top of page

By:

Commodore S.L. Deshmukh

31 October 2024 at 8:30:19 am

The Beam That Blinds the Drone

As cheap drones reshape the battlefield, India’s T-SHUL BEAM points to a future in which electronic warfare may matter as much as firepower The drone has definitively become the weapon of choice for the modern battlefield. Cheap, expendable and increasingly autonomous, unmanned aerial vehicles can now threaten troops, armour, airfields and critical infrastructure without requiring the attacker to risk a pilot. Their proliferation has created a corresponding demand for counter-drone systems...

The Beam That Blinds the Drone

As cheap drones reshape the battlefield, India’s T-SHUL BEAM points to a future in which electronic warfare may matter as much as firepower The drone has definitively become the weapon of choice for the modern battlefield. Cheap, expendable and increasingly autonomous, unmanned aerial vehicles can now threaten troops, armour, airfields and critical infrastructure without requiring the attacker to risk a pilot. Their proliferation has created a corresponding demand for counter-drone systems that can respond quickly and at a cost proportionate to the threat. This is where beam-based anti-drone technology enters the picture. Broadly, such systems fall into two categories. Hard-kill systems use concentrated laser energy to physically damage or destroy a drone. Soft-kill systems, by contrast, use radio-frequency or electromagnetic energy to disrupt the electronic links that allow a drone to communicate, navigate and transmit information. Sophisticated Weaponry Hard-kill laser systems focus an intense beam of light on a vulnerable part of an incoming UAV - its carbon-fibre structure, control surfaces, battery or other critical components. The concentrated energy rapidly heats the target, potentially burning through its structure or disabling optical sensors and bringing the aircraft down. India’s DRDO has demonstrated a 30kW laser system, while Israel’s Rafael has developed the Lite Beam system. Soft-kill systems take a different route. Rather than physically destroying the aircraft, they interfere with the electronic architecture that keeps it airborne. Directional radio-frequency energy can disrupt command-and-control links, video feeds, telemetry and satellite-navigation signals such as GPS or other GNSS services. Depending on the drone and the nature of the disruption, the aircraft may be forced to land, return to its launch point or lose control. It is in this category that the T-SHUL BEAM system developed by Indian defence company IG Defence deserves attention. T-SHUL BEAM is a man-portable, directional counter-drone system designed for tactical deployment. Its multi-band radio-frequency architecture is intended to target several of the links on which unmanned aerial systems depend, including command-and-control, telemetry, video transmission and GNSS navigation. Its directional configuration allows an operator to concentrate electronic countermeasures on a particular aerial target rather than indiscriminately radiating energy across a large area. That matters on a battlefield where the warning time against a small UAV or first-person-view drone may be measured in seconds. The appeal of such a system is therefore not simply that it can counter a drone. It is that it can potentially bring counter-drone capability closer to the soldier and to the tactical edge. Large counter-UAS installations have their place, particularly around fixed and high-value assets. But forward units require systems that can move with them, be deployed rapidly and operate against small, low-cost unmanned platforms without imposing the logistical burden associated with conventional weapons. The T-SHUL BEAM’s significance also lies in its proposed integration with an artificial-intelligence-enabled battle-management architecture. IG Drones, the original equipment manufacturer, has stated that T-SHUL BEAM has been integrated with GRID, its indigenous AI-powered platform. The GRID architecture is intended to bring sensors, intelligence systems, unmanned platforms and command elements into a common operational framework. The attraction of such integration is obvious. Countering drones is increasingly less about a single weapon and more about the speed of the kill chain: detecting a threat, identifying it, deciding what response is appropriate and directing that response before the target disappears. An AI-enabled command architecture can potentially improve situational awareness, facilitate real-time threat detection and coordinate different systems operating simultaneously. This is particularly relevant as drone warfare evolves from isolated attacks towards increasingly complex and potentially swarming operations. A battlefield crowded with drones cannot be managed effectively if every sensor and weapon operates as a separate island. The advantage will increasingly belong to forces capable of turning disparate streams of information into a coherent picture and responding at machine speed. The T-SHUL BEAM’s reported demonstration at Pokhran represents another step in India’s attempt to build a domestic ecosystem spanning drones, counter-drones, artificial intelligence and electronic warfare. Counter-drone warfare is likely to be a recurring requirement rather than a niche capability. Importing every component of such an ecosystem would leave India vulnerable to supply-chain disruptions, technology restrictions and foreign-exchange pressures. Indigenous development, even when undertaken by relatively small private-sector companies, can broaden the country’s technological base and give the armed forces greater freedom to adapt systems to their operational requirements. Economics of the Contest Yet the real measure of any counter-drone system will ultimately be operational rather than promotional. Electronic warfare is inherently a contest between countermeasure and counter-countermeasure. Drone designers can alter frequencies, communications protocols, navigation methods and levels of autonomy. A system that is effective against one generation of drones may require modification against the next. The battlefield, in other words, will remain a technological arms race. The economics of the contest nevertheless favour directed-energy and electronic-warfare solutions. A conventional interceptor expends a missile or projectile against each target. A beam-based system can, subject to its power supply, engagement envelope and other operational constraints, engage targets without expending conventional ammunition. The marginal cost of an interception can consequently be dramatically lower. The beam also travels at effectively the speed of light, removing the flight time associated with kinetic interceptors. In densely populated areas or around sensitive infrastructure, bringing down a drone with a projectile can create its own hazards. Electronic disruption, when properly controlled, offers the possibility of neutralising the threat without sending an interceptor crashing back to earth. These advantages should not obscure the limitations. Soft-kill systems depend on the vulnerabilities of the target’s electronic architecture and may be less effective against increasingly autonomous drones that require fewer external communications. Weather, range, power availability, frequency management and the sophistication of an adversary's electronic countermeasures can all affect performance. No single technology is likely to provide a complete answer. The future of counter-drone warfare will therefore belong not to the beam alone but to layered defence combining. The emergence of systems such as T-SHUL BEAM suggests that India is beginning to build the technological pieces of that architecture at home. (The writer is a retired naval aviation officer and a defence and geopolitical analyst. Views personal.)

Bollywood’s Annus Mirabilis

Writer: Shoma A. Chatterji
Shoma A. Chatterji
Jan 17
3 min read

Author Pratik Majumdar’s latest book argues that 1975 transformed Bollywood in ways memory has flattened.


Sadly, whenever we go into a flashback to 1975, all discussions boil down to Sholay, a milestone in the history of Indian cinema and perhaps also, across world cinema. “Sadly” because, few are aware that 1975 can be defined as the Golden Year of Bollywood cinema. Did you know that not less than 80 full-length feature films were released across theatres in India and some of them were big hits too? Few might have kept a count but film buff and author Pratik Majumdar reminds us of these milestones that mark the history of Bollywood.


Watching films has been Majumdar’s passion and he has been actively pursuing it from the time he was ten or eleven. A couple of years ago, Pratik decided to record his passion for cinema, especially Bollywood. The result is in the 197-page extensively researched book published by Hatchette-India last year. The book is titled 1975 – The Year That Transformed Bollywood with a colourful collage for a cover with an image from Sholay dominating the cover. 


The most outstanding quality of Pratik’s selection of around 30 feature films in the study is the underlining of the fact that Sholay might have been the best but this in no way signifies that other good films that hit the box office in a big way or landed on the wayside had not released in theatres.   


The most important function of Bollywood – its cinema and the people who inhabit the film industry is its ability to act as an interface between traditions of Indian society and disturbing modern or Western intrusions into it. The Hindi film is a means of giving cultural meaning to Western structures superimposed on society, demystifying some of the culturally unacceptable modern structures now in vogue and ritually neutralizing elements of the modern world that must be accepted for sheer survival. Are Western intrusions into the Hindi mainstream film ethos really disturbing? 


Not really, because the emphasis is not on the inner struggle between modernity and tradition. Nor is it on any deep ambivalence towards the West. The function of the Hindi film according to Shyam Benegal is to externalize an inner psychological conflict and handle the inner passion generated by social and political processes as problems created by events and persons outside. These events and persons are both ideal types and representatives of different aspects of a fragmented self. These fragments are separately controlled.


Bollywood seeks to sustain this control by sharpening the focuses of these differences - the hero and the anti-hero, the heroine and the anti-heroine, the large-hearted father-in-law and the middle-aged don. Hindi cinema does this because integration of these separate fragments into a unified whole would highlight the gray elements of characterization that it does not wish to adhere to. The cinematic influences of a foreign culture cannot uproot the cultural roots of a nation dotted with a largely illiterate mass population nurtured on a steady and generous diet of mythology, folklore, theatre, folk arts, music, all of which are reflected, represented, interpreted, distorted and questioned in and by popular cinema.


Pratik sheds light on films lesser-known than Sholay that were released the same year. Those films that were mainstream but had distinctive individual traits of the director are – Feroz Khan’s stylish Dharmatma, Shyam Benegal’s innocent filmization of Habib Tanvir’s famous play Charandas Chor, Rajshri’s super-duper hit Geet Gata Chal, Randhir Kapoor-directed Dharam Karam which is perhaps the first film in which the director directed his illustrious father Raj Kapoor, Brij Sadanah’s Chori Mera Kaam, three films of Gulzar, Shakti Samanta’s Amanush, Basu Chatterjee’s Chhoti Si Baat and many more.


There are five analytical essays also which sheds light on special areas of Bollywood cinema such as ‘The Impact of the 1975 Emergency on the Hindi film industry.’ Majumdar’s writing style is fluid, completely devoid of technical jargon and academic theorizing which enhances the book’s readability.


An outstanding feature is his dissection of  Jai Santoshi Maa, which was released the same year. This film led to a kind of mass hysteria among Indian women throughout the country trapping most of them in a fiery fervour of rituals, fasting and prayers for 16 consecutive Fridays to seek her blessings through fulfillment of their vows. Interestingly, it is this film which created this Goddess which did not really exist before. Thanks to the film, the worship in temples dedicated entirely to Santoshi Maa sprung up right across India and women still pay obeisance to her.


This is a must-read book for everyone interested in cinema with special focus on Bollywood cinema.


(The author is a film scholar. Views personal.)

Comments

bottom of page