South Asia Investor Review

How is increasing use of technology transforming modern warfare? What will be the impact of widespread deployment of cyberweapons like Stuxnet worm used by the United Sates to cause extensively physical destruction of Iran's nuclear centrifuges? Will such weapons be used to destroy critical infrastructure of telecommunications, water and power and the economy of the enemy? Will the boots on the ground be replaced by bots on the ground, in the air and on the water in the future? How autonomous will such bots be? How will the armed drones distinguish between combatants and non-combatants in war? Will bio-hacking lead to new extremely lethal biological agents developed and deployed by terrorists and rogue individuals and nations? How is the information technology changing the battlefield awareness with more effective command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I)? Are India and Pakistan modernizing their militaries for technology-based warfare? W...

Drone is now a household word in Pakistan. It outrages many Pakistanis when used by Americans to hunt militants and launch missiles in FATA. At the same time, it inspires a young generation of students to study  artificial intelligence at 60 engineering colleges and universities in Pakistan . It has given rise to robotics competitions at engineering universities like National University of Science and Technology (NUST) and my alma mater NED Engineering University . Continuing reports of new civilian uses of drone technology are adding to the growing interest of Pakistanis in robotics. Pakistani UAV Shahpar at IDS 2012 Show Last week,  two indigenously built drones, named Burraq and Shahpar , were inducted into Pakistan Army and Air Force to deal with both internal and external threats. A press release by the military's Inter Service Public Relations (ISPR) announced that Pakistan had inducted its first fleet of “indigenously developed Strategic Unmanned Aerial Vehicles...