Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan Wednesday said that Pakistan’s use of unarmed drones and loiter munition during Operation Sindoor failed to inflict any damage to the Indian military and civilian infrastructure.
Addressing a workshop on UAV & C-UAS indigenisation in Delhi, Chauham said: “Drones are proof of reality, recent conflicts demonstrate how they can shift tactical balance disproportionately.”
“The need of the hour is to develop capabilities to harness this lower airspace… During Operation Sindoor, on 10th of May, Pakistan had used unarmed drones and loiter munitions, none of which could actually inflict any damage to Indian military or civilian infrastructure. Most of them were neutralised through combination of kinetic and non-kinetic means, and some of them could be in fact recovered in almost intact conditions. We need to focus on this to combat in future in lower airspace,” Chauhan said.
The workshop-cum-exhibition titled, “Indigenisation of critical components currently being imported from foreign OEMs in the areas of UAV & C-UAS,” organised by the Headquarters Integrated Defence Staff and the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies, was held in Delhi on Wednesday.
The Indian Armed Forces carried out Operation Sindoor in the early hours of May 7, “to deliver justice to the victims of the Pahalgam terror attack and their families” that took place on April 22 this year. In just 25 minutes, Indian armed forces, using multiple long-range high-precision strike weapons, targeted and destroyed nine terror sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir including the headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.
India had then said that Pakistan launched a failed drone and missile attack at a number of military targets in northern and western India.
During the workshop, Chauhan also spoke about the evolution of weapons and war fighting equipment built by India over the years. He said, “Throughout history if you look, we have witnessed evolutionary as well as revolutionary changes in warfare that have transformed the kind of battles we fight… So evolutionary changes have made weapons and war fighting equipment smaller, faster, lighter, more efficient, more affordable. Long back we had rifles which were much weighty, they were large length. We have now shorter, lighter rifles, longer ranges, they are much more cheaper. We can fight at night. Similarly for tanks and aircrafts, we made them affordable, they are lighter, yet they manoeuvre very fast and they afford more protection.”
