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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.)

Still Storming the Bastille

Writer: Mouparna Srimani
Mouparna Srimani
Jul 14
3 min read

Amid shelves crowded with sophisticated histories on the French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle’s classic remains the one book that makes history feel gloriously, terrifyingly alive like no other.


Every Bastille Day, I find myself reaching for the same battered volume. It is not the newest history of the French Revolution. It is not the most balanced, the most archival or even the most reliable in the way modern historians would define ‘reliability.’ But for me, Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution: a History, first published in 1837, and rendered in scintillating, breathtakingly eccentric prose, remains the history I return to most often.


Nearly two centuries later, after generations of scholarship have transformed our understanding of revolutionary France, Carlyle still wins the day for me on the subject. The austere Scotsman captured the Revolution’s terror, exhilaration and chaos with an almost primeval force that no one before him or since has managed to do so.


Carlyle was one of the great prose stylists of the Victorian age. His book has one of the great origin stories in English letters. Having completed the manuscript of the first volume of The French Revolution in 1835, Carlyle lent it to the philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose household maid accidentally consigned most of it to the fire, mistaking the pages for waste paper. Undeterred, Carlyle painstakingly reconstructed the volume largely from memory, producing not a diminished substitute but one of the most electrifying works of historical prose ever written. Few masterpieces have literally risen from the ashes.


Carlyle’s gift for portraiture comes alive in his masterwork. His dramatis personae refuse to remain names in a chronology. His Robespierre is “the sea-green Incorruptible” - a phrase so haunting that it has eclipsed countless more scholarly descriptions. The revolutionary crowds swell into what Carlyle calls a “living flood.” One reads Carlyle not just to learn what happened but to encounter personalities so vividly drawn that they continue to inhabit the imagination long after the dates have faded.


Small wonder that Carlyle’s masterwork made such an indelible impression on Charles Dickens, whose A Tale of Two Cities bears the Carlylean imprint on almost every page. The charged atmosphere of Paris and even some of the novel’s memorable scenes owe a clear debt to Carlyle’s pages. And while Dickens transformed history into fiction, Carlyle had already made history read like a great literary novel.


Since Carlyle wrote, the French Revolution has been interpreted and reinterpreted almost beyond recognition. Jules Michelet transformed it into the epic awakening of the French nation, while Albert Soboul saw class struggle at its heart. François Furet challenged Marxist orthodoxy and recast the Terror as an outgrowth of revolutionary political culture. Later writers from Simon Schama to William Doyle, and a host of others have enriched the subject with extraordinary scholarship. Every decade seems to produce another ‘definitive’ account of this seminal event.


Yet none has displaced Carlyle from my bookshelf. Carlyle’s masterpiece sucks the reader in with a prose that surges, recoils and erupts like the Revolution itself. Paris is not a backdrop but a feverish protagonist. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Danton, Robespierre and Mirabeau appear not as carefully calibrated historical actors but as figures caught in a drama whose ending they cannot foresee.


Reading Carlyle can be exhausting. His sentences leap from irony to prophecy. Exclamation marks proliferate. Metaphors pile upon metaphors. He interrupts himself, apostrophises the reader and occasionally seems to abandon grammar in pursuit of momentum. By contemporary standards, it is ‘undisciplined’ writing. For this reader, it is also unforgettable.


The 21st century has already supplied its own catalogue of populist upheavals and political polarisation. One need not equate modern democracies with revolutionary France to recognise familiar patterns of institutional distrust and public anger. Carlyle’s enduring power lies not in offering direct parallels but in reminding readers that history is ultimately driven by human passions rather than abstract theories.


There is something oddly refreshing about revisiting a 19th century historian who wrote before every sentence had to satisfy peer review. Carlyle believed history should not merely instruct but overwhelm. He wanted readers to hear the roar of the Parisian crowd, smell the smoke above the Bastille and feel the dreadful inevitability of the tumbrils rumbling towards the guillotine. He was a writer who understood that revolutions are not only events to be explained, but storms to be felt. Perhaps that is why, every July 14, I return to those pages.


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

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