Need For Electronic Warfare Resilience Will Increase Going Forward: ideaForge CEO

Electronic warfare resilience will be pivotal to warfare technology in the coming years, Ankit Mehta, co-founder and chief executive officer at ideaForge Technology Ltd., emphasised while talking to NDTV Profit.

Prior to the recent India-Pakistan conflict, the focus was more on Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance or ISR, and not as much on Electronic Warfare Resilience, he said.

Shedding light on the evolving nature of warfare technology, he shared how ideaForge had incorporated EW resilience into its products. "In February, we launched a suit of products that come with EW resilience; resilience toward communication jamming, and many other multi-frequency operations."

There is a need to be proactive, envisage the kind of evolution required and go after it very fast to stay ahead, the ideaForge CEO added.

Mehta feels the right mindset toward the manufacturing process is pivotal for the technology to be relevant beyond borders. He credited the success of his company to having adopted that sensibility from day one. "When we started our business 18 years back, we were very clear we wanted to build one of the best drones in the world; we wanted to build reliable platforms and we wanted to build autonomy into our systems. Now, we can add resilience to that vector as well," he added.

He further explained how they had an edge over global competitors too. "We have won contracts in India against global competition which has not been able to meet the challenging requirements. There are extreme flying environments and difficult terrains in India. This gives us the opportunity to build cutting edge technology that will be relevant and useful anywhere in the world," he added.

Mehta believes one of the major challenges in a lot of ideaForge's procurement in India has to do with our reluctance in absorbing advanced concepts early on. "That is an area where we need to see improvement so that we are prepared for something like the recent conflict," he added.

On challenges to capture overseas defence markets through exports, Mehta said, "There are certain barriers with respect to exports. We have export controls on most defence items...smoothening of these, along with more predictability in getting permissions to export, will help the industry take advantage of opportunities which are very short-lived in terms of the reaction time we get."

He added that a lot of active promotion is required to accelerate demand in overseas markets.