Are Indian drone tech startups ready to tackle anomalies like the Jammu attack?

Post the Jammu drone attack, the warfare strategy has taken a massive turn. India now has another policy to mull over: Drone tech for war. But the larger question remains: How do we prevent future attacks of the sort from happening? How can India be better prepared?

Surveillance is of course the best way to prevent such an attack, says Kruthi A, marketing lead at IdeaForge. “Surveillance can be done at various stages with different drones. Therefore, owning a wide fleet of drones for short and large range surveillance and increasing the frequency of surveillance is one way to prevent such an attack.

IdeaForge has drones which can do ISR, border monitoring operations, and the frequency of this should increase and consistency maintained.”

Kruthi opines that there is no silver bullet for anti-drones and if the border forces want to utilize drones for surveillance “they need to think of the impact of any tech on our drones and on enemy drones.”

She believes that the most important aspect is to build an ecosystem where we are aware of our RF environment, then work on the counter. “We should be always be aware of the type of threat we face, military radars are not useful against small commercial drones being deployed against our borders.

Having said that, counter drone systems are also needed. As everyone has been mentioning there is no 'silver bullet' in anti drone solution. None of the solutions (whether Indian or from Western nations) will give 100% detection (ESM) and destruction (ECM) assurance. And the technology is still new and this particular technology hasn't matured fully. So the need is to do a nuanced threat assessment of an asset and deploy these Anti Drone Systems and with time, better technology and ecosystem will develop,” Kruthi states.

There is also a requirement of having a joint detection infrastructure of MoD, MHA, Airports Authority and various other agencies having hardware to detect drones. “Drones and counter drone systems should work together with Govt and airport authorities to prevent such future attacks,” she says.

Are drone tech startups in India ready to tackle such anomalies?

Kruthi says there are multiple ways of drone detection be it radar, RF Communications, Visual Signature, etc., which can be used in combinations.

“To counter these drones you need both soft and hard kill. You can break the control of the drones using jammers, which is a soft skill. A hard kill would be to detect the drone and either through projectile, lazer or net bring the drones down. None are better than the other and there isn’t one optimal solution present. There is no one size fits all,” she says.

Kruthi lists a few important questions to be asked before investment:

• What is your requirement?
• What is the importance of the assets? Is it our airbase, ports, oil and gas?

Depending on the answers to the above questions, the investments and kind of technology has to be determined. There are Indian companies that are making this technology either collaboratively or independently.

“For example, IdeaForge has always promoted a close collaboration between the three main stakeholders of the Drone Industry Triangle: drone manufacturers, regulators, and drone detection system manufacturers.

IdeaForge signed a MoU with the leading developer and manufacturer of the RF-based drone detection and countermeasure systems: Aaronia AG out of Germany. Aaronia has leveraged over two decades of experience in the test and measurement of RF and microwave spectra to develop innovative and effective methods to detect and counter drones,” Kruthi concludes.