On the evening of May 8–9, a swarm of over 500 drones intruded into Indian airspace, from Leh to Sir Creek, all from Pakistan. In contrast to the heavy-duty military UAVs of classic warfare, they were largely commercially made drones, small, inexpensive, and with some loaded with pellets or simple payloads. In power, they did not lie in weaponry but in disruption.
What happened to the drone swarm of Pakistan was not merely a technology trick, but it was double-layered as a strategic message, and with a hybrid motive. It committed India to an expensive reaction, strained the attitude and tempo of its air defences, and aimed to influence the psychological and strategic calculation of India. The aim was simple: cause confusion, triangulate our defences, and induce a probable disproportionate deployment of resources, while not crossing the line of visible conflict.
India must recognise this for what it is: a textbook grey-zone tactic intended for strategic attrition. The best response is not increased bombardment, but misdirection and deception.
Misdirection through a measured drone swarm strategy is what Pakistan has advanced as a notion of “precision by volume.” They have a plan, and it consists of multi-layered objectives that are required to break down India’s defence posture. Pakistan would employ low-cost drones to force India to consume their expensive missile systems; For India to drive her air defence budget and operational readiness into a whole new tax bracket. Every Indian reaction to these careless drones is an opportunity for air defence mapping and intelligence for Pakistan: you provide the operator with valuable situational support of your radar locations, jamming frequencies, and defence reaction.
In addition, we can’t ignore the psychological effect of drone incursions. Targeting civilian areas, either with unmanned drones or deploying harmless, playful drones, provides an opportunity for fear and disruption while creating political anxiety through what are essentially psychological operations. And the use of civilian airspace, as a cover during drone swarms, adds ambiguity to India’s response possibilities.
Additionally, the synchronisation of drone activity with cross-border shelling links physical attacks with electronic warfare, creating a hybrid threat. Pakistan’s objective is not a singular dramatic strike but a gradual erosion of India’s readiness, morale, and strategic clarity. In response, India must embrace deception and cognitive warfare, transforming each drone intrusion into an intelligence opportunity and redefining the rules of engagement.
Actually, India is sitting on a game-changer when it comes to drone warfare, and it all boils down to getting stealthy. If India plays its cards right, every time a drone peeks across the border, it could end up entering straight into a well-laid trap. We’re talking old-school trickery, but with high-tech toys.
Learning from the Maskirovka masters, the Soviets, who added a few pages to the art of battlefield deception. India could just drop some mock radar returns, perhaps some low-grade artillery decoys close to the border, something that looks alarming enough for the Pakistani drones to take cognisance of. Those drones will squander time and perhaps even rounds, striking shadows rather than actual targets. And the real defences? Loiter in plain sight, ready to hit the targets, turning the entire battlefield into a grand scam for those drones to walk into an ambush.
Mimicking Operation Bodyguard from WWII, India could create a simulated military buildup in Rajasthan, bolstered by the deepfake conversations and open-source indicators, which would entangle Pakistan’s (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) ISR assets. While everyone’s focus is on Rajasthan, the real operations would occur elsewhere, e.g. Kashmir. With this strategic flooding, India is able to control the initiative and tempo of the initiative. By spoofing telemetry devices and heavily seeding false information into crashed drones, India can mislead Pakistani tactical intelligence in a way similar to the British Double Cross strategy in WWII. The false therapeutic reports of mission success, with the moved co-ordinate intelligence, lead the enemy analysis to waste their time in Islamabad in potential future operations based on false assumptions, creating a loop of strategic mistakes and further degrading the utility of Pakistan’s drone war.
Inspired by Vietnamese tunnel warfare, India can build “honeypot” radar sites designed to lure Pakistani drones. These decoy installations, equipped with hidden RF jammers and directed-energy weapons, attract swarms to seemingly high-value targets. Once engaged, the drones are neutralised en masse, turning deception into defence and preserving real assets while inflicting disproportionate losses on the adversary.
Adapting Desert Storm’s radar baiting, India can deploy slow UAVS near suspected drone corridors to provoke an enemy response. Once targeted, signal triangulation reveals Pakistani drone control hubs. This converts passive defence into active intelligence gathering, providing India with precise, deep-strike targets that disrupt command nodes and deter future incursions at their source.
Inspired by Hannibal’s feigned retreats, India can lure Pakistani drones through seemingly undefended zones like Sir Creek. As they penetrate deeper, pre-positioned loitering munitions or jamming nets trap and neutralise them. The result: drones are denied return paths and data transmission, turning each intrusion into a strategic dead end rather than an intelligence success.
If India actually wants to send a message, it could simply borrow a page from Israel’s “Iron Sting” playbook. Imagine this: precision loitering drones flying over and pounding Pakistani ISR towers or artillery whenever there is a drone incursion. No more sitting on defence, just strike right back, quickly and hard. Suddenly, sending a drone isn’t such an easy option for Pakistan. It’s really a large, sweaty, high-stakes gamble. Every time it becomes kind of a crapshoot for them, and truthfully, this sort of pressure could seriously destroy their appetite for these challenges.
India has to move from reactive air defence to cognitive dominance, that is, re-purposing drone incursions into intelligent assets. Rather than burning resources on every incursion, India must absorb, track, and convert a UAV threat into an advantage through strategy. It is sufficient to allow low-risk drone incursions through and to allow us to map enemy control nodes. Loitering munitions, such as the IAI Harop or SkyStriker, provide for an efficient swarm-on-swarm defeat of a threat. There is also telemetry and design data available from battered drones for reverse-engineering capabilities. This mitigated threat paradigm allows high-end resources to be saved and provides Pakistan with another tactical loss with each incursion. The goal is simple: convert each drone encounter from a burden of reactive defence to a pre-emptive opportunity that is data-driven.
The battlefield is now not physical terrain but psychological perception. And drones are the most versatile weapon deployed in grey-zone warfare, not as weapons of destruction… but as weapons of disruption. Pakistan’s drone intrusions aim to provoke, distract, and exhaust. But the real power of these operations is in how India perceives it. If India can reinterpret these incursions as strategic opportunities rather than threats, the cognitive advantage reverts back to India. India has the technological development and historic experiences to switch the paradigm. All we need now is a doctrinal change that puts deception, misdirection, and cognitive warfare at the centre of conceptualising and planning for its defence. Grey-zone conflict choices, opportunities and actions are driven not exclusively by firepower but by the ability to foresee the future before your adversary.
By weaponising perception, India can turn Pakistan’s swarm tactics against them, exposing command networks, baiting assets, and flipping the cost-benefit equation. Victory will belong to the side that sees beyond the drone to the mind behind it. With strategy over panic, India can make every shadow in the sky reflect its own calculated advantage.
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