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Indigenous unmanned systems will be showcased for the Indian Air Force at the Pokhran Firing Range, Rajasthan, in September 2026.
The demonstration will cover long-range UAVs, swarm drones, expendable surveillance drones, logistics drones and one-way attack drones.
Pokhran lies about 270 kilometres from the Pakistan border and is a long-standing site for weapons trials.
The IAF completed a week-long helicopter exercise, Rotor Clapp-III, at Pokhran in August 2026 focused on Counter-UAS capability.
The Indian Army had conducted field trials of unmanned platforms and electronic warfare solutions at Pokhran on May 31, 2025.
Military unmanned systems are not one technology but several, distinguished by what happens to the platform. A surveillance UAV flies out, gathers intelligence and returns. An expendable surveillance drone is cheap enough that losing it is part of the plan. A logistics drone carries cargo forward or evacuates casualties. A loitering munition — also called a one-way attack drone — circles over an area waiting for a target and destroys itself in the strike, which is why it is not recoverable. Swarm drone technology adds a different dimension: many small platforms operating in coordination, designed to overwhelm defences that can engage only a few targets at a time.
Simple Analogy: The difference between a scout who comes back, a courier who delivers, and a one-way messenger who does not return.
Counter-UAS covers the detection, tracking and neutralisation of hostile drones. It has become as important as the drones themselves, because cheap unmanned platforms have made aerial threats affordable to adversaries who could never field aircraft. The difficulty is that small drones are hard to detect on radar designed for aircraft, and expensive missiles are a poor economic answer to a cheap drone. That asymmetry — a low-cost attacker against a high-cost defence — is the core problem Counter-UAS work tries to solve, and it is why the IAF's Rotor Clapp-III exercise focused on it.
Simple Analogy: Swatting mosquitoes with a rifle works, but not at the price of the ammunition.
GS Paper III > Security > Defence Technology and Indigenisation
General Awareness > Defence and Current Affairs
General Awareness > Defence
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle — an aircraft operated without an onboard pilot.
A drone that circles over an area awaiting a target and destroys itself in the strike; also called a one-way attack drone.
Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems — the detection, tracking and neutralisation of hostile drones.
Multiple small drones operating in coordination to overwhelm defences that can engage only limited numbers of targets.