Indian Army Chief General Manoj Pande on Thursday took a dig at Western countries, stressing that access to modern defense technologies was not just limited to rich nations.
Pande, who was speaking at a defense conclave organized in New Delhi, also underlined that rules of conventional warfare have changed with the emergence of low-cost weapons platforms such as drones and underwater UAVs.
"While conventional warfare has changed, emerging technologies today are not central only to rich nations and disruptive technology is transforming warfare. The asymmetry in conflict has increased the risk of a fallout with an increased propensity of risk-taking behavior to initiate a low-threshold armed conflict," he noted.
Perhaps, the best example of low-cost technology overpowering the so-called high-end defense products was the success of the Palestinian military movement Hamas' usage of paragliders and small armed drones during its attack on Israel on October 7 last year.
The surprise Hamas attack made the technology-laden surveillance system of Israel ineffective and also overpowered the Iron Dome system with a barrage of rockets that cost a fraction of what the Jewish state's highly publicized air defense system cost to produce.
In this context, India has made great strides in developing low-cost indigenous defense technology with its tri-service chiefs urging the country's military equipment manufacturers to come up with weapons for the future in the last 10 years.
Recently, India unveiled its first domestically produced medium altitude long endurance (MALE) drone named Drishti 10 'Starliner' in Hyderabad.