condemnation. Budget-blowing MT-yield bomb programs would ensure that India missed the boat on the Next Thing. Hypersonic Cruise Missiles. 

India did not miss that boat. Long range, yes; MT warhead, no. 

Hypersonics evolved fast. Circa 2000, a novel painted a horrible picture of a time when many nations had cruise missiles and hypersonics. We are there.  Hypersonic cruise has many tough problems. Simple arithmetic: At 3000 m/s (“medium speed”), a flow perturbation “convects” from nose to tail of a 5-meter weapon, in under 2.5 milliseconds. If you cannot sense, compute and adjust controls within that time, it is all over. Only extreme computing and actuation, surviving high heat and acceleration, could stabilise, control and manoeuvre. “They” did it. Today’s Russian Kinzhals exceed 3 km per second and can evade defences. 

CEP and warhead size shrank 

In Mariupol, Ukraine, in 2014, three Ukrainian regime tanks drove into a school compound and stopped. Within a minute, a missile hit one tank. “Human flesh hanging from tree branches”. A second missile hit the next tank. The 3rd crew got out and ran. Imagine the communication, target acquisition and response time of that. This indicates the revolution that has occurred in CEP, Circular Error Probability. CEP is the radius within which your gizmo is pretty certain to hit a distant target. As CEP shrank, so did the market for huge warheads to wipe out a big area, just to hit a small target, enabling small warheads and cheaper launchers. Fast automation and shrinking CEP enabled the exponential rise in “drone” utility. 

In Nagorno-Karabakh, Azerbaijanis used Turkish drones (resembling PRC’s Mugin UAVs and US Predators) to annihilate Armenia’s Soviet hand-me-down Army. No contest. The Ukraine and present Iran “Special Military Operations” have advanced Drones by orders of magnitude. I won’t add to the noise about Op. Sindoor. 

Will Drone Swarms render the Crewed Fighter Plane and Massive Aircraft Carrier irrelevant? 

Today, people are dazzled by small drones, Biblical little Davids with slingshots killing Goliaths. But that works only once in real life. Goliath’s brother could learn to use a slingshot with far more range and kinetic energy. End of David. 

A modern fighter plane costs USD 50M to 160M, plus 1 or two precious human pilots. The fighter can confuse and dodge many advanced missiles and carry out its mission, which is the point. A cheap drone downing a fighter plane would be a very lucky shot. The question is, how crucial is the mission to send a manned fighter plane? Evidently, many are. 

Have huge aircraft carriers become just targets? The chappal-clad Yemeni Houthis and now Iranians appear to have at least pestered multiple aircraft carriers. Claims differ on exactly why some have left the scene. So, shouldn’t we drop the aircraft carrier building in India? 

No. A warfighter always accepts risk from which I would surely run away, to carry out an essential mission. To quote Ian Fleming’s James Bond 007, quoting an old Chinese Proverb: 

“Before you set out for Revenge, Dig Two Graves”.  

The adversary facing destruction will try their best. Yes, the Carrier is at risk. But note: the fighting today is on the other side of the world from the carriers’ home. Nothing can project power like a big carrier. 

These floating fortresses cost $6 to 12B each and a lot to operate, but their business case is more about protecting the US dollar, which they have done admirably, worth dozens of $Trillions. Several ground military bases have suffered heavy damage. OK, they don’t sink, but the aircraft carrier is still one of the safest places in the Middle East. 

A carrier could probably attack a nation while staying out in the clear ocean, out of range of small drones, etc. So why go into danger? To do missions that would cost more lives if done in other ways.  

Do costly planes still rule the skies, or is their era over?

Decades ago, my dear students in High Speed Aerodynamics or Jet Propulsion, facing an assignment deadline, tried to stall me as I rushed to give hints to remove excuses: “Why do we need new fighter planes? Our Air Force is already Da Best?” 

I recognised the trap: “Have you thought about what it is like to live in a country that does NOT have air superiority? Where you cannot control the skies above you?”  

Silence. I got my 5 minutes. Assignment still due at 8 AM. 

Ruling the skies means denying the enemy freedom to fly and securing airspace for one’s own forces to operate. This requires air superiority fighters. That is the main reason why US carriers stay in the Persian Gulf, so that their planes can fly Combat Air Patrol and ensure that Iranian planes do not take off. Small drones cannot protect anyone.

The Role of Drones 

Some people I know were already flying tiny “bugs” – waxing eloquent about the Weiss-Fogh Effect, back in the 1990s.  Like the late Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali: “.. floats like a butterfly but stings like a Bee!” 

With a fatal sting. I made a conscious decision to stay off that bandwagon since the only application I could imagine was “peacetime homicide”. 

Drones allow targeted assassinations: hit a vehicle moving on a road, or a specific apartment. In Chechnya in 1996, ex-Soviet General Dudayev, leader of the breakaway Islamic Republic, answered a call on his satellite phone. Two laser-guided missiles from 2 fighter planes came down on his head. 

Today, that might be done with much cheaper loitering drones – if one has Air Superiority, which again needs those fighter planes. 

Drones have also cut down the fear of tanks, though it still takes a very substantial drone to really damage a tank. The big Cold War scare was that 10,000 Warsaw Pact tanks would roll through the Fulda Gap into the West. Germany and reach the English Channel in 2 weeks. But again, this is an old contest. Tanks suddenly dominated in WW1, and were a huge part of WW2. But even there, anti-tank rockets started posing a big threat late in the war. As the Battle for Berlin moved into the suburbs of Berlin, the Russians got mattress springs from houses to bounce off these rockets. More recently, Active Armour used explosives to bounce projectiles. In Syria, tanks sported big metal cages, and then an optical sensor with some form of self-guided gun to stop ATGMs (Anti-Tank Guided Missiles). So, the contest continues, see below.  

Infantry attacks have become suicidal in Ukraine due to massed drones, but soldiers are reported to have shot down as many as 12 each while running across a field. Guided bullets are not science fiction; enough said. 

Small and Large Weapons – assuming Atmanirbharta

All types are needed. But conceptualised, designed and manufactured indigenously. Everything I mentioned was with indigenously designed and manufactured systems. $160B for a fighter plane or $12B for an aircraft carrier are OK if the money goes to salaries of innovators and top-skilled workers. Very little is the cost of metal, carbon or silicon. If one has to import them, they first kill the taxpayers of the importing nation. 

Consider the numbers. Just one factory in the Russian Far East, said they are manufacturing 1000 Geran drones every day.  A single shipping container could bring 1000 drones (Turkish? Chinese?) to say, Chittagong, to infiltrate India’s North East. A big Container ship carries 25000 containers. 

Is India going to fight those with imported drones? I think the answer to that has been recognised. 

I think today’s high-tech jets themselves can be improved by a huge amount if one can remove and substitute the human crew with computers. The Vietnamese have converted their ancient MiG-21 relics into supersonic UAVs!  Why not India, with several hundreds of those, much newer? Why not an HF-24 supersonic Strike Bomber? HAL Gnat UCAV? LCA UCAV? The reliability standards needed for a UAV or its engines are far less stringent than those for aircraft carrying a human crew. So, one can use UCAVs (C for combat) to get mass-production quality right, and keep using them, Hopefully if a few fall down, they hit something across the L.O.C. or L.A.C. 

What About The Day After Tomorrow?

This age of Cheap Drones and even Drone Swarms is probably short-lived. What can defeat them? One thing I can imagine is a new generation of Directed Energy Weapons (DEW). DEW could sweep the skies clear of cheap drones. Initial cost is steep, but the cost per shot is negligible, and the repetition rate can be high. They are already on ships – and soon on expensive, maybe uncrewed, fighter planes, 30 to 50 years ahead of what India can buy at Treasury-emptying costs from shiny catalogues. “Riot Police” can already beam “non-lethal” 90 GHz rays that cause extreme pain. Tanks can dial up the power and range on those. 

Drones can attack in Swarms, with collective intelligence, autonomy and tactics. Several papers discuss mathematics for optimal choreography to attack a fortified position. At high altitudes (Tibet). Not future. Now.

Spacecraft are central to detecting threats and targets, with live updates to warfighters and drone swarms. Tomorrow, a swarm of soda-can-sized micro-satellites, or 1-orbit wonders, could knock out hundreds of $$B satellites. “Kinetic Energy Weapons”. “Smart Rocks”. “Brilliant Pebbles” (headlines from the 1980s). So, space drones and swarms are existentially linked to their near-surface cousins. 

What comes Beyond? 

HG Wells’ 1898 War of the Worlds described Martians using (Heat Rays) to annihilate Earth’s human armies and machines. DEW. But Earth’s true Masters intervened: the Martians were wiped out by a (putrefactive) bacterium. Today, it might be a virus (discovered in Russia in 1892), since a good spray of Dettol might end the Bacterium Army. 

That was not so original! From Lord Byron’s poem, 1815: “Destruction of Sennacherib”, which we studied for our Pre-Degree exams – I cannot imagine myself reading poetry except in Self Defence: 

“The Assyrian Came Down Like The Wolf On the Fold… His Cohorts were Gleaming in Purple and Gold”. 

So, they camped outside the terrified city, looking forward to loot and mass-murdering the next day. but made the mistake of breathing the air and drinking the water. All dead before daybreak. Divine or human intervention? 

Innovation accelerates to Warp Speed when one faces death. Again, to quote Guru James Bond 007: 

“U only LIVE twice. Once when u r born, and once when Death Stares U in da face.”

Vande Mataram

With gratitude to Rajeev and Bapa for getting me to think about these things.