ADAPT & OVERCOME

Napoleon Bonaparte once famously said " God fights on the side with the best artillery". That was true for 19th century warfare. In 20th century, well late 20th century anyways, God fought on the side with the best Air Force. And now in 21st century God fights on the side which has the cheapest Air Force. Don't get me wrong, boots on the ground always won wars, but nowadays it is a little more complicated. When I say cheapest Air Force I certainly don't mean an incompetent one. The above video shows the deployment of a swarm of drones by Chinese military during testing and exercise scenario. This system is a ditto copy of a similar American made system (Now there is a thinking among Chinese that copying is the ultimate form of appreciation but I call bullshit on that.)

Though this is called swarm of drones it isn't exactly one. It is more of a swarm of loitering munitions, the difference being loitering munitions are on one way ticket missions, that is they are not intended to return to base like drones. Now again taking recent conflicts in the Middle-East and Baltics as reference, loitering munitions have found widespread and very successful usage. Israel is the torch bearer of it's usage in modern warfare. Israel uses it's inventory of loitering munitions like 'Harpy' for both pinpoint strikes as well SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defence) operations. They effectively employ loitering munitions to mimic the electronic signatures of aircraft and trick the enemy to reveal it's air defence batteries and then proceed to strike these positions using the very same system. Thus they have amalgamated the American Reaper drones, Hellfire missiles and Tomahawk cruise missiles into a single system and that too at a fraction of it's cost. Now if that is not called innovation I don't know what it is. A very unlikely development is that Iran has taken this a step further and configured loitering munitions with a secondary role of SAM (Surface to Air Missile), thus effectively turning their 'Missile 358' (image given below) into a "jack of all trades' sort of system. This allows the Iranians to field a single system for both offensive as well as defensive purposes. (It is a known fact that Iran has shot down Israeli Harpys before and would have reverse engineered them with additional capabilities.)

Now India and China is moving on a collision course as far as I can tell and it would be wise to be prepared. I would like to bring into focus the 'Pinaka" MBRL (Multiple Barrel Rocket Launcher) which is a indigenously developed system. Pinaka fires unguided rockets and supplements artillery of Indian Army. My thinking is that if our scientists and engineers can repurpose the unguided rockets into loitering munitions, we would have a very versatile system in our hands. This would wreak havoc among Chinese ground forces by eliminating their infantry, armour and artillery.

Our soldiers are known for adapting and overcoming any and all challenges. Now it is the time for our scientific community to do the same by rising up and meeting the challenges head on.