The President has rightly indicated that the nature of warfare has changed.War is now not about destroying buildings, spoiling the land or killing soldiers and civilians but also valuable resources of skills, information, knowledge, and culture. The DRDO has a task cut out for itself. It must seek to identify those areas of low intensity conflict for which are defense arms are inadequate. I can only cite one instance: Terrorist profiling: It has become important to develop kits that will enable the forces to profile the potential terrorists and wean them away from this path. The management of captured terrorists is also an area that needs attention. Another area is to develop means to unveil the terrorist networks infiltrating the open economy. Materials for the safety of our soldiers fighting insurgents, rapid identification of missing personnel in battle areas. Powerful computing equipment that will do a large amount of information mining, etc. I believe these are frontier areas and tend to be very country specific. A huge amount of foreign exchange saving will itself be a justification to remain competitive as far as DRDO is concerned. It is said that China has embarked on building strong backward linkages so that new development can be supported on the back of the commercial industry. The DRDO with the laboratories of the CSIR could catalyse these backward linkages ultimately supporting the defence effort.
