Drones – Uses & Misuses

I think we are starting now.

Hello, this is C. Paul Singh, President, NISSMAT. A very good evening, everyone who has joined us at today's webinar, and a warm welcome. Today is the 102nd exam of the series of webinar which we have been conducted, and today's webinar is on the subject Drones - Uses and Misuses. The session shall be addressed by two eminent speaker: Colonel Jadhav, a senior fellow at Center for Land Warfare Studies, and Dr Ajai Sahni, Executive Director of the Institute for Conflict Management and editor of South Asia Intelligence Review. I extend the warm welcome to both the learning speakers.

Introduction about NISSMAT, a few lines. This was established in the year 1990, about 30 years back plus, then started training in the course of safety, security, security management and technology. With the passage of time, NISSMAT has become a think tank, and we have today on our list more than 85 scholars who are providing inputs in the field of security, safety, tropical subjects and other management subjects. This was established four wings. First is the NISSMAT Forum, which is conducting webinars, seminars, conferences and interaction programs. There is NISSMAT Academy to conduct virtual training programs, then NISSMAT Enterprises to undertake audits and studies in various sectors, and then is the NISSMAT Foundation. We want to undertake welfare and social work for the society at large, with particular reference to the subject of security and safety and order.

With this word, I'll pass on to the next item on my introduction, that is the introduction of the chairman. I heard about chairman Captain Pavanjeet Ahluwalia. He took voluntary retirement from the Parachute Regiment of the Indian Army and started at a very young age a business career, an unknown area for him. With his warmth, with his empathy, he is able to bring out the best in other people. He has an internal sense to find out a silver lining in the worst situations. A businessman who is unafraid of telling truth, a thoughtful and inspiring leader, he is adept in creating alliances and has created a business group under the name of Ahluwalia Holding Private Limited, which has offices at multiple locations. Is a past president and former chairman of Council of International Investigators, and also he is awardee of Malcolm Thompson and Kotali Award by this council. Ahluwalia shall moderate this session.

A few words about the subject. Introduction of the subject in a few words would be that the expanding use, more and more use of drones, which are also called unmanned aerial vehicles, has become a multi-billion industry, multi-billion dollar industry. The threats of drones being used for surveillance, dropping arms and elimination for terrorist activities, carriage of narcotics and drugs, is required to be checked. The risk involved are mid-air collisions, which often happen if the drone pilot is on the ground, is not able to see and divide other drones. Then the drones reportedly fly below 500 feet, and this is another risk for the commercial aircraft at the time of taking off and netting. Then losing control of the drones is also supposed to result in system failure, as they say, and the drones flying beyond the range assigned to them.

There are a lot of misuses. Internal law and order, we always say. The law enforcement agency are concerned that the drones may be used to attack sometime a crowd or a gathering and create havoc. Video piracy is another area which concerns us, that committing the crime or helping the criminals through the eyes of drones, and other misuse. Privacy and trespassing is another mystery. Then the need for certain regulations, or lack of the need of some international, regional and local regulation for safe operations of the jobs.

The uses of the drones are mostly said to be in the field of agriculture and other forming of operations, also delivery of blood and vaccine to remote localities, particularly in the community. International reports have come that drones have been used to provide vaccine in remote areas, health monitoring and services, assessing damages to soil, spray of insecticide and pesticides. Then availability of foster data is also of great importance due to drone technology. To bring quality healthcare is also, drones can be used now. But all the same, there is a lot of emphasis being laid that there should be some regulations. Some analysts and some law enforcement organizations have recommended that the use of drones for any activity should be limited to a short duration, specific individuals, specific organizations, should ensure that there is a total transparency and accessibility to the government agencies when the drones are flown in the country.

Regulation required can be: limit the aggregate time of the drones flying, limit the specific individuals, limited to specific individuals and parties, transparency and accountability, a rejection of broadly worded restriction. It doesn't mean specific, no broadly worded regulation where the people can take advantage of the language of the legislation. It should be restricted and it should be very clear-cut, restricted to the regulation. Rejection of, in any case, I will say the rejection of in this legislation, this rejection of alarm was called by us: oh, this will happen, this will happen. If the legislation is there and the proper regulation is exercised, probably the drones can be used to the best advantage of the nation. But let us listen to our specialist speakers who know more about it than I can talk. With these words, I'll pass on the session to Pavanjeet, who will moderate this session. Thank you very much.

Yes, thank you very much. We are, as I speak, we are streaming live on Google and on YouTube. Today we have participants from India obviously, the United States, Romania, France, Kenya, UAE, Singapore, Sweden and the United Kingdom. I'd like to acknowledge the sponsors for the evening today. This event has been sponsored by Premier Consulting and Investigations Private Limited, which is a background screening and an investigations company. It is also supported by Premiershield Private Limited, manpower at the security company; India Skills Private Limited, which is an assessments organization — it carries out examinations for universities, schools and the Skill India mission; Tax Course, which is an online assessment SERP platform; and JMD Cargo, a logistics company. During the session I would request all to remain muted. Switch your videos on so that we can see your face. Please have your smartphones switched off so that you don't have any side distractions, and prepare to ask questions on this most important subject.

A word about the president. Mr C. Paul Singh is probably one of the most illustrious police officers of our country. He's a masters in English literature and has served the Government of India in very senior police assignments across the country. He was made responsible by the Government of India to raise the Rapid Action Force and was also its first chief. He was later asked to raise and head the Internal Security Academy, which is a central police academy in the Indian state of Rajasthan at Mount Abu. During his service he has been decorated with the President's Police Medal for Distinguished Service, the Indian Police Medal for Meritorious Service, the Police Special Duty Medal with bar, a Sena Medal, and a number of other recommendations and rewards. Post retirement he has worked with the Tata Iron and Steel Company as a consultant, and where his responsibility was to streamline the security and vigilance matters in the coal field division of Tisco. He was also the chairman of the technical committee of Quality Control of India, which formulated the standards for the star rating of the private security companies. He was also involved in developing the curriculum for private security guards training under the security sector and skill development council. He was the head of the committee we designed and worked out national occupation standards for the training of private security guards, and the qualification packs and national occupation standards for the firefighters. He was awarded the Security Personality of the Year award by the President of India in the year 2009 in a ceremony at the Vigyan. He currently advises the Asian Professional Security Association, the Indian chapter, and is the honorary director general for the Central Nation Association of Private Security Industry and the estation of private detectives and investigators. Mr C. Paul Singh's face is well known in India as a dynamic security professional, and he's frequently called to share his views on various subjects connected to homeland security on national news channels.

Now it is my distinct privilege to introduce the first speaker of the day, Dr Ajai Sahni. Dr Ajai Sahni is the Executive Director of the Institute for Conflict Management, the South Asian Terrorism Portal and Khalistan Extremism Monitor. Is the publisher and editor for the South Asia Intelligence Review, Faultlines, the KPS Gill Journal of Conflict and Resolution, and the Second Sight. He served as a member of the Madhukar committee on the restructuring of the Ministry of Home Affairs, and is presently a member of the police modernization and strengthening committee for Uttar Pradesh. He has researched and written extensively on issues relating to conflict, politics and development in South Asia, and has participated in various advisory projects undertaken for national or state governments. He jointly edited with Mr KPS Gill "Terror and Containment: Perspectives on India's Internal Security", "The Global Threat of Terror: Ideological, Material and Political Linkages", and separately "The Fragility of Order", and also the essence in order of KPS Gill. He has lectured at numerous professional institutions and appears frequently as an expert on terrorism and insurgency in the electronic and print media in India and internationally. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I present Dr Ajai Sahni to you.

Thank you very much, Mr Ahluwalia, Mr Singh. This thing has given a very comprehensive overview of the current uses and threats that drones pose. I'd like to take this into a wider context, say, of the future of drones as well, not only of current risks. And there is a tremendous need to understand that this is a fundamentally transformative technology. It is not going to augment certain risks and improve certain functions incrementally. It is going to have a transformative value in the very nature and quality of life, of our perceptions. This is still not visible because we are still seeing minor peripheral accretions. We are seeing things that are in the way of incremental developments of technology. But if you see the trend, you discover that the drones are likely to have a ubiquitous or ever-present presence in our lives in the foreseeable future — not more than a decade, decade and half — if you see developments in other parts of the world, not so much within South Asia, not so much in India. And these are transformations that will occur in both the military and the civilian sphere.

Drones are likely to impact every aspect of our lives. Our businesses, our occupations, our security, our social lives are also likely to be significantly changed or transformed or influenced by the development of drones, and I will go into the details of how this is likely to happen. Most drone technologies that are currently evolving have dual use potentials. That means they will have a security and defense potential on the one hand, and a tremendous civilian and social use potential as well.

What are we seeing in the evolution of drones? We are seeing increasing versatility, the capacity to do more and more functions — not the simple single function drone, but a very wide area of capabilities. In the security sphere, increasing lethality, increasing autonomy, progressive machine learning capabilities. This is what we bring in more and more versatility into their applications. We are seeing on the one hand increasing and tremendous miniaturization. We are seeing insect-sized drones that have been created in certain laboratories which can carry out functions ranging from secret surveillance on the one hand and the potential for targeted assassination on the other. These are insect-sized drones that have already been developed, although we are still not aware of their deployment anyway. There is also an increasing spectrum of sizes, from these near microscopic to massive transports that will do off most aerial vehicles in the past.

We also, I think, need to see that the traditional definition of the drone, before the dominance of the discourse by the UAV or the unmanned aerial vehicle, actually applied to all machinery that was capable of complex movement and service. And it is important for us to not only limit our vision to simply the UAV, the aerial drones, because what we are also seeing is a very strong trend towards multi-domain operations: land-based, sea-based and submarine robotics and autonomous vehicles, which are capable of — and in fact space vehicles also, there is a fourth dimension there — which are capable of operating in more than one domain or medium. So the drones of the future, and some of the drones already in existence at least at experimental level, are already multi-domain vehicles. We know for instance several countries, including China, have not only developed but may also be in the current process of deploying submarine drones which have a capacity to remain underwater for extended periods of time till they are activated, and then may be deployed in the air as well. So we have seen tremendous possibilities here.

Mr C. Paul Singh has mentioned many of the uses of the drones. I will go across two broad areas: the civilian uses of course, and then the security and military applications of the drone. Some of these are already in use, others are in advanced stages of development, which may see them deployed very soon, within the next few years, certainly within the next decade. We see of course — Mr C. Paul Singh had also spoken of this — is the in the management of agriculture, but also of livestock, of natural resources, wildlife and conservation as well. You also have delivery and logistics. You already have several companies, at least on some small or experimental basis, using drones for delivery of various products, supplies, food, drugs. Even mass transportation by heavy duty drones, which are envisaged to replace trucks in the foreseeable future. Also have tremendous potential for use in disaster mitigation and relief, as well as search and rescue operations in extreme conditions. You can see the potential for a drone in, for instance, a mountainous zone, or in a area affected by floods or even worse natural catastrophes. Drones can also be used in commercial operations such as site selection, construction, real estate, inventory management, indoor and outdoor inspections.

You also have the possibility of urban air mobility vehicles. We are talking about transport drones. We have already started the process in several countries of planning systems that would unclog highway systems. There are companies in the United States which have already announced that they are going to develop — American parking garage operators — to create parking spots in urban areas for air taxis. So already these are things that are in a planning stage, and they become very very important because — and I will come to this later — if we are able to envisage such use, we must start acting now to plan and implement their legal and administrative and special management. Because if we don't start now, yes, we don't have these vehicles in use today, but tomorrow we will either develop or we will import such vehicles, and after we import such vehicles we will start saying, how do we manage them? Which is what has happened with the drones already in use. Drones were already coming into this country and there were no regulations. Then for years the government just said, ban all drones, all private ownership of drones. We mustn't be lagging behind the development of technology. We must plan for the future and the evolution of this technology, and the directions of evolution are very clear. If we don't prepare for this future, we will continue to do what we are doing now: we see a drone across the border, we try to shoot it with our whatever weapons we have. Maybe we bring down four, maybe six coming and go out. This is not really the way we can effectively and efficiently manage our future.

Several other possibilities are there already. These drones are being used for vehicle identification, for traffic surveys, for management of congestion hotspots — not in India, but certainly in other areas. You can also have large-scale data collection surveys, magnetic exploration, inspection of transmission lines, location of various metals, rare earths, hydrocarbon resources using magnetic disruptive patterns. So all these elements are already possible. They are not in use here because we are lagging far behind what is already available and in use by at least some of the more advanced countries in this technology. And I must keep on emphasizing again and again that China is one of the more advanced countries in drone use and drone development and drone technology development at present.

Among the negatives over here, we have corporate espionage and private surveillance. You also have a consequence of extreme miniaturization, and if you take the wider, I would say, definition of the drone, then you have even possibilities not only in what we are talking about — surveillance and espionage — but also medical uses, where you can inject tiny drones into the body, into the bloodstream, to create images through the bloodstream or through the body of various elements that are not currently accessible, and also to carry out minor surgical procedures, possibly complex surgical procedures in the long term future.

I've already mentioned that you have the potential for miniaturized drones, but even larger drones which are being used already and have been used for so many years by the Americans in Afghanistan, in Iraq and Syria for targeted assassinations. You also have now drones that can simply lie in wait. They have been programmed to attack a particular definition of a target which is fed into the system, and when it recognizes that target, with or without confirmation — both options are available, even without operators — it will attack and destroy that particular target. These are, you could say, very much more advanced AI based systems which are a development of what are being called loitering or fire and forget devices that are currently increasingly in use in the military sphere.

In security and defense, we've already seen many offensive and lethal operations have already been brought into play by both non-state and non-state entities. Terrorists have been using drones both for lethal operations and of course, as Mr C. Paul Singh mentioned, for transportation of contraband, of weaponry, of explosives, and by organized criminal or terrorist, narco-terrorist elements, for the transport, composite transfer of weapons and drugs, weapons and counterfeit currency, elements of these natures. This is something we have in India already been subjected to for some time now.

Drones are becoming much much bigger, faster, capable of very long long-range visions. We have now, since 2021, the Americans have developed what are called hypersonic drones — drones that are capable of traveling at many times the speed of light, of sound. You have a program called Mayhem, the hypersonic multimission ISR and strike program. You have something called SR Dark Star, which is a hypersonic drone system capable of flying at over Mach 5. Then we have the Ravn X drone, which is intended to launch satellites into space before launching them into a low earth orbit. So we are seeing — you must see that it is not enough to keep on talking about Pakistan and the drones that China has given Pakistan. You must see the tremendous expansion of the possibilities and potential of this device, and understand that we are lagging very very far behind. I will not go through the many other — you have the RQ Global Hawk, which can survey as many as 100,000 square kilometers a day. Please understand the numbers, scale, and the resolutions that it provides are down to square centimeters. US planners have already envisioned that the majority of their aerial combat missions in the foreseeable future will be unmanned. So there is no involvement of the human pilot, at least not the pilot within the plane. It may be then flown by remote pilots.

Now, given what is going on across the world, both in the civilian and the defence and security sphere, I think there is a tremendous need to immediately begin the processes of defining the processes of regulation and management. First and foremost, we cannot wait till these technologies have actually come into our sphere of operation. We must have a system of defining regulation and management prior to the intervention of these technologies into our domain, into our theater, into our neighborhood and into our own territories. Bans and efforts to limit use will only prove counterproductive. Mr C. Paul Singh had rightly, from the current point of view, suggested that we should limit certain functions of the available drones. This is necessary at this juncture because we are unprepared for their unlicensed or unregulated use. But the ban cannot be a long term solution, nor can limitation of use be a long-term solution. You cannot have licensing departments for every application of the drone in the internal future.

You must understand that if you depend too much on restrictions, what you will do is you will restrict the absorption and development of drone technologies in your own country. If you do that, you will lag behind other countries, especially hostile and neighboring countries, in the use and deployment of drones, and you will eventually suffer or be subjected to a generational technological disadvantage. So you have to allow the development of drones, and the development of drones cannot really be pushed forward unless there is tremendous encouragement of their use in every potential sphere, because it is only then that they will be profitable, only then that they will give returns on research and development that might be applied. So we need to allow private sector and public sector research and development and industrial units to develop the widest spectrum possible within our capabilities of drone development and drone technology development — that means the technologies that are to be mounted on drones for various uses.

If there is any significant asymmetry in the use of drone development, of drone technologies, between the Indian state and non-state actors or state adversaries, we will find that we have a cumulative and progressive, eventually overwhelming disadvantage which will inflict unsupportable costs on the lives of our people and particularly of our fighting forces. There is consequently no option but to urgently develop India's capabilities across the entire spectrum of civil and military applications of the drone. There is also an urgent need for a massive augmentation of resources dedicated to R&D for development of drone technologies and management systems. Management systems, I keep on repeating, are very important — not just developing drones. How will we control, manage, supervise their use? To this end, there must be a dedicated and empowered national technical agency which will prioritize and project and plan the trajectory of drone technologies and systems in terms of the national priorities. We need now a national body to do this. Some development will carry on in its own scientific trajectory, but we also need a well-informed technical expert grouping which is setting national priorities as to what the state is going to support in terms of drone development.

We also need urgent efforts to begin the process at least of designing, designating, mapping and management of aerial roads and drone corridors, which will eventually take all our legal drone traffic — where all our legal drone traffic, anyone who can legally move on drones or move drones, would need to flow along some kind of a map system. You cannot pick up and send off a drone wherever you want. When the numbers increase, there will be increasing flows which will need enormous management. You cannot start the process of inventing a management system after the traffic has already been generated. You will have chaos, and you will have, I think, tremendous loss, both material and life. So this process of creating or designing these systems and designating corridors, mapping out the whole country in terms of how these are — this is far more complex than any usual, you know, air traffic management system, because air traffic management systems are already actually managing thousands and thousands of flights every day. But when we talk about drones, we are no longer going to be talking about a handful of operators. We are going to be talking about millions of unmanned systems in our airspace. This is going to require an air traffic management system of disproportionate scope. Nothing that we have imagined till now would be able to deal with what we are looking into the potential for.

Then we have to have technologies and guidelines needed for digital license plating — this is all part of the management system — digital license plating which will remotely identify unmanned aircrafts; integration of small unmanned aircrafts into the national airspace system; identification technologies that enable drones to fly beyond visual line of sight. Because the sheer numbers and complexity of the system is going to require systems that can automatically trace the trajectory both of legal and illegal systems. The legal system and identifications will allow the channeling of passages along the legal corridors, and then you have to have a surveillance management system that covers the whole country, where drones are seeking to evade the surveillance system of the state — that means engage in illegal operations. This cannot be that we are standing at the border and watching, because there will be millions of drones within the border. So we are talking about designing and imagining systems that are very very far ahead in terms of management of the potential traffic that we will be generating, both legal and illegal.

Within a decade, almost all wars that you are imagining will be dominated by automated and autonomous systems, including aerial drones, but also land-based and sea-based systems. We are aware that China is already a leader in development of military and non-military as well as dual use drones on land, sea and undersea, unmanned systems including land, sea and undersea unmanned systems. Beijing is already providing selective access to drones to Pakistan. As these things become easier and larger in their development and their scope, we are certain that secondary technologies, if not the cutting edge technologies, will be passed on to Pakistan, and we will be within a two-edged pincer, and we will need to counter this. And given the head start that Beijing has already established, we have a very small window to at least create a drone program that will give us defensive capabilities on land, sea and air, if not decisive capabilities there.

Of course, some developments of drone technologies in India — we are talking about the development at least of a model of the stealth drone Ghatak. Several surveillance UAVs have come up, some are being imported. But I don't think anything that is being envisaged in India today is proportionate to the scale of developments globally, and the scale, the potential of these developments for their economies, and the potential of the threat that they could generate for us. Most importantly, you must understand that, as I said before, if too much of a technology gap develops between India and other states, given the ubiquity, the pervasiveness of drone technology in the future, we will lose out on all spheres. We will cease to be economically viable in a number of industries and a number of service sectors, and we will also come into a situation where we find it increasingly difficult to fight the unmanned aggression of our adversaries. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Dr Sahni, for our rejuvenating thoughts. And it's now my honor to introduce — it's a special privilege for me because he and I are from the same regiment and from the same battalion. Colonel Jadhav is a senior fellow at the Center for Land Warfare Studies. He's a third generation army officer. He's an alumni of the Sainik School Satara and the National Defence Academy. He was commissioned into the Parachute Regiment, in Seven Para to be precise, which he later commanded. He has very rich experience of combat in operations like Vijay and Rakshak. He has attended the technical staff and higher command courses. He has been an instructor at the NCO Academy and the Army War College. He has contributed immensely in modernization and the capability development of the Parachute Regiment. His area of research is disruptive technologies, particularly artificial intelligence and its application in national security. He has published a number of papers and articles on the subject. Now, ladies and gentlemen, Colonel Jadhav.

Thank you so much, sir. I'll just start presenting my screen. Sir, can you see the screen, sir? Yes, it's coming on. A very good strategic foundation for the talk today, for the webinar today. Respected the panelists and members of NISSMAT Foundation, a very good evening. It's a singular honor and privilege for me to have been invited to this seminar, to speak on a very contemporary subject. Well, I have been researching on disruptive technologies in military as a researcher and also as a practitioner of military technology, you know, in the army. The drones in civil domain have caused a major revolution, whereas in the security domain it has caused a lot of disruption. So while the drones give you a lot of data, a lot of information data, but to process that data you require big data and artificial intelligence. So I will be covering these two aspects on the same platform, so that we understand, you know, in terms of futuristic technological requirements for the country. Going to certain security constraints, I won't be speaking any classified material, but however I would give a lot of examples which I have read and researched, which are happening across the globe as we speak.

So I will cover my presentation in the following years — I'll just lay down the road map — in terms of what is a little bit of technology of drone, what are the applications, what are the users in the internal security, how are the anti-national elements, the non-state actors, using this technology — essentially the misuses. I will also cover two case studies. You know, 2020 onwards we had two conflicts: one conflict is already going on between Ukraine and Russia, and one was Azerbaijan and Armenia, and I will specifically bring out the drone lessons which need to be learned by India. And I have finally covered the anti-drone measures.

So what is the drone technology? The drone technology — specifically today I'm not going to cover — I've written a lot on robotics, on ground-based robotic drones, but I will limit my thing to the aerial vehicles. So the drone essentially is an unmanned aerial vehicle which can be controlled by a pilot on ground, or a larger drone can be controlled by a set of operators sitting in a compound control station, and they could also use AI to actually detect and recognize the system. A drone can also be a kamikaze drone, which can loiter, act as a loiter munition, loiter over the target area and then recognize and strike a particular target with explosives on board. And the third category is the larger variety of drones which are armed, which are known as UCAVs, and fire missiles and rockets to attack.

Essentially a drone is a bird which is battery powered, or can be fueled by an engine, and can carry a fueled engine. It has sensors by day and night. The bigger drones have very high powers — from 15, 20,000 feet they can actually, by day and night, carry out surveillance, very high resolution cameras. They have multifusion data, data fusion capability. They have the GPSes for navigation, even satellite based communication, radio frequency based communications, and some of them are also armed. Well, at the ground station you have the GCS, which is a ground control station, which can be handled or can be in a control room, which essentially gets all the data, it processes all the data and analyzes all the data.

Coming to the classification of drones we've been speaking about — so I'll get into the specifics of it. The DGCA has laid down in 2021 how are the drones going to be classified in India. So these are the various — well, I'll speak about them in detail further — but there are also other methods of classifying drones in terms of altitude ceilings, in the engine type, in terms of autonomy, but generally the DGCA has laid out these particular guidelines. The DGCA have also laid out certain drone flying zones — the green zone, yellow zone and the red zone — essentially these zones are closer to the airport in terms of the flying prohibitions. And so the green zone can fly up to a 400 feet distance, the yellow zone closer to the airport you can fly up to only 200, and in the red zone you can get no permission to fly. But this is just closer to the airport. You know, they require, like Dr Sahni said, as the infestation of drones increase across the country, we would require regulations, especially near to the Line of Control.

So what about the uses of drones in the civil, before I get down to the security domain? You know, I attended this drone expo on the Saturday, the Sunday, in Pragati in Delhi. There are more than 60 odd companies, Indian, all indigenous companies, displaying their entire range of drones, and there is so much of a work going on. And one specific example which I would like to give you is in the field of agriculture, in which they are not only using drones but they are using big data and artificial intelligence. How so? The surveillance of entire — there are about 500 districts plus which have been surveyed by drones, various types of drones. There are crop donations, they're also even used to spray pesticides, and a lot of monitoring. But the entire data from all these 500 districts is coming to a state control center where there's a lot of data collation taking place, and then coming to a central database where there are a lot of data analysis taking place, and there are a lot of AI engines which are being used for prediction of crop patterns, types of crops, future or any future crop related pesticides. And they are fusing a lot of soil data into it, a lot of weather patterns into it, any storms which are coming into it — like we have so many storms, you know, coming on from the Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea. So this marvelous work going on here in the field of agriculture.

In terms of medical, Bihar — we've seen the medical, especially in forward, the medical supplies being utilized. The drones also being utilized to locate accidents, emergency, provide emergency medical aid. And there's a very interesting drone we just saw in the drone expo, in which we had a patient carry, which could carry a patient on a — it was a big drone to carry patients. Incidentally, I have written a paper on artificial intelligence in combat healthcare, and that is where actually you can give emergency life saving — the AI can tell you what emergency medicines need to be given, and at the hospital artificial intelligence can, you know, predict surgeries and suggest surgeries. That is very fast. In terms of weather, you know, there are specially designed drones which fly in the lowest layer of the earth's atmosphere, and there are a lot of sensors to gather information on temperature, humidity, wind and atmosphere, and help to improve weather forecast. Same is there for disaster and environment management. There's a lot of monitoring which is taking place, evacuation and identification of environmental conditions and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of work going on here in the civil domain.

Now I will, more or less, in the next part of my presentation, focus on the security agencies. So these are the major applications of drones, and I will cover each of these in detail by starting various examples in my presentation. So I come to the drones which are actually being classified by the DGCA, and I'll start with the first drone, that is which is in the nano category, which is less than 250 grams. There are drones as small as 32 grams which can actually fly for 15 to 20 minutes, get inside built up areas, do the surveillance by day and night. The advanced drones have anti-collision software, which can fly into rooms on a pre-programmed path in a GPS denied environment, and this is essentially for urban cities and urban warfare, to provide immediate situational awareness. And they have very negligible noise, which provides them a lot of stealth factor.

Then there are those quadcopters — you would have seen them in plenty, which are now actually invested in all across the country — up to two kgs. These micro drones are essentially used for surveillance by day and night. They have a vertical takeoff capability, can fly up to 30 to 40 minutes. Coming to the small drones, the small drones are quadcopters as well as — the one which has been shown in the slide with a helicopter base flies like a helicopter, can fly after two hours of endurance, or 20 kilometers line of sight, but it can carry arms and logistics for transportation for up to five to six kg. This is where, various times, Jammu and Punjab, these drones have been utilized to carry drugs and ammunition. In this category also, same as in the previous category, you have kamikaze drones. Kamikaze essentially is a loiter munition which can self-destruct by striking a target. So it has explosive content which it carries, and it can even go strike autonomously, or it can be remotely operated by an operator.

Coming to the medium drones, which are essentially not only used to carry a lot of load, for 20 to 30 kgs, and you also have kamikaze drones in this category which can carry up to 5-10 kgs of explosive. There are also large drones which are called the MALE, which are above 150 kgs. These are medium altitude long endurance drones — these are essentially surveillance drones like the Heron or the Rustom, which can fly up to 30,000 feet, much above the radar signals, fly up to 48 hours, fly 300 to 400 kilometers at fast speeds of 150 kilometer, and they have real good surveillance systems, and they also provide communications and communication systems to the ground stations. But they require a small platform or a runway to take off and land. The one which is actually the talk of the town is the MALE category unmanned combat aerial vehicle — you've seen the Bayraktar, the talk of the town. So essentially they have these pods, five to six pods, which can fire missiles. They can fire guided bombs and have a 14 to 15 hour endurance, fly at 300 kilometers per hour, and they can carry missiles, 270 kgs. We'll talk about the employment later. There is also HALE, which is under development, and that is a high altitude long endurance which can operate at 65,000 feet with 10 days of endurance with, you know, hydrogen fuel.

Now I come to the meat of my presentation, that is one of the applications, uses for the internal security agencies. Now what are the requirements of security? The security agencies, be it anyone in the paramilitary or the military, essentially requires to detect, to carry out surveillance, detect a particular threat, identify that threat, and develop the information into intelligence. So essentially the drone can do the surveillance and detection part of it, but you require AI to identify and analyze that data. And prevention — when you detect a particular, and when you analyze and you pinpointed, okay, this is a particular problem area, a threat, you require to monitor it, and that also can be done by drones. And eventually, if you want to eliminate a particular target or a threat, you can also use drone with a kamikaze or a UCAV, by kinetic measures, and AI is also employed in this particular technology. And I will now cover each and every step, starting with the surveillance.

Now, surveillance — when we do not have drones, essentially in the olden times we used to do surveillance with our eyes, with our ears, and with our senses of smell. Then came the binoculars, and then the night vision devices, then came radars, ground-based radars, and then came the computers, which were essentially storing data and actually very less of analysis. But the surveillance information was all two-dimensional. There were gaps, there were information voids, and the ranges were very limited, you know, only to the range of binoculars or night vision devices. The drones then brought in absolute different dimensions. The drones took us into the third dimension. They gave a three dimensional coverage, and some beautiful sensors by day and night started coming in. They could deep dive into depth, into various jungles, or be it any terrain, provide long ranges. You can just imagine an MQ-9 Reaper flying at 30,000 feet, you know, looks down 30,000 feet below and gives a precision of one meter, one to five meters, of target area it can look into. And the most important thing is real time data provision when you're monitoring a particular target, and that's where artificial intelligence and big data comes in.

So the surveillance drones provide, through a network, provide information to the control center. But currently, in most places, even in India, the data which is coming to these control centers is in form of raw data. You have audio files, your video files, you have radar signals, and the volume of data flow is very immense, and it's all — in the big data terminology it's called an unstructured data. And the operators sitting here use the human cognition to detect, recognize, analyze and evaluate. So whatever the human cognition detects, it disseminates in information too. So this is happening in most places as of now, because AI and big data is still in the evolving stage. The US and China have made some ground, but still in the evolving stage in India.

So how can these two help processing the data? So big data actually processes the data. All the information which is coming to the data centers, the control centers, is in an unstructured form. So the big data engine collects it, it filters it, it cleans it, it carries out analytics, data analytics on it — you know, in layman terms, it identifies the human, okay, it identifies the tank — and so it stacks the data in various forms, and then it feeds it to the AI engine. So the AI engine, in layman's terms, is essentially — information is actually converted to intelligence, you know, where you have various sub modules of artificial intelligence: recognition of speech, image, voice, object — whether it's a tank, what type of tank is it, whether it's a helicopter, what type of helicopter — develops patterns, and then through various modules it gives predictive analysis. So essentially at the data center, at the control center, you have to have big data and AI to actually process and analyze this intelligence, to give you this information, to give you actually hard intelligence. So when you get the intelligence, you can also, at the decision making at the control center, you can also have artificial intelligence models being developed for giving you the best course of action, that is the decision making model. So this is here — this place also you can actually, you know, help the senior leadership. Artificial intelligence can give you the best course of action, and that is one of the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

Now, having seen the surveillance part of it and the situational awareness part of it — how artificial intelligence and big data can help this drone data to actually take out and convert the information to intelligence — now we'll come to the drones which are being employed by elimination, and I will use some examples. General Qasem Soleimani, the second most wanted man by the US, in Iran, was actually on a hit list of US, and Americans were tracking him down for a long time with the help of those drone Predators and the MQ-9 Reapers, UCAVs. So on the 3rd of January 2020, a drone which was actually doing surveillance finally detected, you know, that okay, he's going to land at Baghdad airport, and the drone eventually took off from Qatar, controlled by a satellite and a ground station at the US Air Force base in Nevada, and moment he came out of the aircraft, two Hellfire missiles got the hell out of them. So essentially now look at the asymmetry: an Iranian general, wanted in Iran, lands up in Baghdad, controlled by a station in Nevada desert in US, controlled by a satellite, and drone takes off from Qatar and strikes even in a different country. So look at the asymmetry what technology has brought to us in warfare — absolutely asymmetry.

Now coming to the kamikaze drones. Now what are kamikaze drones? Kamikaze drones have actually brought in a big big disruption in the two conflicts which I'll talk about later. So essentially what kamikaze is: self-destruction. They are loiter munitions which have the surveillance capability and the target destruction capability on the same platform. So they go over a target and they have explosive content. They can autonomously detect it, or it can be detected by a ground control station — the target can be detected and the orders can be given to simply arm and fire, and it will go, and precision at one meter precision, it can go and destroy it. There are different forms of it. There are anti-personnel — the small ones which carry about two kgs of explosive, the bigger ones at five to ten kgs of explosive, and the bigger ones actually carry 25 kgs of warhead. A small video — but there are various kinds of a lot of munitions.

I will come to swarms. Incidentally, I have written a paper on swarms which received a lot of likes, a lot of interest, and on the Beating the Retreat day we saw a swarm of drones going up, developed by IIT Delhi, and going up on the Raisina Hills and making all those formations. So what are swarms? The swarms are a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles — a set of aerial robots, that is drones, that work together to achieve a specific goal. Now the drones communicate — all the drones communicate to each other and are programmed with the AI chips, they are algorithms, so they can communicate, detect, recognize, and they carry out surveillance. And in some instances there are drones which are also equipped and armed with explosives, and actually can deep dive and strike a target. So these drones can not only carry out large-scale surveillance, but also, if need be, can also be developed into a kamikaze variant, can go and strike a particular type. These are in both versions: they have semi-autonomous, that can be controlled by an operator on the ground, but also it can be developed autonomously with AI algorithms. A small little video of, again, an American video, okay.

So now I'll come to — having seen the applications of drones in terms of surveillance and in terms of prevention and in terms of elimination in the security domain by security agencies — now I encounter some misuse of drones, and quote some examples of the non-state actors which have been employing this technology world over. The first one is the Houthis. So in 2019 the Iran-backed Yemeni Houthi rebels hit two oil fields in Saudi Arabia. We all are aware what is the capability of Saudi Arabia in terms of its oil and energy reservoirs. So essentially this set of 10 to 15 drones, basically swarms, flew 500 miles without detection, below the radar, and struck these targets in Saudi Arabia. In March 2021, again the Aramco oilfield in Saudi were attacked by six Samad-3 kamikaze drones, who flew again for about over 500 kilometers — you can see here in this map the queue — and they again hit these oil fields. And so this is by the non-state actors. What was the analysis of it? The oil prices went up, the Americans were forced to deploy and counter drone detection measures, they also deployed force levels. So that's what the asymmetry these drones bring to the table.

Back home, in Jammu we had a kind of a drone attack, but in small quadcopters with 1.5 kg explosives — entered the Jammu air force station and dropped these explosive bombs onto certain buildings, for a few, a couple of casualties. But this was very low end compared to the loiter munitions, or compared to the swarms. This is a very low end, but then it is a paradigm shift in our security, and we personally need to build counter drone measures, especially very close to our vital military installations, at least to start with, across our borders on the north as well as west. So essentially it's been — internally, in terms — it has called as, who are using very primitive methods of actually using commercial drones to drop grenades. They are essentially, in the terminology, dirty drones.

Coming to the transportation of drones — of late, in Jammu and Punjab, we have seen the Pakistan using these medium drones to carry narcotics, drugs, weapons and ammunition. You know, they're using them to just hop over the international boundary or the Line of Control to drop these, and they carry about standard 25 to 30 kgs of load — a major cause of concern, and we definitely require detection measures. I come to the detection measures and the network which we'll require some time later.

Now I'll come to my two case studies where we will draw certain lessons of drones. The first one is from Armenia and Azerbaijan. Armenia and Azerbaijan have been locked into a conflict, or were locked into a conflict, for the disputed enclave of Karabakh since 1988, going to ethnicity and territorial. Armenia in the first war, from 1988 to 1994, had an upper hand and seized a lot of territory, and ever since 1994 there have been border clashes and there has been a low intensity conflict in this area. Azerbaijan has been backed by Turkey, and Armenia by Russia. Until September 2020, a 44-day war was fought between the two, which ended in a cease-fire brokered by Russia, wherein Armenia agreed to return the occupied territory of Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan. And one of the major reasons for the victory of Azerbaijan were the employment of drones, which were equipped by Turkey and Israel, which actually for the first time — you know, although we saw the use of drones limited in Syria and Iran — but this is the first time in a conventional battle between two countries this game absolutely changed.

So what were the drones which were utilized? So they essentially utilized surveillance drones such as Heron, which continuously surveyed, dead surveillance over the target. But largely what were used were the loiter munitions: the SkyStriker, which essentially took on the infantry based targets, essentially carrying 5 to 10 kgs explosive, with a loiter time of two hours — they attacked artillery gun locations, the infantry positions and soft targets. The Harop, a loiter munition which is the next category, which can fly up to almost 1,000 kilometers, carrying 25 kgs of explosive, up to 9 hours, with an AI system on its loiter munitions — so it detects, recognizes, deep dives and destroys. So this is one of the major medium kind of size. And obviously the famous TB2 UCAV, which changed the entire scenario and revolutionized the entire battlefield, which would fly up to 4,000 kilometers, to 25,000 ceiling, and can carry missiles and homing bombs. And essentially it operated with a Heron in a hunter killer concept: so the Heron is to detect, the UCAV is to fire — may detect and fire missiles onto tanks, logistic installations, missile sites. That's how they actually pushed the asymmetry, and you can see in the slide what are the Armenian losses caused by the drones, and the Azerbaijani losses were just one sixth.

Certain lessons. Azerbaijan has been traditionally using the blitzkrieg style — the entire tanks and, you know, infantry is to go and there's to be an air cover — so they changed it. So essentially when the battle was analyzed, the conflict was analyzed, because the concept of old doctrines, vintage tanks, AD systems and heavy artillery provided by Russia to Armenia, versus the new age innovative use of surveillance drones, UCAVs and the loiter munitions. In one such instance, the An-2, which was a World War Two aircraft, was actually converted into a drone for autonomous flight. So moment they used to take off, the radar is to open up, the missile sites is to open up and start firing, the Heron is to sense it and the UCAVs is to actually go and strike. In the first one week of the battle, a lot of these missile sites were actually, and the AD systems and the artillery positions, were taken off by these drones, because of which actually the tanks and the infantry could move. So the AD proved — their defense actually proved ineffective against opponents, because either the drones were flying at a very low, below the radar, or they were flying at 30,000, 40,000 feet, which are above these barriers, and the munitions were actually striking the targets at a speed of 150 to 200 kilometers per hour.

So there was a shift from an attrition warfare — shifted to precision strikes of high value targets, and it generated a very important debate of a value of a jet fighter which cost billions of dollars, and a cheap UCAV. The kamikaze drones were again very difficult to detect, and actually at the tactical level, at the infantry level, and at the tactical battles it could game change, especially in the tank. These kamikaze drones is to come and strike where the tank is most vulnerable, into the cupola from top, which actually demoralized the Armenian soldiers to a large extent. So there was absolute revolution in this kind of a warfare, which led to a debate as to will the drones be enough, and how much drones do you require, and where do the nations invest — do they invest in air force or do they invest in drones?

Coming to the Ukraine and the Russian part of it. To start with, we all are aware the conflict has gone into the fourth month. There was a lot of asymmetry — you know, Ukraine is 16th largest army in the world, Russia is in the top three, there was a lot of asymmetry. But the lessons which were learned from Nagorno-Karabakh were actually employed by the West by providing a lot of these drones to Ukraine, so that actually started bridging that asymmetry between Ukraine and Russia as the war progressed in the second and the third month. So actually it's a big surprise for experts why Russia performed so poorly, because Russia has equal number of the drone capability, but it displayed this capability in Crimea when it annexed Crimea 2014, and at that time Ukraine didn't have any drone power — it was not a drone power at all. But over the years the West actually pumped in with a lot of these drone technology to Ukraine, and actually the counter drone systems were supplied at a very large scale, which actually countered the Russian drones which were actually flying. However the truth, you know, is still not out, because the judgment is not out, because the war is still on.

So these are the certain surveillance drones. This one, the R18 small drone, was classic example of how a commercial quadcopter can be equipped with a 40 mm grenade, and these — you would have seen so many videos wherein these drones would just come down over a tank and it would just drop — and the tanks were actually sitting ducks, and they would land into the cupola and would explode. And this was all operated by civilians in Kiev or, you know, Kharkiv. So that is how the war actually reached the civil domain. And Switchblade, you've already seen — Russians had similar things, but it's probably the counter drone technology and the innovative use of drones.

Certain lessons learned. Obviously I have talked about how the Ukrainians reached the asymmetry with drones. Russians had the technology, but it did not translate on the ground — especially their part, it unfortunately was not seen on the ground. Obviously the employment of drones has actually forced the tacticians and the strategists to actually rewrite the concepts and documents, especially because of the innovative drones. Now this is one example of how a digital era battle is fought, how is digitization actually changing the battlefield. In the initial few weeks, the Russians actually neutralized all the Ukrainian satellite communications and also destroyed a lot of this command and control communication setup. Elon Musk actually came up and offered Zelensky his Starlink satellite communication system, and it not only provided strategic communication to the higher leadership, but it also provided high speed internet data, which actually was used by the information, during information war, where they'll strike. And actually the live drone feed was getting transmitted at a very high speed to the control center, then the targeting was taking place — the UCAV data was getting at such a high speed. So that's how civil and military fusion took place, and as a result of which the world was seeing what Elon Musk provided to Ukraine, live on Twitter, on YouTube, social media.

The difference of high value static mobile targets has been very critical, and we saw the drone showed you what tactics — poor tactics of long tank columns along the road to Kiev, and vulnerable to drone attacks, and how these drones struck. So the drone warfare then wasn't actually just for the major powers. The low cost, no pilots, no training for pilots, not investment in too much of fighter, a superior air power, became a game changer for Ukraine, and even for Azerbaijan, to actually compete with major powers. We saw what information domain — when civilian quadcopters did an information to them, we've seen it on the western media, we've seen it across YouTube and across social media — and another side, there's nothing at all coming from the Russian media at all. There's one thing which is common in both the conflicts was Russia. You know, Armenia had the Russian technology, so it actually raised questions about its vintage technology, doctrines, and being able to use of technology.

So what about the counter drone measures, which is now the need of the hour? We require counter detection systems — you know, essentially radio frequency analyzers, electro optics and lidar to actually detect the location of the drones. They have to be ground based and aerial based, both. And then the detection systems and the kinetic and the non-kinetic measures to counter this drone have to work together. I saw some beautiful solutions in this drone expo which multiple Indian commercial companies have developed. And in the kinetic measures, you can destroy the drone physically through nets, or you can take control of the software by hacking, or fire a high power electromagnetic pulse or lasers, neutralizing. And then the non-kinetic measures: we have the RF, the radio frequency jamming, and also the GPS spoofers. This is the place where a lot of work is going on, and we need to first start guarding our military installations along the borders, and then proliferate it down along various places in the hinterland and in the cities and urban areas. We have the DGCA drone laws of 2021 — they still request to be.

So that's my last slide. Security agencies need to keep up with the pace of technology and the disruption which the technology is actually bringing to the table. You know, the security agencies need to keep pace, and not only to understand, but to develop and induct. It was very heartening to see the kind of progress which has been made by Indian indigenous industry to absorb this technology and develop real good systems. The acquisition processes and the technology are two sides — at the same time, every one of us, you know, it is marred by the very stringent government acquisition processes. The technology doesn't stop, it's not going to halt for that process to follow. It's going to follow its own pace — you saw it in both the wars. And to absorb this technology, India has got immense talent in terms of IT, especially AI and big data and drones. You require flat organization structures — the hierarchy won't work. So in order to develop this disruptive technology of drones, AI, big data, you need to start small, fail fast, correct early, field prototypes and then scale up. I've finished, and I would take on any questions and comments. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. I think a very nice, very helpful and very educative presentation. I start by asking a very theoretical question. You know, the drones have come to stay, and they can practically do what the air forces of various countries are doing. How long, in your opinion, would it take for drones to replace the air forces of various countries?

So when the equation between the adversaries, the peer adversary, is almost equal, I don't think — the drones will only act as a force multiplier, and they have to be used innovatively to achieve that, to bridge that asymmetry. I don't think so, sir, this technology will eventually replace — we will still require the air force to go deep and strike. But yes, this will act as a force multiplier, especially in terms of the Indian conditions with our two neighbors.

Yeah, because it is felt in some areas of the world that the air force would reduce in numbers, the drones would substantiate the air force. The number of pilots required to fly physical aircraft would reduce, but the drone pilots would increase.

That's right. So yes, it has to be a mix of both, sir.

All right. Please ask your question, and anyone else who has a question, please raise your hand and I would come back to you.

May I submit nothing here — as far as the air force aspect is concerned, the capability is to how many sorties can you launch in a 24 hour, and it's very heavy drain on the pilots as such. Actually, when you're holding off the assets is much better than what is required. So what you mentioned about this drones, aircraft, drones — they are in the process of things made, it will augment the air force resources in times to come. And for Jadhav, I want one question to ask you. You see, along the western border, where all this smuggling and drops being taken by photography — we cannot have radars all over to detect, because they can be lost from any side. Why is there even thought of using aerostats?

Oh yes. Yes, the aerostat is a very potent source of carrying out surveillance, and yes, the aerostat would really help in detecting, but it would still require measures, and very cheap measures also, in terms of laser guns, you know, which the commercial companies are developing, which we would still require to get control of the enemy drones. So that is something which both have to work in tandem.

No, I agree. You see, when I talk about the aerostat, it gives a very wide coverage as compared to the radar. Secondly, it gives you the area where these quadcopters are coming and the drop areas — it is giving you full information on that. So I thought aerostat along the western border, a couple of kilometers inside, would meet the requirement of detection, identity, protection and identification. Why, I feel — I know you would know better of it.

Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with you.

Pradeep has asked a question: wondering, application and the different types and degrees, the levels of the drones are so many, at the moment it appears total confusion, and its application uses are all over the place. It's civilian, it is incremental, it is the defense, it is protective, it's defensive, anything. Are we looking at something like that? Are the law enforcement agencies in our country doing anything to address this possible, very possible problem that we may see in very near future? I think Dr Sahni may be able to tell us this.

I'm afraid the law enforcement agencies are coping as best they can with whatever they already possess. I don't think any specific drone specific technology has been offered to them, or instrumentation has been offered to them. Most of the reports we see on drone crossings across the border are visually sighted — there's no technological sighting — and then they are engaged with whatever weapons are available, which is usually the assault rifles that the forces on the border, whichever force they belong to, are using against these drones. Some of them are forced back across the border due to firing, others are brought down. But I don't see a systemic or a systematic response as yet, and we must recognize that it is already more than two years that the drones have been operationalized by Pakistan for various purposes.

I was wondering that the country needs to do something about it.

I mean, if I may interrupt you, this is precisely the point I was trying to make throughout — that we start responding afterwards. We are seeing all these developments around us, and it is only when a particular technology or system or a strategy is deployed against us that we wake up to the issue, and then we start, you know, trying to cope with whatever we have. We have all these, I think, counterproductive measures, such as banning all use of drones in the country for a good two years or more, I think, and then we start sort of backtracking slowly as we feel that we've got some sort of control. We have got to start looking at the trajectory of the technology. Yes, whatever is already under threat, we have to cope with whatever we have — that's not a choice, that is simply coping with what we have. But if we are actually to be empowered sufficiently to exercise choice, then we will have to start looking forward, looking into the future — not saying, oh, but you know, we can manage Pakistan, and China hasn't really got anything.

The question is also that, are we gaming full-scale wars? Okay, then maybe China will not have at this juncture any overwhelming advantage against us. But what of sub-conventional engagements? China is not likely to enter into a full-scale war with India. It is engaged in all sorts of little salami slicing or irritant campaigns which are progressively compromising our capacities to cope. And unless we start recognizing these strategies, the technologies that back — and not just drones, we are discussing drones today — there's a whole range of technologies that will be deployed within the next decade. We're not talking 50 years hence. Within the next decade, a range of technologies are going to be deployed which will make it more and more difficult for us to respond to Chinese marginal provocations, calibrated provocations and encroachments. And unless we begin to prepare for those encroachments and attempts at progressive aggression, we are going to always be just doing this: well, we have this, let's try to deploy this or that. I don't see the scale of response that is required — most importantly, the scale of strategic or intellectual response at the highest level. There are specialists sitting there, somewhere or the other, in the forces, in other institutions, who know the problem, who understand the problem. But at the decision-making level, which is a political and civilian administration level, the degree of ignorance is startling — or I would even say the degree of neglect. Even where there is some knowledge or awareness, there is a comprehensive neglect of at least the urgency of the issue. Yes, I know the problem, we will deal with it when it comes — that tends to be the general response.

Thank you. Thank you. I have a little point for — come back to you. Please unmute yourself and speak, John. We can't hear you. Back to you.

Yeah, my point was, somewhere along the line when you were giving your presentation, you mentioned something about tanks, and then the drones and the cupola, and the drone come in and drop something and the tank is destroyed. Are we looking at the possibility of the drones and some kind of drone units and subunits being integrated with the units and formations in near future, so that they can be integrated together?

Well, so, that's a little classified. I can't really — although, direction, I can assure you we are moving the right direction, and that's about it.

Thank you. And the self-driven vehicles on the road — because it has grown, so imagine the potential, because these are camouflaged on the roads, we can't identify them. They have tremendous destructive potential, self-driven vehicles. Technology is available.

What's the question, John?

You see, I quite understand what Dr John is saying. I think this is what I had also mentioned, that the drone at present has been rather restrictively defined only as an unmanned aerial vehicle. Now this was not the classical understanding of the drone. The drone could be any self, shall we say, driven vehicle on land, on sea or in air. In fact, we've had for many many decades, we've had bomb defusing drones, you can call them. But I think the more important element in that question is — and it refers to something that I also said — that what we need is a greater understanding of the progressive integration of these systems. You may talk about UAVs and land-based systems and sea based systems today. Five years down the line you will have multi-domain systems. There will be systems that will be based sub sea and will operate in the air, or will operate through the air on land. So these are all elements in the development, and our definitions need to come to terms with these factors. We can call them drones, you can call them robotics, you can call them what you like, but you must understand the increasing trajectory towards integration.

Thank you. Just so soon, we have a question for you. You know, when you've been doing surveillance for years together, if you were presently serving the IB, how would you use drones for surveillance in your type of work? Can you unmute yourself? Okay, I think he can't unmute himself. There's a question I had a question for you. You know, you've been serving the IB for several years, and surveillance has been a part of your job, and surveillance was always physical in nature or through a conventional technology. Supposing you were still serving and you had drones available to you, how would you use drones for surveillance?

Now for that purpose, we will have to have some — because observation is the main thing. Drones can be sent — because mostly we are mostly doing surveillance in populated areas where we have to keep track of our targets, so drones won't be of much use, because the physical surveillance or technical surveillance are the main two things which can be used for protecting the activities of our targets. I don't think drones can be of much use in this type of surveillance.

The application, you see, in all these civil domains and especially in urban planning, applications of these small drones is immense, you know, in built up area also. So we've seen drones actually flying into buildings and carrying out surveillance and getting outside. You see, China, sir — you have not only drones being employed, but also by tons of surveillance cameras also, and trying to infuse, you know, inject data into their systems. So there is definitely a possibility of employing them in the urban areas.

But in most populated areas, those will be immediately detected.

I think substantially he was speaking in terms of the drones that are currently visible in use. If you project a little into the future, as I said, there is enormous miniaturization taking place, and already we have functional drones in the West certainly which are of, you know, a centimeter or a centimeter and a half in size, which can be introduced into an environment and then can remain positioned in that environment, sending back signals for extended periods of time, or introduced into an environment, picking up a record and then returning to their source. So perhaps with a significant size visible quadcopter that is flying into an area, you cannot do what we are talking about, but this is very much in the — what you have at this juncture, you are very right, is impractical. It can have a number of policing uses. For instance, in an area of, say, disorder or violence or something like that, you can project — in counter insurgency operations you can take very small locally controlled drones also, and just project over the, you know, immediate surroundings to ensure that there is no ambush, or to locate targets and things like that. So there is a lot of policing work already possible with existing drones. But we must again come back to the same thing: the potential for miniaturization even in intelligence gathering is tremendous, and the potential for its misuse is also tremendous.

That's one of the reasons why I said that, to start with, if you have aerostats — absolutely, very wide coverage. Yes, yes. And it gives you real-time information on that, and it can be well positioned within your own territories. Absolutely. Any attack or aggression against it would be an act of war, so that again allows you significant protection.

Dr Sahni, how would you use drones for your counter-terrorism operations? Especially, you know, the police doesn't have it at the moment, or the paramilitary forces like the CRPF, which is supposed to be doing all this work. Unless you equip them with these kind of things in the near future, the impact on terrorist activities would not be too large.

Sir, in counter insurgency, particularly in the Naxalite belt, we have seen the significant use of drones — not adequate use of drones. Also, there was for a very long time an emphasis on these very expensive large drones, half a million dollars, which nobody wanted to fly because they were afraid if it, you know, gets hit, somebody is going to lose their job. So that kind of problem was there. What we needed literally — and that is something one was advocating almost a decade ago — was little toys with, you know, a range of a few hundred meters, to just fly up and look around, and you would not have so many ambushes on your deployments, particularly in areas which offer significant cover, such as forested areas or other hilly areas or something like that. So that is a very significant possibility.

You can have drones — even the existing drones can be mounted with small firearms, remotely controlled. They can be sent into a hideout where we know that — for instance, so many operations where our personnel are killed while, you know, terrorists are hiding out in a building or in some other protected area — and a drone can give you, number one, perfect visual sighting, just as a surveillance factor, or it could even go out and target these individuals exactly. There is a multiplicity of possibilities. You just have to apply your mind and provide the resources — or rather, the other way around, provide the resources, and believe me, the security forces will find out how to use them, right? Because their lives are on the line. The decisions — because lives are — not surveillance work or survey work. It's not just a question of catching them in the act. If you can just, you know, see how they are progressing in terms of their activities — in terms, say, sandalwood cutting down of trees, you know where they're operating, you can then isolate and act against them. As I said before, give the people the technology, give them some freedom of use, and the security forces will find out the most efficient uses themselves, because their lives are on the line. Our lives are not on the line.

Absolutely. John, you have another question — I saw your hand. Are you done with it, John? Are you having a question, or he's having difficulty with his sound? Okay, okay.

I just wanted to sort of point out one thing. The drone was invented by Abraham Karem, who started creating UAVs. So you know, it's from a person born in Baghdad to Syrian Christian parents, who migrated into Israel, from where the technology is actually related.

Since we have no other questions, I would now hand the meeting back to the president to conclude the session.

Thank you very much. Actually, to start with, I think we should change the name — now UAV is not the right name, as pointed out by Dr Sahni, because these drones are not only aerial vehicles but are being used for various other. So it's other way wrong. We always said that UAV is the first, and drone is the second name. Drone we were saying as a sort of acronym, or you must say anything. But now, after listening to Dr Sahni and Colonel, otherwise UAV is not the word to be used for these jobs. So that is one point. Secondly, I think right from basics, starting from the nano drones to the highest zone surrounding MALE, red, yellow zones, everything which conceivably one should learn as education has been pointed out beautifully by Colonel Jadhav. And on the wider perspective, on the futuristic perspective, on the holistic dimension, I think it's very educative — I mean, it is a sort of foresight Dr Sahni has pointed out, and I think this is to be understood by the political masters.

Drones have come to have a decisive impact now. Certain drone strikes also raise complex legal and moral dilemmas. It has come to stay, but they also raise complex legal as well as moral dynamics and issues. But tomorrow you may use drones with certain chemicals or something like that, so it needs to be perceived and thought of that it raises certain moral dilemmas and certain issues. Electronic warfare is the art of locating enemies by signal — the use of drones have become almost as important as we used to have at real time some intelligence inputs, etc. Further, the drones are still being used in a large number, I must tell you, by the insurgents, as you pointed out, and for counter-terrorism we have to see as to what techniques we should use. Dr Sahni has pointed about — to the next slide I'll just try to bring to his notice, which he has had a case study for me, that when we were in the Mand area, I think we were just having an aerial survey, that's all. We could not see what is there under that grass, that wild grass. Probably such central antenna could be used by the drones, because the terrorists will always use the pipes and have a breathe and go into the water. I mean, in such situations, if they give us some technology, probably for counter terrorism, those can be very useful.

And in Pakistan — drones have been cited in the recent past in J&K and Punjab frequently. In fact, it has been reported by our intelligence agencies — I'd just like to point out to the people here — and it has come in certain reports that had organized a meeting of top commanders of terrorist groups, in which the use of drones and strategy to be adopted for the use of drones was taught to them. I do not know if we have done anything, our proposals — anything has to know at that level what is mistakes here. The intelligence agencies also raised serious concerns at one time about the use of drone by Pakistan smugglers, and also dropping of all the elimination. Since the drones have become, as India is concerned, potential threat, and both as an offensive, as a counter-offensive, MALE or counter MALE, we have to be well equipped. And I tend to agree — and not tend, I agree with Dr Sahni hundred percent — but let's not lag behind, let's look forward, think in advance. Once things happen, then we start thinking, all right, we give these resources and that resource.

And this is also — in Punjab we had no bulletproof vehicles, we had no bulletproof jackets. We devised our own motorcycle vehicle — they were all right, you fired, you will put heavy plates on the vehicle, then firing your AK-47 or something, and then find our support after two to three months. We're not looked in advance that we want bulletproof jackets and we want what a true faker. The drones have to come as a prediction first, seriously, selling both the fancy, other self counter MALE — the way, that means, to block the lidar drone, I think, is the key requirement for India today. This webinar is eye-opener for our leaders also. And of course there's a silver lining, as Colonel Jadhav has pointed out, that there is a research going on — although he cannot tell certain thing, there are so many things in the pipeline. There's a silver lining that this is being thought, but I think it may need a wider and a more important way of thinking in this thing, because with narrow thinking here and there, isolated thinking, it is not going to happen. You have it all — the army is doing research. I don't think, as our police forces, our central armed forces — because then there is such a research going on — so there has to be dovetailing of all these things.

With these words, I once again thank Dr Sahni and Colonel Jadhav for very illuminating presentations. I mean, I was listening to it with rapt attention for one and a half hour — well, forget about first half, which was blah blah blah introduction — now it's one hour very very scintillating and very very educated session. We thank them. Thanks for the iridescent speaker, and we hope we have the pleasure of having you in future session. Probably we'll organize some session which we'll call the interactive session — we have about half an hour or one hour, and we may get you again. Thank you, and thank you very much, doctor, you have always been very kind and agreed to my request. Thank you very much.

Our next webinar is on judicial activism. I mean, this is another thing which is very much in there — that there should be judicial activity. The legal system, and particularly the judiciary, should become active if the democracy has to be kept intact, because there's a lot of things going on inside the political parties and all, which is danger to the democracy of the country. So there has to be some interference by the higher courts. So judicial activism is our next webinar, is due on Friday 24th June, again same time, 6 to 7:30. We have a speaker, a very eminent speaker and lawyer, Mr O.P. Saxena. He is one of those who have filed about 200 public litigations cases in the High Court and Supreme Court. We are also getting another very eminent lawyer, and I request all the delegates to make a note of this in their diaries and be with us on 24th June at 6 pm. Thank you very much. Thank you indeed. Thank you.

So thank you, Dr Sahni. Thank you. Jinx, Jadhav, when were you there with the NCO Academy?

So just a year after its raising, sir. I joined the Infantry School, and then we were sent with back there. Yes, sir.