India urgently buys 450 home-built kamikaze drones
The Indian Army has concluded an agreement with a local company for the purchase of 450 kamikaze drones. Solar Industries Nagpur beat out Polish and Israeli firms to win the 2.12 billion Indian rupee ($25 million) contract to supply the Nagastra-1 kamikaze drones. The Poles competed with their new Warmate system.
“ Economic Explosives Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of the company, has signed a contract for the supply of loitering munitions with the Ministry of Defence ,” PSU Watch said, citing a regulatory document from Solar Industries.
The Army signed the deal under emergency provisions, which require delivery within a year. The use of the emergency clause is curious: does India fear an external attack? From whom?
According to the Economic Times, the Nagastra is an electrically powered drone equipped with a camera with day and night vision for surveillance missions and a fragmentation warhead to neutralize "soft" i.e. unarmored targets. The projectile has an operator-guided range of 15 kilometers and a self-driving range of 30 kilometers. In the case of using the system with GPS guidance it can hit a target with an accuracy of 2 meters. The autonomy of the vehicle is 60 minutes. The performances appear similar to those of the Switchblade used by the US military, which however has characteristics suitable for electronic warfare that we do not know if the Indian model possesses.
If a mission is interrupted, the platform can be recalled and landed with a recovery mechanism with parachute to be reused and, above all, not to fall uncontrolled in an area where civilians are operating.
The "Lotering drone", the kamikaze drones, are increasingly becoming a standard equipment of modern armies because they allow to combine reconnaissance and attack capabilities available even to small groups of operators. The war in Ukraine showed the usefulness of these systems on the battlefield.
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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/lindia-acquista-con-urgenza-450-droni-kamikaze-costruiti-localmente/ on Thu, 27 Apr 2023 10:00:33 +0000.