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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.)

My Stalingrad, My Reckoning

Writer: Mouparna Srimani
Mouparna Srimani
Jul 12, 2025
3 min read

In 2018, gripped by a restless literary hunger for something that could match the philosophical depth and vast human canvas of Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace,’ I reached for Vasily Grossman’s monumental ‘Life and Fate.’


What I found was something bleaker, more shattering and more honest. Grossman’s magnum opus is not just the greatest novel of the Second World War but mirror held up to the soul, mine included.


That year, I had been struggling quietly with a myriad of personal and emotional crises. My body was failing in small ways. So was love. I turned to literature in search of something deep in its moral and emotional reach. Grossman gave me that and more. He offered no comfort, but he taught me acceptance.


Finished in 1960, ‘Life and Fate’ was (unsurprisingly) banned by Soviet censors. Mikhail Suslov, the Kremlin’s high priest of ideology, had the KGB raid Grossman’s apartment and seize everything pertaining to the book - carbon copies, draft manuscripts, typewriter ribbons. Suslov is reported to have told Grossman that his book could not be published for the next two hundred years! That a novel could so terrify the oppressive Soviet state reveals just how clearly Grossman’s truths cut through the fog of toxic ideological propaganda.


Historian Antony Beevor put it succinctly when he observed that Grossman was the first to draw an explicit moral equivalence between Nazism and Stalinism, the similarities between the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the interrogations of the Lubyanka. In both systems, the individual is ground down under the heel of totalitarianism.


Grossman also had that rarest of combinations: physical and moral courage. A nearsighted, middle-aged Ukrainian Jewish intellectual, Grossman embedded himself with Red Army troops at the front lines, from Stalingrad to Berlin. He never took notes during conversations with soldiers, fearing it would alienate them. Instead, he would sit quietly, listen deeply and write everything down by night. His work for Red Star, the Soviet army newspaper, stood out for its honesty. Soldiers trusted him. He was, they said, the only one telling the truth.


That truth is what pulses through ‘Life and Fate.’ Its sprawling canvas is set amid the backdrop of the brutal Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia. Around it unfurls a panorama of Soviet life under siege: from the Shaposhnikov family scattered across frontlines and rear to physicists in state laboratories walking a tightrope of ideology and survival to soldiers on the steppe and prisoners in gulags and Nazi death camps alike. The novel’s moral centre is Viktor Shtrum, a physicist and surrogate for Grossman himself, who bears witness to the suffocating compromises required to survive under Stalin. In an unbelievably grim moment of history, Grossman finds redemption in the smallest acts of decency - a woman sharing her bread in a death camp, a soldier refusing to denounce a comrade.


The book does not preach. It observes. And it does so with a Tolstoyan eye for the tragic contradictions of history. The title is no accident as ‘Life and Fate’ was intended as a 20th-century homage to ‘War and Peace.’ But where Tolstoy saw providence, Grossman saw absurdity and the deep loneliness of freedom.


For me, that was the revelation. The only victory Grossman offers is the capacity to endure. That acceptance, oddly, helped me come to terms with my own condition, to deal with the uncertainty of tomorrow and the fragility of relationships. As Grossman writes, “Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.”


That kernel, somehow, survives. So do we.


(The writer is a Technology VP in an investment bank.)

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