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.)

The Body Politic of Farming

Writer: Parashram Patil
Parashram Patil
May 20
3 min read

For decades, India has approached food security as an engineering problem. Governments built granaries, expanded irrigation canals, subsidised fertilisers and fretted over logistics networks that could carry onions from Nashik or tomatoes from Kolar to distant urban markets. The vocabulary of policy was dominated by procurement, storage and distribution. Food security was measured in tonnes. Risk was measured in rainfall deficits. The farmer, paradoxically, was treated as incidental to the system he sustained.


But today, the deeper fragility of India’s food economy is no longer merely climatic or logistical; it is biological. Beneath the discussions on Minimum Support Prices (MSP), cold-storage chains and export bans lies a neglected reality: the exhaustion of the human being at the centre of agricultural production. India has long monitored the depreciation of tractors and the degradation of soil. It has paid far less attention to the “biological depreciation” of the farmer himself.


As an agricultural expert with decades of experience, I have articulated a Farmers’ Health Capital Theory to remedy this. The theory argues that a farmer’s physical and mental health should be treated not as a welfare concern alone, but as a measurable economic asset essential to national stability.


Every economic system recognises maintenance costs. Factories budget for machinery breakdowns. Airlines inspect aircraft engines before failure occurs. Even digital companies invest heavily in server resilience and redundancy. Agriculture, however, continues to operate as though the human body powering it were infinitely renewable.


India’s farm economy remains heavily dependent on intense manual labour, especially in high-value perishable crops such as tomatoes, onions and potatoes—the politically sensitive ‘TOP’ crops that periodically convulse inflation charts and television studios alike. Conventional explanations for price spikes usually point to erratic monsoons, hoarding middlemen or transport disruptions. Yet a closer examination of conditions at the farm gate reveals a subtler bottleneck: physical exhaustion.


Extreme heat provides the clearest example. During severe temperature spells, a farmer’s productivity collapses abruptly. Manual picking slows. Delays that appear trivial in isolation become economically catastrophic in aggregate. A delay of even two days in harvesting tomatoes can sharply reduce usable yield through spoilage and overripening. In a tightly balanced market, small production losses at the source cascade into dramatic retail inflation in cities hundreds of kilometres away.


Thus, the vulnerability of India’s food system may lie not merely in weather patterns, but in the physiological limits of the people exposed to them.


The traditional state response to volatility is infrastructural expansion: build more warehouses, increase buffer stocks, tighten supply chains. Those measures remain necessary, but they address the symptoms rather than the origin of instability. A Health Capital approach would focus upstream, on preserving the reliability of the “human engine” that drives production itself.


That could mean investment in mechanised harvesting tools suited to small landholdings, heat-shielding infrastructure, hydration systems, portable shade technologies and rural health protocols specifically tailored to agricultural labour conditions. Such interventions are often dismissed as welfare expenditures. In reality, they may prove as strategically important as fertiliser subsidies or irrigation projects.


This logic also casts existing welfare schemes in a different light. Programmes such as PM-KISAN are typically framed as income support or political largesse. But viewed through the prism of Health Capital Theory, they resemble maintenance liquidity for the nation’s food infrastructure. Financial buffers allow farmers to avoid cutting back on nutrition, delaying medical treatment or overextending physical labour during periods of stress.


A healthier farmer is not merely a happier citizen. He is also less likely to make costly agronomic errors, mishandle pesticides, neglect crop supervision or abandon cultivation altogether.


If crop prices fail to compensate for the biological recovery of those producing them, the country is effectively extracting value by depleting its own human capital base. Rural migration is often analysed through the lens of income disparities and urban aspiration. Yet physical depletion is equally important. When farming becomes synonymous with bodily attrition and financial precarity, younger generations rationally abandon it. The result is not merely demographic change, but a slow erosion of domestic production capacity.


India’s food-security challenge, then, is not only about producing enough grain. It is about sustaining the biological resilience of those who produce it.


The country has spent decades treating farmers as beneficiaries of policy. It may now need to regard them instead as custodians of critical national infrastructure.


(The writer is a member of Maharashtra Agriculture Price Commission. Views personal.)


Comments

bottom of page