Ukraine's drone revolution: Ukraine's drone war forces rapid changes in weapon design

From the missile domain, let's now shift focus to drones, because you really can't keep drones out of any defense-related development when it comes to 2026. The war in Ukraine, it is forcing a rethink of how military weapons are designed, how they're tested, and how they're deployed. Drones are being modified on the battlefield, while countermeasures are evolving just as quickly. For defense manufacturers now, it raises a critical challenge. Can a weapon developed over several years keep up with a battlefield that is changing in weeks? A constant race between weapon development and battlefield adaptation is taking place. Electronic jamming has forced changes in drone communication and guidance systems. Let me come to fiber optic drones here. They've emerged as one way to bypass radio frequency jamming, which is affecting drones on the battlefield actively. And software upgrades, new sensors, modified hardware, they are increasingly important to keeping weapons effective. But a weapon that performs well during controlled tests, it may face very different conditions on the actual battlefield on the front line. Often, it's the soldier operating the weapon who identifies what the engineer may have missed in the tests or in the laboratory. Weapons can take years to develop, test, they can take years to induct as well. But in drone warfare, some technologies can become outdated in a matter of months. For India, the challenge is to develop systems that can be upgraded as quickly as the challenges are emerging without compromising reliability or its battlefield performance. Ukraine's experience is changing the way militaries think about weapon development. Now, on that note, let's take this discussion to our next Pathfinder to discuss what happens when weapons move from the drawing board to real world field trials. When drones become weapons, the battlefield needs a new kind of shield, and that is the challenge Amardeep Singh has taken on. An IIT Bombay alumnus and aerospace engineer, he is the founder of defense tech startup Armory, a company focused on developing indigenous counter-drone technology. With Armory, his focus is on building homegrown systems that can help India respond to this new generation of aerial threats and strengthen the country's indigenous defense capabilities. And on beyond, we have Amardeep Singh, founder of Armory. Amardeep, always a pleasure speaking with you. What did soldiers in field trials tell you that engineers perhaps missed in the laboratory? Over to you. I think when you are building something sitting in a lab, you are very, very engineering focus. And you think that, you know, the field is going to be like this. You can only imagine so many things. But when you go out on the field, it is very different. Like the situations are very different. The environment is different. Like the terrain is very different. so we we try to actually do a lot of trials on the field we don't we i mean we do simulations but we want to spend a lot of time on the field and we have spent a lot of time with the defense forces including the people who are buying like who are creating specifications so working with them uh understanding their requirement and educating them also you know what is doable what is not what we should aim for as well as uh spending time with the soldiers on the field like what are the problems that they have on the field a lot of times we we have an imagination that you know the soldier is going to use it this way but uh later you realize that you know he's not just carrying your equipment he's carrying a few lot of other things also he has to carry a gun also he has to carry his ration also now with that how do you put your system in the mix because he's he has already certain responsibilities that he's doing now along with that this is an additional thing and uh the time to reaction uh is you know short on the field uh you know you know when you're in the lab you have all the time to you know test and trial but when you are under threat from a drone um you don't have really much time to react to it so those are the kind of things so most of the times we are looking for what problems they face and then we propose solutions we don't look for solutions from them we look for problems from their side how can we make their life easier so the tech overall you know the main tech can still be the same but how can we make it easier for him to use it on the field in a threat scenario is something that we we keep learning from and every time we have gone to trials we have made our system better like that is for us that is the key to build things faster and better every trial just learn a lot from there come back and you know iterate over it and then go back again that has been our philosophy uh right from my first at IdeaForge as well as here that do a lot of iterations with them and when we take the conversation over to Ukraine drone designs then the countermeasures to them they change within weeks does that mean a weapon can no longer really be a finished product i think this is where the software defined hardware is very very important uh so essentially if you think of let's say our systems which is a detection and and uh you know a software solution uh there is a receiver part of it which can receive radio frequency signals and then there is a transmitter part of it but whatever happens between these two things is all software so be it about uh better detection algorithms which can detect drones at larger ranges or different kind of drones or new drones so we can always update that uh the same is true for the jamming part of it we keep on uh building better waveforms which can jam uh jam the drones so a lot of innovation on this software is something that can be loaded on the software on the hardware and this is where that is the only way we can you know keep up with the threat evolving uh very very frequently so in in today's date if uh hardware is not software defined it's going to be very difficult to keep up like it will be uh pretty much useless within six months if it is not upgraded software wise Thank you.