On July 25, the Defence Research and Development Organisation successfully conducted flight trials of the UAV-Lau – nched Precision Guided Missile (ULPGM)-V3 at the National Open Area Range (NOAR) in Kurnool, Andhra Pradesh.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, in a congratulatory post on X, stated, “Indian industry is now ready to absorb and produce critical defence technologies.” On the other hand, there are concerning reports that state and non-state actors from our neighbourhood are using drones to smuggle drugs and weapons into India. The surge in cross-border drone activity along the Punjab border highlights a growing threat of narco-terrorism, posing serious risks to national security and public safety. Just as the machine gun changed the face of warfare in the early 20th century,drones or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) represent one more tragic turning point ~ this time demanding urgent international action in the form of a comprehensive UN treaty.

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If Alexander the Great had drones, he could have aimed his charge precisely at the enemy’s weak point, seeing it clearly from above instead of taking a risk. Then he might have lost the very claims to heroism that made him great. Centuries later, drones ~ initially used for intelligence gathering in the 1990s ~ played a decisive role in the 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, tipping the war in favour of the latter. The ongoing Ukraine-Russia war has taken this to a new level. A recent report on “Operation Spiderweb” reveals how Ukraine’s military has deployed so many small, cheap drones to inflict heavy losses on Russia’s high-end fighter jets worth billions. These low-tech systems, often assembled from commercial components, have emerged as powerful asymmetric wea – pons.

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