Pushed through in public imagination by Hollywood films and successfully used for terrorism by the Islamic State, drone usage for terror activities have made its entry in India via Pakistan for quite some time now.
Indian security personnel and technology are not fully equipped to neutralise drone terror attacks. It is a work in progress. Lets decode the use of drones for terrorism.
What is a drone?
Till a few years ago, drone principally referred to a stingless male bee whose only role was to mate with the queen bee in a highly stratified honeycomb society. But thanks to bio-mimicking by engineers and scientists, drone now refers to an unpiloted aircraft or spacecraft.A drone is also called an unmanned aerial vehicle or UAV. So, simply put, a drone is a flying robot.
The threat of drone attacks from the Pakistani side is very real. Sighting of drones near India-Pakistan border and the Line of Control (LoC) has been frequent. Some of them have carried weapons to the Indian side. In 2019, security personnel reported 167 sighting of drones from Pakistan, according to the official figures. In the pandemic hit 2020, there were 77 sightings.
In September 2019, the Punjab Police had seized a drone-dropped arms consignment to bust a terror module, which was receiving supplies from Pakistan. The seizure included AK-47 rifles and China-made pistols. Another drone-dropped arms consignment was seized in Punjab’s Gurdaspur in June 2020. The same month, the Border Security Force (BSF) shot down a drone in the Hira Nagar sector of Jammu. The recoveries included the US-made M4 rifles. In January 2021, the Jammu and Kashmir Police caught two persons as they were picking up drone-dropped arms consignment.
The use of drones by Pakistan to drop arms and ammunition into J&K is part of its latest strategy to carry out drone swarms attacks—which gives deniability and carries an element of surprise. It also marks a tactical shift from the decades old strategy of infiltrating terrorists into Indian territory. The Chinese drones come cheap for Pakistan, can hover at low speeds for hours and provide technological ease to the users. China is also a global leader in manufacturing armed drones, a fact that has benefited the Pakistani spy agency which is learnt to have supplied hundreds of these drones to state and non-state actors in Pakistan.
Why preventing drone terror attack is difficult?
The surveillance technology including radar systems that India has deployed at the borders or lines of control is meant for tracking bigger objects, helicopters, planes and missiles.
Drones are smaller in size as small as 2 feet or only 60 cm than previously popular UAVs but can fly for several kilometres at a speed ranging from 125 kmph to over 950 kmph, according to the AUSA report.Preventing drone attacks requires jamming of drone systems and shooting them down. Laser-based Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs) are being talked about as a defence system against drone attacks.
In India, the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) has developed two anti-drone DEW systems. They can use powerful 10-kilowatt laser to engage aerial targets at a distance of 2 km. However, mass production of these systems is yet to take place.
From all this we can understand that India is still not much equipped to deal this threat . But we have various government and private institutions which are working towards developing indigenous anti-drone technology to counter this new threat of modern era.
