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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.)

Inside the Great Power Game

Writer: Smitha Balachandran
Smitha Balachandran
May 13
3 min read

Certain books on geopolitics (past and present) are insightful and revelatory enough to constitute an intellectual treat for the reader. ‘Great Power Games’ by erstwhile RAW chief Vikram Sood is exactly that. Published in 2025, this work begins by describing how power and money result in global control. Sood begins with the phrase: “It is difficult to define or measure power, but it is true that wealth is a source of power and the ability to project violent force adds to that power.”


In nineteenth-century America, ruthless businessmen such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Carl Vanderbilt, Henry Ford and Jay Gould prospered and became millionaires thanks to the massive flow of money into the US due to the industrial revolution in Europe. The wealthy had very specific ideas about perpetuating control—in November 1910, six of America’s biggest bankers created a blueprint for the Federal Reserve system, which saw to it that the country’s biggest private banks had oversight of the nation’s currency supply and over smaller banks.


Power Play

The author describes how in the United States, three investment companies who hold the largest share of the market—BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street facilitate the flow of money to big corporations which also implies big investment in and outside American territory and big military. Some of the employees of these investment companies have held positions in multiple US presidential administrations and own part of CNN and Fox. This permits them to influence the bipartisan information flow.


Sood emphasizes how war was used for wealth creation. JPMorgan and BlackRock for instance have been helping the Ukrainian government set up a reconstruction bank to steer public seed capital into rebuilding projects that could attract hundreds of billions of dollars. Firms like BlackRock invest some of their assets in military-industrial complex firms.


The US sought to control a global empire post- World War II and for that it needed to be ubiquitous across the globe. Very often, its intervention, especially for regime change were for economic reasons rather than political, although the fabricated narrative was that of politics and security.


The book reveals how the National Endowment for Democracy or NED (founded in 1983) despite claiming to be a “non-profit, non-governmental, bipartisan, grant-making organization to help strengthen democratic institutions around the world,” includes in its activities the secret funding of individuals, political parties and NGOs favourable to US interests and the channelling of money to obliterate the activities of those considered anti-US.


Russia and China, both of which play pivotal roles in today’s geopolitical scenario, are discussed at length. Rand, a Pentagon think tank, in a 2019 report, listed six possibilities to undermine Russia—arming Ukraine with lethal weapons, increasing support for Syrian jihadists, promoting regime change in Belarus, exploiting tensions in the South Caucasus, reducing Russian influence in Central Asia and rivalling Russian presence in Transnistria (a small tract of unrecognized independent territory in Moldova). The author strongly feels that this report would have been read by the Russians.


Dragon’s Challenge

China is now well on its way to challenge the US as the global hegemon. It is a well-known fact that China’s phenomenal growth took place due to large-scale theft of foreign science and technology. China controls the headwaters of more than a dozen major rivers. About half the world’s population depends on the water supply from these rivers. Yet China does not have a single water-sharing treaty with any riparian country on its borders. Politically, the author feels that Chinese strategy would be to continue to push diplomatically against the Americans and try its military tactics against neighbours to establish superiority.


Sood’s concluding chapters focus on obstacles to India’s destiny (both internal and external) and the way in which India under Prime Minister Modi has benefited due to efficient political, social, economic, fiscal and financial reform. The author however strongly advocates an overhaul of India’s colonial era bureaucracy which he feels strangles business with red tape, chokes entrepreneurship and takes too long to make most decisions. He is critical of the Indian judiciary and the large backlog of cases, 50 million of which are still pending in courts as of end-2023. Yet, the author feels that despite uncertainties, India is poised for greatness.


This book is a repository of valuable information on past and mainly present-day geopolitics. The author’s style is engaging, witty, incisive and focuses on issues relevant globally and nationally. The reader will enjoy Sood’s racy, yet informative narrative.


(The writer is a Mumbai based educator.)


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