As India pushes drones down to the squad level while Pakistan races to build its own jamming grid along the frontier, the Su-30MKI fleet lines up for AWACS-killing R-37M missiles, Japan's F-2s land on Indian soil for the first time, and India and China hold their first-ever Corps Commander talks in the Eastern Sector. Firstpost tracks the week's key defence developments.
The Army is done treating drones as an add-on. Operation Sindoor made that call for Delhi: unmanned systems did as much of the real work as fighter jets and missiles, and the force structure is now catching up fast.
Down at the squad level:
Nearly 385 infantry battalions are getting their own Ashni platoons, each carrying ten drones, four for surveillance and six kamikaze loitering munitions. A frontline company commander doesn't need to route a strike request up the chain anymore. He can see the target and hit it from his own position. The armoured corps has its equivalent now too. Shaurya Squadrons, tested first during Exercise Amogh Jwala near Jhansi, slot drone crews directly into tank regiments running T-90s and Arjuns, giving armour its own eyes and strike option instead of waiting on higher formations. Artillery has Divyastra batteries doing the same job for gun positions. Light infantry gets Bhairav commando battalions built for fast, drone-integrated operations. None of these exist in isolation. They're all pieces of the same doctrine: every arm gets its own organic drone layer instead of borrowing one.
The newly cleared Akash Tarang system adds another counter-drone layer to that shield, alongside upgraded L-70 guns. All of it now sits under Mission Sudarshan Chakra, the PM's 2035 target for a layered, AI-enabled national air defence net meant to cover everything from a single military base to entire cities. Pakistan is patching its own gaps too;
Islamabad has inducted Turkish Korkut 35mm guns under the Mecca Pact, layering them with Sahin counter-UAS turrets and Chinese HQ-17AE missiles, a direct response to the BrahMos strikes that exposed its air bases during Sindoor. It's Rawalpindi trying to buy its way past a vulnerability that imports alone won't fix.
Rawalpindi is tuning its own radios:
Satellite imagery this month shows Pakistan quietly expanding its electronic warfare footprint right along the frontier, a suspected ESM node at Dadyal in PoK, just 33 km from the LoC, a
nd ELINT infrastructure coming up near hardened shelters at PAF Base Sindhri in Sindh. Read together, that's Islamabad trying to build a networked EW grid that watches Indian troop movement on one flank and Indian Air Force activity on the other. This matters directly for the drone fight. Every loitering munition, every Ashni platoon quadcopter, every Akashteer sensor link runs on GPS and radio comms that a serious ESM network is built to jam, spoof or simply listen in on. A denser Pakistani EW picture means India's drone swarms need to fly and fight through more contested electromagnetic space than they did during Sindoor, not less. It's also the reason DRDO's own EW suites on the Su-30MKI and Rafale, and ground-based jamming systems along the LoC and LAC, matter as much as the drones themselves.
Army's AASHVAST Labs to Hunt Hidden Chips and Backdoors in Defence Electronics
The Army has opened AASHVAST Labs in Delhi, inaugurated by Army Chief General Dhiraj Seth, to scan military drones and electronics for hidden vulnerabilities in hardware, software and firmware. The labs check for unauthorised remote access tools, embedded keys, unapproved software updates and weak GPS-security controls, with particular attention to Chinese origin components that may have made their way into sensitive systems.
The bigger picture:
A drone can look completely genuine on a physical inspection and still carry a hidden backdoor buried in its firmware, something that only shows up under exactly this kind of deep electronic audit. As India buys and builds more of its own unmanned systems at a rapid pace, verifying the actual supply chain behind every chip and line of code becomes as important as the platform's flight performance. This is India applying the same self reliance logic it has used for missiles and radars to the invisible layer underneath them, treating electronic trust as a frontline defence issue rather than an afterthought.