Indian Army to Deploy Swarm Drones Along Border With China to Boost Offensive Capacity

The Indian Army claims China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has increased its offensive power near the loosely demarcated Line of Actual Control (LAC). India's Army Chief, General Manoj Mukund Naravane, has vowed to face China's infrastructure build-up and deployment with equal power.

With a "substantial force deployed" bordering China, India's army has planned to use swarm drones to make up for what ground-based surveillance is unable to detect at heights greater than 4,500 metres above sea level.

The army said that swarm drones would be a force multiplier as it provides capabilities to forces beyond the visual line of sight.

"Swarm drones can be effectively employed to detect enemy ground activities and target enemy ground forces, including troops, vehicles, and command and control links," the army said when explaining its move.

The swarm drones are a group of drones operating in conjunction with the ground forces, which would provide an aerial manoeuvre capability during offensive and defensive tasks.

The army's swarm drones can hit a target or detect enemy movement up to 50km away. The army said the endurance capacity of these drones would not be not less than two hours in the sub-zero temperature of the Himalayas.

The army document said that deployment will provide inherent advantages of affordability, flexible employability, redundancy, precision, and lower the risk of human causalities during conventional and non-conventional operations.

The Indian army has been turning to variety of new air defense systems to counter aerial threats, including swarm drones coming out of China across the LAC.

After media reports that several drones had been used at the Malan airbase in China's Xinjiang region, India's armed forces added swarm drone tech to its combat potential in December 2020.

The decades-old border dispute between India and China escalated into a violent face-off in June last year in which 20 Indian soldiers and four People's Liberation Army troops were killed in the western sector of the LAC. The two armies have deployed more than 500,000 additional troops, sophisticated weapons, and missiles in the Ladakh region as talks at the military commanders' level have thus far ended without results.