Drones Complicate the Fight Between India and Pakistan

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.

India’s defense officials said Pakistan’s military had attempted aerial intrusions Thursday night in 36 locations with “300 to 400” drones to test India’s air defense system. Pakistan, for its part, claimed to have shot down over 70 Indian drones since the escalations began. Neither account could be independently confirmed.

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.”