The debut of attack drones in the conflict between India and Pakistan injects a new and worrying style of warfare between the two nuclear armed powers, experts said.
But it was also inevitable, given the proliferation of armed drones in combat worldwide.
Both India and Pakistan have been developing their respective drone-building industries in recent years, and both import drones from foreign allies. Most of what is being deployed now amid the latest conflict, after an attack in the disputed Kashmir region, appear to be one-way Kamikaze drones that became ubiquitous in the war in Ukraine and will all but certainly be a standard weapon on battlefields going forward.
India has said it identified Turkish drones used by Pakistan; Pakistan said it identified Israeli drones used by India. Neither of those reports could be independently verified.
Neither country appears to be using any drones capable of carrying nuclear warheads, said James Patton Rogers, a drone warfare expert at Cornell University. And while he called the conflict “incredibly worrying,” he also noted that drones generally are used as the lowest possible escalatory step in a conflict, usually to pressure and probe an opponent’s air defenses.
“I’m cautiously optimistic by the fact that the first response is a limited number of drones used,” Mr. Rogers, the executive director of Cornell’s Brooks Tech Policy Institute, said in an interview on Friday. “They show that, politically and militarily, they can inflict damage when and where they want to, and both sides have been certainly attempting to do that.”
At least 118 countries currently have drones in their arsenals, up from about 60 nations in 2010 that either had or were considering them, Mr. Rogers said.
Pakistan likely has a limited number of drones, he said, although it has developed several attack drones and also so-called loitering munitions, like the kamikaze drones. It also imports armed drones from China and, as recently as last year, from Turkey, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
India’s drone industry is far more sophisticated, Mr. Rogers said, and includes ground, air and sea drones. He said it also buys them from Israel.
He said neither side had likely launched more than 100 drones against the other, and warned that misinformation could exaggerate the size of reported attacks.
Shuja Nawaz, the former director at The Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, said both India and Pakistan appeared to be using the drones to scout the positions of each other’s weapons systems and test their response times. He said both were refusing to recognize international rules governing sovereign airspace.
“There will be frustration in their ability to do the kind of damage that they want on the other side, through the use of unmanned aerial weapon systems,” Mr. Nawaz said. “And then the next stage may well be trying to resort to aircraft and missiles. And since both have nuclear weapons, God knows what else.”
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