The Thar desert hosted spectacleing before. It has seen the rise of successive Indian governments showcasing military might Bharat Shakti in 2024 and Vayushakti drills in this year. However, one thing has changed in what is being rolled out on that dusty firing range. The newer, more popular star attractions can be smaller, unmanned and, in some respects, thinking for themselves, while tanks and fighter jets fill the rest of the frame. The Pokhran tests were not only a theatre of firepower but also a test bed to understand how India plans to fight its next war where pilots may not be on board the frontline aircraft.

The scope and size of what it is private industry and Defence start-ups have begun to deliver to these events speaks for itself. In fact, not a company known for battlefield drones a decade ago, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) showed off two indigenously developed platforms, Vedh Mk-1 and Chanakya, at the showcase in Bengaluru and even took 21 drone startups with them to search for co-development partners. The company's “Precision Engineering and Systems” division, which now makes up a small three per cent of the company's total turnover, is now expected to triple that figure within five years, its own executives said. But that isn't a rounding error in a company which had revenues of over Rs 2.86 lakh crore last financial year it is a wager that unmanned systems are going to become a big profit centre and not a mere sideline. The company has also pledged to supply the Air Force with 100 more Teer drones, and is already in the process of manufacturing them.

A few weeks ago, Solar Defence and Aerospace, based in Nagpur, India, pulled something equally significant off: an all-encompassing, multi-layered system for defeating drone swarms, not just any single drone. The fact that the demonstration took place at the company's own site and at the same time for the Army, Navy and Air Force makes it evident that the private sector now takes serious note of counter-drone as a new business line, rather than an afterthought task tacked onto missile defence. The system has been praised by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh in public, which is a strong endorsement considering the ministry's prudence in outsourcing sensitive capabilities to private companies outside the public sector 101s.

All of this is not occurring in isolation. The Ministry of Defence released a request for information only a few weeks ago for some 800 of these to be supplied, and a swarm unmanned munition system would be able to launch the kamikaze drones from catapults and have an operational range of 350 kilometres, with a 30 kilograms payload. A Request for Proposal is anticipated by June. The timing isn't coincidental. It comes just after the four-day military drills with Pakistan last May, in which the two militaries used unmanned platforms and layered counter-drone systems to a level they had not shown in combat before. Indian officials have since characterized the use of drone warfare, electronic warfare and air defence during the exchange as a major leap in the country's efforts to develop its own defence technologies, attributing their ability to prevent such attacks on airfields and logistics installations along the border to the multi-layered air defence shield.

This evolvement has been years in the making with the policy backbone and only recently being reflected in hardware. India has been prohibiting the import of fully-fledged drones since 2021 to encourage local drone production capacity to reach maturity. The same year, a scheme for providing production-linked incentives for drone and component manufacturers was introduced. Then a few months later, last September, the GST Council merged an uncoordinated tax regime with 18 percent and 28 percent rates into a single 5 percent rate, which impacted the economics of both producers and consumers of drones. The Air Force's own swarm-intelligence competition, in its third round, has seen orders to the tune of nearly Rs 2,000 crore coming from its first and second rounds, all of which are based on the concept of swarms of smaller sensing drones replacing a single expensive AWACS aircraft. In the last ten years, the defence procurement from domestic companies has been around Rs 6 lakh crore, with annual production doubling to exceed Rs 1 lakh crore and over 150 new defence startups getting orders from the government.

There is a global context that needs to be recognized without excuses. India's pivot is the same as what Ukraine, Israel and now more than ever before, the Gulf states have found out the hard way: cheap, expendable, autonomous systems can neutralize far more expensive conventional forces, and GPS-denial and electronic warfare are no longer fringe specialties but mandatory features in design. These conflicts have been discussed openly by Indian manufacturers as the reasons for their developing platforms to be able to function in 'contested, jammed' environments rather than 'safe, benign' ones a decade ago. Its partnership with Israeli companies in the field of radio-frequency detection for counter-drones is indicative of how India continues to rely on its old partners even though it is developing local expertise.

Equally to be examined is the enthusiasm that's shown at these exercises and is that enthusiasm going to result in deployed capability at the rate officials are proposing. India has had years-long timelines of deliveries in the past and an RFI is a number of bureaucratic steps away from an operational squadron. It is a case of many impressive startup companies demonstrating their modular, mission-configured platforms on the stage, but then many have found themselves facing challenges when it came to scaling their designs from a handful of prototypes to thousands of units under combat-grade quality control. The true measure of Pokhran's latest displays will be whether the industrial muscle that drives them is able to perform up to the mark when the cameras are not present.The top number of unmanned platforms sold has come from India and the chart below illustrates the orders received for the swarm drones on a log scale as the numbers are rather large.