BULLET--TO--BULLET

If you have been following global conflicts as closely as I do, then you would have noticed the striking ability of armed drones to wreak havoc among ground troops and armoured vehicles. If you haven't I suggest you search for drone footages from Syrian, Libyan or Nagorno-Karabakh conflicts on YouTube to get a better understanding. Now after having seen the efficiency of these killer drones and the ease with which they dispatch their targets to the kingdom come, it is ordinary for anyone to doubt whether the age of ground warfare has come to an end.

Fear not for their exists a brilliant technology that can counter these missiles that rain fire from above. Today I am talking about the newer cousin of CIWS ( Close In Weapons Systems) which used machine guns with very high rate of fire fixed on warships to knock down incoming missiles. Ladies and gentlemen let me present to you "Hard-Kill Active Protection Systems". Now I came across this technology on Discovery Channel when I was in 8th or 9th grade, back then it was just experimental. Nowadays this technology means the difference between life and death for infantry as well as armoured columns. The school of thought behind this technology is very simple - use a missile or rather grenade to knock out an incoming missile, it is just like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet. An array of sensors detects the the incoming missile and calculates its exact trajectory and at the right moment fires an explosive charge towards it, neutralising the threat even before it reaches its intended target.

Most of the modern armies have begun equipping their troops with such technologies to boost their survivability. Unfortunately we Indians are lagging far behind in this technology. Our main battle tank Arjun weighs a whopping 68 tonnes when compared to the 49 tonnes of Russian T90 making it far heavier and less maneuverable and ultimately restricting the areas where it can operate. This increase in weight is due to the use of additional armour rather than fielding modern technologies to increase protection levels. Even the use of ERA (Explosive Reactive Armour, its a story for another time) by the Arjun is not still widely adopted instead the army is still relying on outdated techniques.

All this has culminated in a very embarrassing situation for the Indian Army as it is unable to deploy Arjun MBTs to high altitude areas to face the Chinese aggression as it is extremely difficult to airlift such a heavy tank on top of which even if deployed the border roads infrastructure is inadequate to support it's weight. So to sum it up we Indians have engineered a giant steel sitting duck.

It is high time our defence industry adapted to 21st century warfare, otherwise some other kid in another part of the world would be googling the destruction of Indian army tanks by Chinese drones on the internet.