DRDO’s Centre for High Energy Systems and Sciences (CHESS) issued an RFI, in April, for the operation and field maintenance & repair for a fixed wing UAV to be used for the demonstration of Directed Energy Weapon (DEW) systems.
Fixed Wing Unmanned Aerial Systems (FWUAS) will be used for various field experiments and demonstration of capabilities of DEW systems, being developed by CHESS. It is proposed to award a job work for operation and field maintenance and repair of the Fixed wing Unmanned Aerial System (FWUAS) during such experimentations and demonstrations of the DEW systems.
DRDO has identified DEWs as among key thrust technologies for the next decade. The effort is to develop and transform superior technology into affordable and critical military capabilities. Perhaps the greatest technical challenge for the DRDO would come in the form of finding reliable and affordable system integration meeting military platform requirements. Presently, India’s DEWs system are in the research and development stage, and the earliest timeline for them to move out from the laboratory to the battlefield for operational testing and subsequent deployment, going by current trends, should likely be before this decade is out.
