Killer Drones and Autonomous Weapons: Defense Technology Implications for South Asia

The Machine That Chooses

In May 2025, for the first time in South Asian military history, drones were used as kinetic strike platforms in an active conflict between two nuclear-armed states. India launched 30 Israeli-made kamikaze drones toward Pakistan on the night of May 7–8, aimed at suppressing Pakistan's air defense systems and identifying the locations of camouflaged early warning radars and surface-to-air missile batteries. The four-day confrontation that followed did not escalate into all-out war. But it crossed a threshold that military analysts had been warning about for years: autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons had arrived in one of the world's most volatile nuclear theatres, and the rules governing their use had not.

Bangladesh was watching from next door. And it had already begun acting.

From Remote Control to Autonomy: The Technology Curve

Understanding what is actually at stake requires separating the terminology. Most military drones currently deployed are not autonomous in the strict sense. Most drones are still dependent on human operators that command them remotely. Some drones are semi-autonomous, meaning they can perform some or all of their missions without human control, but an operator remains "in the loop." Fully autonomous systems operate without any human input. The distinction matters enormously — ethically, legally, and strategically.

What is shifting rapidly is the degree to which AI is being integrated into drone operations. Militaries have used "partial autonomy" by incorporating AI capabilities to navigate, identify targets, and fuse large amounts of drone data without human input. The human is still nominally in control, but the speed and volume of AI-processed decisions is beginning to outpace meaningful human oversight. In a drone swarm scenario — dozens or hundreds of coordinated platforms moving faster than any human operator can track — the question of who is actually making the lethal decision becomes very difficult to answer.

The scale of the shift is staggering. The number of companies manufacturing drones exploded from six in 2022 to over 200 by 2024. In Ukraine alone, more than 2.5 million drones are expected to be produced in 2025. Drone attacks by Ukrainian forces have increased by more than 127 times since the early days of the conflict with Russia. Ukraine has become a laboratory for autonomous warfare in real time, and every military in Asia is taking notes.

Lethal Autonomous Weapons: What International Law Has — and Hasn't — Settled

On December 2, 2024, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution on lethal autonomous weapons systems with 166 votes in favor and only three opposed — Russia, North Korea, and Belarus. That near-consensus on the need for some kind of governance framework was significant. But a resolution is not a treaty, and the diplomatic process toward binding rules for so-called "killer robots" has moved with extraordinary slowness relative to the technology's development pace.

The core ethical problem is accountability. Autonomous weapons systems would operate without meaningful human control, delegating life-and-death decisions to machines, raising serious ethical, moral, legal, and accountability concerns. Under existing international humanitarian law, a human being must be responsible for a targeting decision. When the algorithm makes the call, the chain of responsibility dissolves. There is no one to court-martial if a system misidentifies a civilian as a combatant and fires. There is no one to hold accountable when a machine-learning model trained on historical conflict data develops biases that systematically misclassify certain populations as threats.

The United States has opted not for prohibition but for governance, grounding its approach in a framework of ethical AI principles that emphasise responsible, traceable, and auditable systems — while preserving the option to use autonomous capabilities. This reflects a larger global divide: some believe pre-emptive prohibition will protect against future atrocities, while others think adaptive regulation is the best way to maintain both military advantage and moral integrity. That divide maps almost perfectly onto the geopolitical fracture lines between democratic and authoritarian states.

The May 2025 Moment: South Asia's New Reality

The military confrontation between India and Pakistan in May 2025 demonstrated that in South Asia, the employment of UAVs in active combat roles has become a reality. The concern is significant since India and Pakistan are two nuclear-armed, territorially contiguous arch-rival states. This configuration renders escalation pathways volatile, compressing the dynamics of conflict escalation.

Drone warfare in a nuclear theatre introduces a category of risk that conventional military planning has not fully grappled with. A drone strike on an adversary's radar installation or command-and-control node could be interpreted — or deliberately framed — as the opening move in a broader offensive, triggering nuclear signalling or worse. Although the systems used in the India-Pakistan confrontation were still semi-autonomous, these platforms may autonomously alter their behaviour through communication with one another, and in nuclear theatres, their use is potentially catastrophic. The problem is not just miscalculation by human leaders; it is the possibility of machine-driven escalation dynamics that outrun human decision cycles entirely.

Bangladesh's Drone Build-Up: The Strategic Picture

Against this backdrop, Bangladesh has been making a series of decisions that will define its military posture for the next generation. The country began operating Turkish Bayraktar TB2 UCAVs in 2023 — the same drone that rewrote the rules of engagement in Libya, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Ukraine. In April 2025, a five-member Bangladesh Army delegation led by Major General I K M Mostasehnul Baqi travelled to China to discuss technology transfers that would enable Bangladesh to domestically develop advanced UAVs and anti-UAV systems, including those utilizing artificial intelligence.

The most consequential development, however, was a government-to-government agreement with China. Bangladesh signed a landmark agreement with China for the local production of military aerial drones with full technology transfer, establishing a domestic UAV manufacturing and assembly facility in Dhaka, granting Bangladesh the ability to assemble, maintain, and eventually manufacture multiple classes of UAVs including MALE drones, VTOL tactical UAVs, and multi-role platforms tailored for surveillance, reconnaissance, and potential strike missions.

Simultaneously, a landmark defense deal with Turkey is in final stages, an agreement that will see Dhaka acquire the SIPER long-range air defense system and potentially co-produce Turkish combat drones. For Bangladesh, this is about buying sovereignty. The drone facility signals a desire to escape the trap of being a perpetual arms customer, investing in its own human capital and industrial base.

The geopolitical geometry of these decisions is not lost on Bangladesh's neighbours. India has adopted a contradictory approach: resisting Chinese military sales to Bangladesh but failing to present itself as a credible alternative. The Wing Loong II's reported operational radius — approaching 4,000 kilometres under optimal conditions — fuels speculation about intelligence collection reach, even if Bangladesh's declared doctrine remains defensive. New Delhi's concerns are heightened by the fact that Bangladesh's Bayraktar TB2s were reportedly deployed along the India-Bangladesh border in Meghalaya sector in late 2024, conducting surveillance sorties of unusual duration.

Forces Goal 2030: Doctrine Meeting Technology

Forces Goal 2030 is Bangladesh's military modernization program that commenced in 2009 and was updated after the 2024 July Revolution. It is designed to transform the Bangladesh Armed Forces into a technologically advanced, multi-domain force capable of conducting both defensive and offensive operations, with the modernization program revised and expedited after the ouster of Sheikh Hasina.

Analysts at think tanks in Dhaka have been pointing out for some time that Bangladesh's drone acquisitions are outpacing its doctrine. Although strides have been made with the acceptance of an Air Defense Artillery Regiment and an Air Aviation Regiment, drone operation in Bangladesh remains minimal, and the Army is far from harnessing drones as a tool for modern warfare. Drone operations are currently conducted within the Air Aviation Regiment which has broader functions with manned planes — an integration that is very limiting to the potential of drone operations, as they require specialized training, tactical acumen, and dedicated resources.

The argument for a dedicated drone regiment — one with its own command structure, training pipeline, and operational doctrine — has gained urgency as the region's security environment has deteriorated. Bangladesh faces real threats: armed incursions from Myanmar's Rakhine State, a long and porous border with India, and ongoing security challenges in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Drones address several of these challenges simultaneously — persistent ISR, rapid response, border monitoring — without committing ground forces to exposed positions.

The Civilian Dimension: Drones Beyond the Battlefield

The military discussion tends to obscure a parallel transformation that affects Bangladesh's civilian population more directly. Agricultural monitoring, disaster response, infrastructure inspection, medical supply delivery to remote areas — the same UAV technologies driving military competition have transformative potential for a country where geographical constraints regularly complicate service delivery.

Bangladesh's vulnerability to cyclones, flooding, and riverbank erosion makes aerial surveillance assets particularly valuable for disaster preparedness. Drones equipped with thermal imaging can locate survivors in flood-affected areas faster than any ground team. The same platforms that militaries are arming for strike missions can be configured — at relatively modest cost — for search and rescue, agricultural yield assessment, and coastal fisheries monitoring.

The tension between civilian and military drone programs is not merely philosophical. The technology transfer agreements Bangladesh is signing with China and Turkey will inevitably blur the line between civilian and military capabilities, since the dual-use nature of drone technology means that a UAV assembly facility in Dhaka is, by definition, a military asset with civilian applications and vice versa. CETC's core competencies in sensor fusion, secure datalinks, and electronic warfare architectures create pathways for Bangladesh to integrate UAVs into a broader network-centric battlespace. Those pathways run in both directions.

What Bangladesh Needs to Get Right

Bangladesh's drone ambitions are strategically rational. A country surrounded on three sides by a much larger neighbour, facing instability on its eastern border, and with a long coastline to protect has compelling reasons to invest in unmanned systems. The calculus is not difficult to understand.

What is harder — and more important — is ensuring that the doctrine, training, legal framework, and ethical guardrails keep pace with the hardware. The May 2025 India-Pakistan confrontation demonstrated what happens when autonomous weapons systems enter a theatre without agreed rules of engagement. The absence of doctrinal clarity concerning the employment of UAVs, combined with both states' asymmetric strategic compulsions, makes the use of drones in South Asia for active combat tasks dangerously escalatory. Bangladesh cannot afford to contribute to that disorder.

The UN resolution of December 2024 — backed by 166 countries — reflects a growing international consensus that governance of lethal autonomous weapons cannot wait for the technology to mature further. Bangladesh, which consistently punches above its weight in multilateral diplomacy and peacekeeping, should be at the table shaping those norms, not merely a recipient of whatever rules the major powers eventually settle on. The country has both the credibility and the incentive to advocate for binding international frameworks on autonomous weapons — frameworks that would protect it as much as they would constrain it.

The machine that chooses is already being built. The question is whether the humans in Dhaka — and in every other capital — will finish designing the rules before they lose the ability to enforce them.

win-tk.org is a wintk publication. This article is part of our ongoing coverage of defense technology and its implications for South Asia.