Talking at an occasion in New Delhi on Tuesday, former chief of defence employees Normal Anil Chauhan (retired) mentioned India had despatched “a variety of loitering munitions” to Sargodha in Pakistan throughout Operation Sindoor within the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror assault final yr. The weapons had been searching radars across the Pakistan airbase, however as a result of these have a “lifetime”, they’ll “loiter for about two hours”, after which – if they do not discover a goal – they arrive down “someplace”, he mentioned.
On this case, in response to the previous CDS’s account, a loitering weapon got here down close to Kirana Hills, which is believed to accommodate a Pakistan nuclear facility, although India didn’t goal it.
India carried out Operation Sindoor in opposition to 9 terror infrastructure websites in Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK) in Might 2025 after the April 22 Pahalgam terror assault in Kashmir.
Normal Chauhan’s remarks confer with loitering munitions, which have – over the previous decade – change into one of many defining lessons of weapons used within the Russia-Ukraine battle and the West Asia battle.
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The weapon in between
Within the spectrum of weapons, a loitering munition could be someplace between a cruise missile and a reconnaissance drone. Like a missile, it carries a warhead and terminates itself on the goal. Like a drone, it could circle over a goal space for minutes or hours, feeding video again to an operator, and will be redirected, retasked or aborted in flight.
Its defining trait is that it waits for a goal, or for a human operator to substantiate one, after which dives.
Sizes of those weapons vary from a 2kg tube-launched weapon that an infantry part can carry to a 200kg airframe with a variety of greater than 2,000km.
How they work
A typical mission involving the weapon has 4 phases. The munition is launched from a tube, canister, rail or plane. It goes to a goal space, typically tons of of kilometres away, after which loiters, utilizing electro-optical, infrared or anti-radiation seekers to seek for a goal akin to a radar, an artillery piece or an armoured car. Seekers are sensors that decide up visible-light imagery, warmth signatures or radio-frequency emissions from an energetic system.
When a goal is confirmed, both by an operator watching the video feed or by the seeker, the weapon dives and detonates.
Increased-end techniques carry fail-safes, which implies that when no goal is discovered inside the endurance window, the weapons might self-destruct within the air, abort the mission and return, or dive into what could also be thought of a protected impression space. Decrease-end techniques may expend themselves when the gasoline runs out.
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Strengths and weaknesses
Price is essential to using these weapons.
A Russian Shahed-136 kamikaze drone – a loitering munition – prices an estimated $20,000 to $50,000 per unit, in opposition to a number of hundred thousand {dollars} for a contemporary surface-to-air interceptor missile, and hundreds of thousands for a cruise missile, in response to the Centre for Strategic and Worldwide Research (CSIS) in Washington.
Since these weapons are comparatively cheaper, they are often launched in swarms of dozens or tons of, saturating the enemy’s air defences that could be constructed to shoot down a handful of pricy missiles at a time.
One other profit is endurance. Older anti-radiation missiles needed to be fired at a radar that was already emitting indicators. A loitering munition, although, can wait within the air for the radar to change on.
This permits the weapon to substantiate the place of a goal earlier than placing it.
However, loitering munitions are gradual, sometimes flying at 150 to 200 kmph, which makes them susceptible to level air defence, fighter plane and even small-arms fireplace as soon as noticed. Their warheads are additionally small, starting from one to fifty kilogrammes, so they can’t destroy hardened targets akin to fortified underground bunkers.
Optical seekers battle in unhealthy climate too. They usually depend upon information hyperlinks and satellite tv for pc navigation that may be jammed. A 2025 paper by Arie Aviram for the Institute for Nationwide Safety Research in Tel Aviv famous that digital warfare, together with broad GPS jamming, has probably the most efficient counters to Russian loitering munitions in Ukraine.
In keeping with CSIS, Russia scaled up its Shahed launches from about 200 per week in September 2024 to greater than 1,000 per week by March 2025, and has sustained mass nightly assaults since. To counter them, Ukraine has been utilizing domestically produced Sting interceptor drones, which had been credited with destroying greater than 3,000 Russian Shahed and Gerbera munitions in Might this yr, in response to open-source reviews cited by the Institute for Science and Worldwide Safety in Washington.
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From Bekaa Valley to Alabuga
Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) constructed the Harpy, an autonomous anti-radar drone, within the late Eighties, drawing on the teachings of the Israeli air power’s destruction of over a dozen Syrian surface-to-air missile batteries in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in a single afternoon in 1982. The episode remains to be studied because the template for contemporary Suppression of Enemy Air Defences, or SEAD.
The bigger and extra refined Harop, developed within the 2000s, added an electro-optical seeker and a human operator, turning the weapon from a fire-and-forget anti-radar drone right into a general-purpose loitering munition.
The US then miniaturised the idea within the 2010s with the Switchblade household of tube-launched munitions, sufficiently small for a soldier to hold in a rucksack.
The 2020s introduced two shifts. Iran’s Shahed-136, produced in Russia because the Geran-2 on the Alabuga particular financial zone in Tatarstan pushed the vary previous 2,000 km, in response to the US-based defence market analysis agency Teal Group and the Institute for Science and Worldwide Safety.
Thereafter, synthetic intelligence started emigrate into the seekers. Russia’s Lancet-3, made by ZALA Aero, has been reported to make use of onboard AI for goal recognition in its later variants, analysts say.
India’s arsenal
India’s stock has each imports and indigenous munitions.
Operation Sindoor, in response to a March 2026 evaluation by the Centre for Joint Warfare Research (CENJOWS) in New Delhi, noticed fight employment of the IAI Harop and Harpy, the Polish Warmate, the Adani-Elbit SkyStriker inbuilt Bengaluru, the Nagastra-1 developed by Photo voltaic Industries in Nagpur, and the Tata ALS-50.
The Warmate is a small tactical munition made by Poland’s WB Group, the SkyStriker is an electrically powered, canister-launched munition, the Nagastra-1 is an indigenous vertical-takeoff loitering munition with a 60-minute endurance, and the ALS-50 is a Tata Superior Programs vertical-takeoff munition with a 50km vary and a 5kg warhead.
The Indian Military has additionally contracted 450 Nagastra-1R models, an upgraded night-capable variant with improved electronic-warfare resistance, and has awarded a ₹5,000 crore emergency procurement bundle for additional loitering munitions, the CENJOWS evaluation mentioned.
Photo voltaic Industries opened a devoted loitering-munition testing vary in Nagpur in March 2025, with the inauguration by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The Harop is nonetheless the workhorse. First ordered in 2010, it has an endurance of about 9 hours and is designed to mechanically steer itself in direction of radiation signatures of enemy radars.
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Ukraine and Iran, the 2 ongoing wars
The Russia-Ukraine battle, ongoing since 2022, has seen the most important use of this class of weapons up to now.
Russia’s Shahed marketing campaign in opposition to Ukrainian power infrastructure is probably the most sustained use of loitering munitions in any battle to this point, in response to CSIS. The Lancet, a Russian tactical loitering munition, has additionally been one in all Moscow’s best drones in opposition to Western-supplied artillery in Ukraine, destroying the highly effective HIMARS launchers, Caesar and M109 self-propelled weapons, and M777 howitzers, in response to information compiled by open-source analysts and cited by the Teal Group.
This yr has seen loitering ammunition used within the US-Israel and Iran battle in West Asia. The Royal United Companies Institute (RUSI), in a commentary printed in Might, mentioned it was “the primary main inter-state battle through which either side have employed loitering munitions and drones for the reason that begin of hostilities”.
Israel is believed to have used loitering munitions to blind Iranian radars forward of manned strikes. And, on the opposite facet, Iran and its proxies have fired Shahed drone variants, combining them with ballistic and cruise missiles in a saturation sample seen earlier.
The best way ahead
Consultants say the weapon’s counter-drone functionality, particularly for reasonable interceptors, digital warfare and directed-energy weapons, is a decisive funding for any trendy army. RUSI had warned in its commentary that “allied air defences stay insufficient” in opposition to loitering-munition saturation.
The second debate is over how a lot authority a machine ought to be given to choose and strike targets by itself. Discussions on the United Nations Group of Governmental Consultants on Deadly Autonomous Weapons Programs haven’t produced binding guidelines, even because the Shahed, Lancet and Harop households are already transferring additional alongside the autonomy curve with every technology.
