Opinion
Drone buzz: India must buckle up for today’s AI-equipped arms race
Summary
- As US-China rivalry heats up to propel both Cold War II archrivals ahead, sneaky drones and hypersonic missiles are blazing trails we cannot ignore. To defend India’s strategic autonomy in the digital age of warfare, our weaponry must keep up—sensibly.
Innocuous news from China shouldn’t make anyone sit up, but any technological edge it gains over the West in the Cold War II that’s underway should. On Sunday, China test-flew a large unmanned aircraft—or drone— with a payload capacity of 2 tonnes.
It’s just a cargo carrier, developed by the state-funded Sichuan Tengden Sci-Tech Innovation Company, but it is bigger than the four-seater Cessna-172. A separate Chinese firm aims to rival this drone, at least on size, and yet another is looking to fly passenger drones.
What makes pilotless planes buzzy in defence circles, however, is the unseen stuff behind the show: digital guidance via a live data-feed. Military mavens speak of such technology as a revolution in warfare, an early example of which were stirrups hanging from saddles that once gave horseback warriors a spatial advantage.
Also read: Cold War 2: Do not let it spark off a nuclear arms race
Drones have been deployed in both the Ukraine and Gaza wars, as well as the Red Sea hostilities. The barrage of projectiles launched by Iran and its proxy militia Hizbullah against Israel this April was a mix of missiles and drones.
While almost all were intercepted, combat experts have warned of warhead carriers that may be too sneaky to detect and neutralize. And on this front, China seems to be ahead of the US-led West.
The Cold War nightmare was about nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles that can blast off the planet and re-enter the atmosphere to strike a target across oceans. This projectile technology has been mastered by spacefarers, a club that includes India.
But the booster phase of such a launch generates enough heat and light to render it detectable, and even if it’s hard to track once fired, it follows a preset path. In contrast, cruise missiles that fly low are sneakier but slower.
Today’s Cold War II era of digitally guided drones, however, is evolving towards blended weapons that push the frontiers of speed, agility and path deception. In recent years, hypersonic gliders have blazed a trail, except that they aim to ensure neither their blaze nor trail is spotted by an adversary.
The sophistication of China’s latest hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), like its DF-ZF, has alarmed the US and driven it to scramble a response.
Since software is a key differentiator, artificial intelligence (AI) may pick the winner of this arms race, even though the idea of any command that leaves humans out of its loop is a moral affront.
Also read: In a first, India delivers BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles to Philippines
Where does all this action leave India? By one thesis, an age of hi-tech threats would make geo-strategic neutrality difficult to sustain as the US-China rivalry heats up to propel them both forth, with neither side ready to cover us under its defence dome without New Delhi signing up as a subordinate ally.
If the going gets tough, as it could in time to come, given Beijing’s ambitions of power projection, our neutral stance might put us in a tight spot. As a matter of national resolve, though, we have kept any breach of Indian autonomy off the table of alliance talks. This means we must play catch-up on weaponry.
Recently, an Agni-5 test of a missile with multiple warheads placed India in a league of powers with only the US, UK, Russia, China and France as members. Clearly, our top brass wants to keep up with other powers. But as AI-enabled drones and HGVs emerge as whizzy new threats, we’ll need to leap ahead.
Yet, we must not let enlarged defence outlays get the better of sound economic policies. China risks slipping into a middle-income trap. So does India. To avert such an outcome, we must focus on the quality of people’s lives, not just the inequity of power gaps.
