For most of the 20th Century, military advantage was purchased with money that only states could spend. Stealth coatings, satellite constellations, cryptographic systems, and precision-guided munitions were the products of defence budgets, classified laboratories, and export-controlled supply chains. That world is receding. A growing share of the technology that now decides battlefield outcomes—commercial drones, small satellites, foundation models, quantum computing, and advanced semiconductors—is developed first for civilian markets and only later adapted for war. The direction of technology transfer has quietly reversed, and with it, the advantage once enjoyed by states that could out-invest their rivals in military-specific research is eroding in ways that are difficult to see and harder to reverse.

This erosion is not dramatic. It does not resemble the loss of a battle or the collapse of a treaty. It shows up instead as a widening gap between what a nation’s defence establishment assumes it can do and what a determined adversary, or even a non-state actor with a credit card, can now do as well. Understanding which technologies are driving this shift, how the erosion actually happens, why it has accelerated now, and what a state such as India can do about it is the purpose of this paper.

The Technologies to Watch

Seven categories of dual-use technology deserve close and continuing attention:

• Drones and small unmanned systems. The same motors, cameras, radios, batteries, and flight electronics that power hobbyist drones now underpin tactical ISR platforms and loitering munitions. The crossover is strongest at the small end of the market, where mass-produced commercial components give attackers scale and cost advantages that were unimaginable a decade ago.
• Commercial space and satellite communications. Earth-observation constellations built for agriculture and insurance now provide targeting-grade imagery, while broadband constellations built for rural connectivity now carry military command traffic. A synthetic aperture radar satellite produces the same picture whether the customer is a farmer or an intelligence agency.
• Artificial intelligence and foundation models. Computer vision, autonomous navigation, and large language models developed for consumer and enterprise use now underpin drone targeting, signals analysis, and battlefield decision support. Much of this capability is openly published or commercially licensed rather than classified.
• Quantum computing. Still immature as a computing platform, quantum research already threatens the cryptographic backbone of secure military communications. Adversaries can capture encrypted traffic today and decrypt it once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer becomes available—a strategy known as harvest now, decrypt later.
• Advanced semiconductors. The chips that train frontier AI models and the chips that guide precision munitions increasingly come from the same fabrication lines, making export control an exercise in chasing a single, fungible commodity across a globalised supply chain.
• Cyber and offensive intrusion tools. Commercially sold spyware and intrusion frameworks, built and marketed as lawful-intercept or security-testing products, have repeatedly ended up enabling state-level surveillance and sabotage operations well outside their advertised use case.
• Additive manufacturing and precision electronics. Desktop and industrial 3D printers, combined with widely available design files, allow small workshops to produce drone airframes, munition components, and jigs that once required a dedicated defence-industrial supply chain.

How the Erosion Is Actually Happening

The mechanisms are quieter than they sound:

1. Cost democratisation. Platforms that once cost a state tens of millions of dollars to field now have functional civilian equivalents costing a few hundred or a few thousand. Ukraine alone is estimated to have produced close to two million first-person-view drones in 2024—a scale of precision-strike capability that would have been unthinkable for a state defence budget a generation ago, let alone for the non-state and irregular groups now copying the model.
2. Dependency substitution. Militaries increasingly rely on commercial infrastructure they do not own and cannot fully control. When Ukraine’s access to Starlink connectivity and Maxar’s commercial satellite imagery briefly became a point of political leverage in a negotiation over a critical-minerals deal in February 2025, it exposed how thoroughly modern militaries had come to depend on privately owned, foreign-controlled systems for functions once considered sovereign—communications and intelligence.
3. Silent obsolescence of cryptographic advantage. Encrypted government and military communications are already being harvested and stockpiled by adversaries who cannot yet read them but expect to within the next decade. Recent research has cut the estimated quantum resources needed to break RSA-2048 encryption from twenty million qubits to under one million, with credible estimates of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer arriving as early as 2029.
4. Diversion through globalised supply chains. Even where export controls exist on paper, enforcement struggles to keep pace with dual-use goods routed through intermediaries. In December 2025, the United States disrupted a network responsible for diverting more than 160 million dollars’ worth of advanced AI chips to restricted destinations—a single case among a steady stream of similar actions.

Why the Erosion Is Happening

The underlying causes are structural rather than accidental, and they will not resolve themselves:

• The centre of gravity for frontier innovation has moved from defence laboratories to commercial markets. Venture capital and consumer demand now fund research at a scale and speed that defence procurement cycles cannot match. A smartphone camera sensor, a drone flight controller, or a large language model reaches maturity in commercial markets years before an equivalent military-specific programme would clear its requirements process.
• The very nature of dual-use technology resists the tools states have traditionally used to control it. A rocket that launches a weather satellite can launch a reconnaissance satellite; a communications network built for rural broadband can carry military traffic; a robotic arm designed to service a satellite can just as easily interfere with one. Export control regimes built around discrete, identifiable military hardware struggle against technology whose military application is a matter of software configuration rather than physical design.
• Globalisation has distributed manufacturing and expertise across many jurisdictions with uneven enforcement capacity. Well-designed controls in one country can be routed around through a third-country intermediary, a shell subsidiary, or a permissive jurisdiction, as the steady cadence of diversion prosecutions illustrates.
• The states that own the largest share of dual-use infrastructure—commercial satellite operators, cloud providers, and chip manufacturers—are concentrated in a small number of countries. This means access to militarily relevant civilian technology is increasingly conditioned on the political relationship with the country hosting the provider, not merely on the buyer’s ability to pay.

What Can Be Done

None of this argues for retreating from commercial technology, which is neither possible nor desirable. It argues for a deliberate strategy that treats dual-use dependence as a risk to be actively managed rather than a convenience to be passively accepted:

• Build sovereign backup capacity. For functions where foreign commercial dependence has already proven coercible—satellite communications and imagery chief among them—states need at least a minimum viable indigenous or allied alternative that can be activated if commercial access is withdrawn or degraded.
• Accelerate the migration to post-quantum cryptography. Because harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks are already under way, waiting for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer to appear before upgrading encryption guarantees that today’s most sensitive traffic will eventually be exposed. Migration needs to begin now, prioritised by how long the underlying data must stay secret.
• Mandate secure-by-design standards for dual-use platforms. Requiring cybersecurity and anti-spoofing protections to be embedded at the design stage, rather than added afterward, for satellites, drones, and networked sensors closes a class of vulnerability that has already produced a documented rise in signal-spoofing incidents against space assets.
• Coordinate export controls with trusted partners rather than pursuing them unilaterally. Since dual-use goods move through globalised supply chains, controls that are not harmonised across allied jurisdictions simply redirect trade through the weakest link. Recent friction over unpredictable licensing has already strained cooperation between India and the United States on exactly this point.
• Invest in indigenous capacity in the technologies that matter most. Rather than attempting to control or replicate every dual-use technology, states should concentrate scarce capital and talent on sovereign capability in the handful of domains—secure communications, critical sensors, autonomous systems software—where dependence carries the highest strategic cost.
• Treat commercial-sector monitoring as a standing intelligence function. Because the technologies eroding military advantage are being developed in civilian laboratories and start-ups rather than defence establishments, tracking their maturation requires the same systematic attention traditionally reserved for tracking an adversary’s weapons programmes.

Conclusion The erosion of military advantage through dual-use technology is silent precisely because nothing about it looks like a threat when it happens. A start-up ships a better drone camera. A cloud provider trains a more capable model. A satellite operator signs a new broadband customer. Each transaction is commercially unremarkable. Only in aggregate, and usually only in hindsight, does the pattern become visible: capabilities once confined to defence budgets are now available to anyone with market access, and control over the underlying infrastructure has migrated from ministries of defence to corporate boardrooms in a handful of countries. For India, as for every state seeking to preserve a credible military edge, the task ahead is not to resist this shift—which is neither possible nor sensible—but to build the sovereign redundancy, cryptographic resilience, and coordinated export discipline that allow it to draw on the same civilian innovation without becoming hostage to it.

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Regarding the security situation in Jammu and Kashmir, Singh said incidents of stone-pelting are almost nil but 200 local and foreign militants are still active.

Since the beginning of the year, 112 terrorists have been killed by security forces while 156 have been apprehended and two surrendered, he said. In 2021, 132 militants were killed during the corresponding period.

Asked about the use of sticky bombs in J&K’s Udhampur, Singh said, “We have threats from our neighbouring country. The agencies are working on it to know whether it is a sticky bomb or not. But it is a challenge.”

The coordinated detonation of two improvised explosive devices in Udhampur within eight hours on 26the  night and 27th September morning were similar and were triggered by a timer, according to J&K Police.

Elaborating on security cover for VVIPs, Singh said, “CRPF provides security cover to 119 people, out of which 18 are in Z Plus and 27 are in Z category.”

Important protectees include Union home minister Amit Shah, former prime minister Manmohan Singh and Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.

A 1986 batch Indian Police Service officer, Singh took over as CRPF director general in February 2021 and had additional charge of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) for more than a year.

Singh said due to stringent action against left-wing extremism “their activities have been contained to a large extent”. “There is a discernible improvement in the situation. Areas which were earlier considered to be the strongholds of Maoists are now free of their influence and are now dominated by security forces. Bihar is now free of Naxals while they have been pushed back in Jharkhand after intensive operations,” he said.

In 2022, 11 Maoists were killed, 387 arrested and 370 surrendered, according to Singh.

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